ITALIAN STORIES
By Joseph Papaleo

A Lannan Selection. 295 pages. $13.95.
(Dalkey Archive Press, Normal and Chicago, IL)

     Joseph Papaleo has been writing for forty or more years, publishing
two novels, "All the Comforts" and "Out of Place" as well as the
twenty-six stories in this book, some of which I remember reading back
in the 60s in the New Yorker, Commentary, and The New American Review.
At the time I was trying to decide if my personal experience as a young
man growing up in Newark and Belville, New Jersey, with Connie Francis
two years ahead in high school and Joe Pesci two years behind, could be
used in literary fiction. Joe Papaleo seemed to be the only literary
Italian-American author around other than John Ciardi, and so, after
reading "All the Comforts," I wrote to him at Sarah Lawrence College,
told him how much I liked the book, and felt pleased when he answered
with a note of thanks and a request to see some of my stuff. I sent him
a story--long since lost--and he wrote back with enthusiastic praise,
saying in a nutshell, "You've got it. Just keep on writing."

     I did keep on writing, as he did, and now, after many years, I have
his work on my desk again, published as "Italian Stories" by Dalkey
Archive Press. I've read the short stories with renewed enthusiasm,
admiring the language, the eye for character portrayal, the complex
vision of a Bronx neighborhood filled with ordinary men and women whose
lives intersect daily and somehow represent the world, in many ways
reminding me, as they did in the 1960s, of James Joyce's stories in
"Dubliners".

     In the first section of "Italian Stories", called "Immigrant
Epiphanies" (an obvious Joyce reference) first generation
Italian-American parents work to make themselves and their children part
of the America beyond the block. Mothers and fathers lead with  a
fallible yet careful concern to preserve the way of life they or their
parents carried with them across the sea and established on these
shores. Men handle money, attend retreats (another Joyce reference),
gather in family conferences to make decisions, while the women worry
about propriety, handle the children, and pay attention to church
affairs. All long to see their children break into the good life beyond
their block at the same time they fear the loss. Children attend school
and church, obey parents, fretting the inevitable contradictions of
loyalty to family in the face of large temptations beyond: New York's
cornucopia, Hollywood's hype, the adventure of love and sex. In "Winds"
two young professional men standing on a front porch in the Bronx
discuss their parents' unwillingness to leave: "The old people, they
can't help feeling small time; it's in their bones. They like the smell
of the Bronx." The other replies, "Perhaps it's change. ... The first
one, the big change, was too much. And part of them is in Italy still."

     By such means, the immigrants' prudent optimism evolves into second
generation malaise, and the middle section of stories, entitled, "Losing
the Bronx," chronicles that development, and the characters' emotional
decline, with humor, irony, and comic despair. Here the professionals
and business people return from visits abroad, feeling lonesome and
disconnected because the wealthy America they inhabit, Manhattan or
Westchester, seems more foreign than the Italy they left behind. With
nicknames like Lucky, and wives if they have them, named Marge or
Marion, they seek the comforts of the old Bronx Italian-American life,
revisiting sausage and cheese shops in a futile attempt to feel at home.
They live and work in a melting pot, and although they wear suits, trim
their hair, and care for the family, their moods express the boredom and
alienation from meaning that led to so much 1960s unrest.

     In "Prison Notes of the Sixties," a young Italian-American
professor in the Midwest speaks against the Vietnam War and is beaten
when the police break up the meeting and attack the protesters. He loses
his university job, returns to the Bronx to live with his family, and
can only express ambivalence toward offers of legal and political help
from Italian-American family friends. He retreats to his childhood room
and broods, feeling that something in his life has ended. Writing to a
friend on the faculty he left, he says, "...here my champions have
become people I laughed at, after two degrees, describing them with
disparaging ethnic names. So I was wrong on both ends. I am one big
defeat." In the end the fired professor finds his only solace in a brief
erotic affair with his high school sweetheart, Rose Anne, who tells him
when he leaves for California hoping to find another job, "It was the
best time. Send me a nice present from out there."

     Sociology and history underlie many of these stylishly written
stories. Papaleo's vision strikes an interesting and original chord in
that it connects the political divisions of the 1960s and 70s with the
ethnic tensions endemic to America's melting pot culture and, of course,
flavors them with particularly Italian-American rue. In yoking literary
with sociological and historical material, Italian Stories balances
between comedy and pathos, giving the book a particularly
Italian-American edge that perhaps explains why the author has never
reached a broader reading audience despite his outstanding list of
publications.

     Papaleo forces the reader to attend to events and people, never
allowing the empty bath of nostalgia, sentiment, or romance to swamp the
story and wash it clean of ethnic issues. As a result, the reader is
richly rewarded, challenged to dig beneath the Italian-American
stereotype, to think critically about the larger culture's values, to
perceive humanity as complex rather than simple, each individual
struggling to resolve the personal and public contradictions inside.
Joyce performed a similar task in writing about Ireland, and because of
that he alienated his countrymen, living out his life in exile.

     Many American authors, especially those with ethnic concerns, have
felt isolated, mainly because good writers force the reader to think and
engage life, rather than escape it as popular entertainments, especially
television and movies, do. Some ethnic writers, African-American or
Jewish ones, for example, can find an audience by relating their stories
to monumental historic events (slavery, the Holocaust). But with
smaller, daily situations like work, family illness, death of a parent,
loss in love and marriage, or separation between generations (the very
substance of Italian-Americana), American authors have had to hide
behind a mask--the bland, larger cultural one.

     It is a testimony to Joseph Papaleo's fiction, as well as his
courage and tenacity, that he has stayed true to his ethnic experience,
fashioning a body of personal work that ranks highly in contemporary
fiction, records a special part of the Italian-American culture, and
displays the sharp, controlled vision of an artist and major craftsman
who dramatizes lives of one neighborhood in Bronx, New York, but throws
light on a larger population surrounding them with the images and words
he places on the page. In the introductory essay, "Prologue for an
Ethnic Life," he says: "I have introduced you to the trail ahead, most
serious stuff in pursuit of actuality."

     These stories are serious stuff, indeed, but also funny and moving
because of the vision behind them. For a reader interested in one
author's portrayals of marginalized ethnic Americans, Joseph Papaleo's
"Italian Stories" provides a necessary, illuminating road map.