The anarchist bastard : growing up Italian in America / Joanna Clapps Herman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Herman, Joanna Clapps.

Series:

SUNY series in Italian/American culture.

SUNY series in Italian/American culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Italian Americans--Connecticut--Waterbury--Biography.

Italian Americans.

Italian Americans--Connecticut--Waterbury--Social life and customs.

Waterbury (Conn.)--Biography.

Waterbury (Conn.).

Herman, Joanna Clapps--Childhood and youth.

Herman, Joanna Clapps.

Herman, Joanna Clapps--Family.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (262 p.)

Place of Publication:

Albany : Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year in the Autobiography/Memoir Category"I was born in 1944, but raised in the twelfth century." With that, Joanna Clapps Herman neatly describes the two worlds she inhabited while growing up as the child of Italian American immigrants in Waterbury, Connecticut, a place embedded with values closer to Homer's Greece than to Anglo-American New England, where the ethic of hospitality was and still is more Middle Eastern and North African than Anglo-European, and where the pageantry and ritual were more pagan Mediterranean than Western Christian. It was also a place where a stuffed monkey wearing a fedora sat and continues to sit on her grandmother's piano, and a place where, when the donkey got stubborn and wouldn't plow the field, her grandfather bit the animal in a fury. In essays filled with wry humor and affectionate yet probing insights, Herman maps and makes palpable the very particular details of this culture—its pride and its shame, its profound loyalty and its Byzantine betrayals.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

With and Without Words

Homer in Waterbury: The Backdrop

My Homer

The Unsayable: The Clapps Family

Peter and His Brothers

Paulie e ’u Gagaron’

My Father Telling Stories

The Unsayable

Before and After Tinfoil: The Becce Family

The Anarchist Bastard

Rille

Waiting for Vito

Tre’ Casse

Keeping Company

Flesh and Bone

Both Are True

Two

Before and After Tinfoil

Stitching Our Voices Together

Coffee And

Words and Rags

My AboriginalWomen

Uffa: Jojo the Monkey

Dropping in on Sandy

Notes of an Unredeemed Catholic

E ’ Poi? And Then?

‘U Bizz’ di Creanz’: A Piece of Politeness

In Absence

Without My Tribe

The Discourse of un’ Propria Papon’

Lotions, Potions, and Solutions

And La La La

Psychic Arrangements

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9781438436333

1438436335

9781441688910

1441688919

OCLC:

710992915