Sicily: The Hallowed Land

202 Pages·2000·0.74 MB·English

by  Ben Morreale

Sicily: The Hallowed Land
Legas
Sicilian Studies
Volume V
Series Editor: Gaetano Cipolla
Printed and bound in Canada
Other volumes in this series:
1. Giuseppe Quatriglio, A Thousand Years in Sicily: from the Arabs to the
Bourbons, 1992, 1997;
2. Henry Barbera, Medieval Sicily: the First Absolute State, 1994;
3. Connie Mandracchia DeCaro, Sicily, the Trampled Paradise, Revis-
ited, 1998;
4. Justin Vitiello, Labyrinths and Volcanoes: Windings Through Sicily,
1999.
Ben Morreale
SICILY:
The Hallowed Land
A Memoir
© Copyright Legas 2000
No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form,
by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means,
without the written permission from the copyright holder.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morreale, Ben.
Sicily, the hallowed land: a memoir/ Ben Morreale.
p. cm.— (Sicilian studies ; v. 5)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-881901-23-8
1. Sicily (Italy)— Social life and customs. 2. Morreale, Ben—Homes
and haunts—Italy—Sicily. I. Title. II. Series.
DG865.6 .M68 2000
00-023950
Acknowledgments
The publisher wishes to gratefully acknowledge the receipt of a
generous grant from Arba Sicula that made it possible, in part, to
publish this book.
We are also grateful to Carlo Puleo for the use of his painting “Si-
ciliani DOC” for the cover. Carlo Puleo, La Pittura, Palermo, Ila
Palma, 1999.
For information and for orders, write to:
Legas
P.O. Box 149 3 Wood Aster Bay
Mineola, NewYork Ottawa, Ontario
11501, USA K2R ID3 Canada
To
My beloved
Carol Wilkerson
Pace e amore

Contents
METHOD AS PROLOGUE ..................................................................9
POINT OF DEPARTURE ....................................................................15
THE TIME OF THE GREEN MICE ...................................................31
DON BALDASSARE ............................................................................51
TIME AS A GENTLEMAN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HERD .......67
LU RABBI SCHWARTZ .......................................................................87
MALANNI OR HARD TIMES ..........................................................121
RETURN TO SICILY .........................................................................131
HARD TIMES ....................................................................................145
THE WARS .........................................................................................161
ENDINGS...........................................................................................175
AVA GARDNER’S BROTHER-IN-LAW ...........................................187
7

METHOD AS PROLOGUE
I’ve spent a good part of my life as a participant among Sicilians.
I participated in such things as my own birth on Christie Street, where
Roosevelt Park now stands on New York’s Lower East Side, of a mother
and father both born in Racalmuto, Sicily. Although I was not a partic-
ipant-observer in the meeting between my parents, I was told, in later
informal interviews, that they were brought together on Stanton Street,
called “Stantoni” by the Racalmutisi of that generation. They had not
known each other in Racalmuto although their families lived only a few
vaneddri away; my father in a two-story house (a sign of some wealth)
near La Baruna (a sign of considerable poverty), and my mother in the
Via Cavour, also in a two-story house.
From the beginning I participated in Sicilian church affairs such as
baptisms, confirmations, marriages, funerals and Sunday school run by
Irish priests. I participated in and observed the social activities on the
roof tops of the Lower East Side that smelled of asphalt and coal dust,
where I flew kites and later observed the older people of my generation
being assimilated through music. They were models for me. I interviewed
hundreds of Sicilians and Southern Italians in those tenements, especially
the young girls who took care of me while my mother went to work
sewing spangles and sequins on the fashionable dresses of those times.
These young girls lovingly fondled me as they learned to be mothers. The
taught me my first words of English from comic books of the times. In
this time too, I was a participant of the role of the older women: Sicil-
ian, Baresi, Calabresi. In the countless interviews by the large black coal
stove I learned of the good-natured warmth of those old women. Even
as a child I asked, “Don’t you think it is immoral to give so much love
and affection to the first born male?” They looked at me with eyes sud-
denly gone dull, like some animal trying hard to understand, but finally
giving up the effort. And I knew that in that question there appeared the
first spores of change, of a conflict of values, of culture. One old woman
whom here I shall call Comare Rosalia, simply threw me up in the air
when I asked the question, then hugged me, saying, “My little Ameri-
canu, my water-washed Americanu.” I was fair-haired and light skinned
then. “When you grow up you’ll have a big Cadillac with one of those
9