Crossing Back: Books, Family, and Memory without Pain

Introduction

I wrote a book called Crossing Ocean Parkway in my thirties, telling the story of moving from a working-class Italian-American neighborhood into Jewish-American culture and then into elite colleges and universities. The book was well received and lucky enough to win an American Book Award. Up from Bensonhurst, I’d thought of calling it—though that title seemed too brash. I wrote it as a wife, a mother, a daughter, the child of aging parents, the sister of a conservative brother, and a native of Bensonhurst, the scene of a shocking racial murder when a group of youths shot Yusef Hawkins, a young black man on his way to look at a used car. I am still all those things, except for the child of aging parents and a sister. Adjusting to the loss of my birth family through books, family, and the process of memory itself forms the subject of this book.

Asked ten years ago, I would have said that I lived so far away from my roots that they hardly mattered. I had spent more years by then in upper-middle-class America than I had in aspiring Catholic and Jewish Brooklyn. I’d had, and have, a career in college teaching that I love. But, as I said in my earlier book, You can take the girl out of Bensonhurst, but you cannot take the Bensonhurst out of the girl.¹ Still true. Though its racial attitudes were never mine, the cautiousness of Bensonhurst and its Italian-American love of la bella figura—wanting to look good in the eyes of others—still linger. What I did not know or anticipate is that, when my mother and brother died, Bensonhurst and all it meant about the past would be lost and leave me hungry. I had once yearned to cross Ocean Parkway, a symbol of upward mobility in far South Brooklyn; now I learned the impossibility crossing back, except via memory, the immigrant or exile’s act and an act that was, for me, fraught with pain about the newly dead.

At age ninety, almost ninety-one, my mother developed her first and only serious illness and died shortly later from complications after surgery. When I went with her to the doctor who would perform the surgery—the first time she had ever asked me to join her—she bounded up three flights of stairs, without pausing. When he looked at her chart, he did a double-take that was not kidding or faux-gallant but surprised: But no, he said, you can’t be ninety. She was so strong and healthy until her surgery that I thought, as many of us do, that she would last forever. Her decline happened over a period of weeks, not years, in a far quicker version of the end than granted many.

Her hospitalization and death took me back to Brooklyn—to her hospital in Borough Park, to a funeral home on West Sixth Street, and to a burial in Greenwood Cemetery—followed by the painful ritual of clearing out her things and the terra incognita of how much her late-life partner, Joe, should remain in my life. It confronted me, more abruptly than we ever anticipate, with loss and the change from being the child of a living mother to being the mother of grown children and, as people say, at the head of the line. From feeling amused by my parents to feeling bereft and wishing, as legions have before me, that I could see them again, if only for a day, and hear their rough-hewn wisdom. The change of finding Bensonhurst, which I once said never changed—accurate enough back then—had changed, a lot.

Where Italian- and Jewish-Americans once lived, Chinese and Chinese-American families live now in the same modest one-to-four-family houses, often occupied, as is the custom, by branches of the same family. When the Chinese—always a stereotype in this context—bought her building, they evicted my mother’s partner Joe from his downstairs apartment, and she felt forced to leave as well, though she had, as he did not, the iron-clad protection of what New York calls rent control. It was my mother’s first move since her marriage to my father in 1942 and one that took her, at age eighty-eight, no further than one flight down and to the building next door.

Italian and Chinese immigrants share certain hard-knock attitudes toward life; they also share old-world habits, like the daily washing of sidewalks. When the mothers in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club make jokes about strangling a rooster, it reminds me of one of my mother’s favorite quips about feeding the family pig in Calabria, Italy, and then serving it as food. I liked the pig when I fed it, she’d say, and I liked it even better when I ate its meat. She’d tell this story when she served sausage in her Sunday gravy and sometimes add, in her sardonic way, that she liked the sausage best of all.

With Asian food more common now in Bensonhurst than Italian sausages or Jewish knishes, a once-bustling pork store on West Sixth Street—a source of cheese, meat, and classic cold cuts—looks lonely. On Eighty-Sixth Street, once a great Italian-American shopping boulevard and outdoor market, I struggle now to find a cappuccino and Italian pastries. I once feared that I would be "banished forever from the land of cremolata," a vanilla-almond-flavored ice usually eaten after dinner (COP, 18). Instead, the land of cremolata has withdrawn to strongholds like Eighteenth Avenue in Brooklyn or moved farther west, to Staten Island and New Jersey.

Memoir is about the living—how not? — and the process of being alive. But the experience of death often motivates its writing. In fact, memoir arises quite often from the vulnerability of grief and offers itself to the world as honestly as it can—in this case, as the Prologue says, with a full and humble awareness of COVID-19’s tragic path. Crossing Back tells the story of grief for my birth family, a grief acknowledged almost unwillingly, that could only be confronted over time. While its emotions are personal, sometimes intensely so, others will, I believe, recognize them too.

My mother — my Mama, I find myself calling her now, though I never did while she lived—appeared without knowing it as a character in Crossing Ocean Parkway, where she played a secondary or even tertiary role, mostly making short ironic comments characteristic of the way she spoke. My father was the star parent in that earlier book—the reader among my parents and so the one I saw as the most supportive of the education I craved. He worked in Manhattan and took me to what we called the City, encouraging my awareness of its pulse. I remember wearing his hat as a young child and carrying a bag and saying that one day I’d work in the City too and be his secretary. My parents laughed, since bank messengers, my father’s job, do not have secretaries.

My father was also the parent who died as I completed Crossing Ocean Parkway, forcing me, as I say there — a locution I now find strange — to make peace. It was natural that he took center stage in that book. Crossing Back tells the story of a different time of life, what I’ll gently call full maturity—a period of large-scale family loss and change but also, in the end, of continuity. It is, quite naturally, anchored by my mother.

Although she was born in New York, my mother, Rose, was sent back to the rural toe of Italy’s boot with her mother and raised there with her siblings until age sixteen. She never went to school or had an American education, and she was fearful that college would take me out of familiar ways. On the surface, she wanted me to work in an office or, at most, to be an elementary school teacher so that I would marry in and stay close to the neighborhood. Yet I always seem to have had money for plays and subway fare to go to Manhattan, and my brother and I were the first among our cousins to go to college—surely no accident. My father was the one who played math games and helped us with homework, for as long as he could, since he only finished the eighth grade. But, in our family, a covert matriarchy, college would not have happened without my mother’s consent. To her dying day, I feel sure that my mother remained proudest not of my education or career, which she articulated as teaching teachers, but of her two granddaughters. She perhaps understood my place in the world as a tenured professor only after she attended their college graduations and felt the kind of plush, pleasant life major universities can offer. They gave us so much food, she said admiringly on both occasions, and for free.

The aftereffects of my mother’s death lasted for years, even, I’d say now, for a full decade, prolonged by my initial unwillingness to grieve and by my brother’s fatal cancer. I sought consolation and even joy in reading and writing on books and family and committed to a daily meditation practice in yoga traditions that I consider American practices too: Ishta Yoga, founded by Alan Finger, a Jewish yogi from South Africa who makes no claim to be a guru, and Integral Yoga, founded by Swami Sachadinanda, who came to America expressly to bring his traditions to the United States. Ishta has more of the features one associates with yoga, American style, by which I mean teachers who are generally lithe and long of limb and who show some concern for fashion and style. Integral is what’s called Bhakti or service yoga: Instructors teach for free and come in all shapes and sizes; at an Integral class, it’s hard to underdress.

Both share a deep and pervasive emphasis on meditation as something that should accompany yoga from day one, regardless of physical ability. Though these traditions route, like all yoga, through Indian genealogies, I consider them American as well as South Asian, and I do not consider them what some purists might call cultural appropriation. In fact, as the author of an earlier book called Gone Primitive that castigates Western uses of tribal cultures, the possible charge of cultural appropriation—which I have heard—makes me marvel at things that go around and come around.

As in my earlier memoir, I follow my writing where it takes me—allowing a certain freedom as I go and not telling the story slavishly in chronological order. Reading great books, I feel better or, at least, feel that the experience of reading and studying opens me up to mourning, a process I constitutionally resisted as somehow shameful. I take some journeys that seem to further the mourning process, which I know by now will have no quick end. Then, after my brother dies, I reenter grief, read or reread other classic books, and begin to write about them in what feels like a mid- to late-life Bildungsroman.

Cumulatively, by revisiting aspects of my past, I reclaim memory, calming emotions that made me something other than myself for years: a riled-up creature who moved restlessly from place to place and could not seem to finish projects I began. Through a series of meditations on childhood and on places I have lived, the final chapters in this book explore what Roland Barthes calls memory without the pain of absence.² That concept is related to meditation, since almost all meditation practices advise allowing thoughts to cross the mind but to think of them as movies or maya (illusion) and to witness them with a detachment that distances depression or pain.

If you are looking for a detailed guide to the classics, Crossing Back is not that book. Though it does contain compact theories and some close readings, its chapters invite you to read the classics rather than show that I have done so. If you are looking for a flat-out grief memoir, this is not that book either, since it places grief within larger contexts. Instead, Crossing Back is intended to be, as its subtitle promises, a warm and intimate user’s guide to books, family, and memory in the mourning process, the endpoint being memory without pain and the users being not just me, but us.

Rituals

The anthropologist Renato Rosaldo tells a personal story that I have never been able to forget. He was researching the Ilongot, a headhunting tribe in the remote Philippines, when his wife, Michelle, slipped and fell sixty-five feet down a mountain. After making the descent, Rosaldo discovered her body, lifeless, as feared.

Thrust into a state of mourning that deepened all the way to despair, Rosaldo was for a time unable to work. Fifteen months passed. Then, when he reopened the notes he had taken among the headhunters, something astonishing happened.

He and Michelle had begun to focus on why the Ilongot headhunt and how recent government prohibitions had affected them. When asked why they headhunt and if they missed doing so, his informants gave long, dry, genealogical lists of ancestry, kin, and the places they had lived and gardened. They seemed to resist, or at least not to understand, the self-reflection Rosaldo wanted. But now, after his own bereavement, Rosaldo suddenly understood that the Ilongot had answered his questions and answered them quite concisely.

The Ilongot headhunt to create a feeling of buoyancy and renewal during mourning, and its absence had left them without customary release. They responded by affirming kinship lines and marking places they had lived and grown their food. Recitations of family names and familiar sites replaced headhunting to balance what Rosaldo calls the emotional force of a death … an intimate relation’s permanent rupture.³ Their recitations nourished their souls much as their traditional gardens had fed their bodies and their ancestral practices had lifted their spirits.

What do the Ilongot have in common with the role of books, family, and memory at a time of loss? In a surprising way, almost everything.

When my strong Italian-American mother died, followed much too soon by my brother, my only sibling, their deaths abruptly marked the end of my birth family. Although I have a husband and children of my own, I found myself brittle, irritable, and unable to finish projects for a surprisingly long time. Because my losses seemed normal, natural, and even quotidian, I remained numbly cut off from grief and yet, somehow, submerged in it, with each push toward cheerfulness repulsed.

Shortly before these deaths, I had written about World War II in The War Complex, a book that immersed me in large and even overwhelming facts. Fifty to eighty million people killed, most of them civilians, the devastation so enormous that estimates still vary that widely. Whole families snuffed out, sometimes over years, sometimes in minutes. Around the same time historically, and forming part of my material, satellite disasters like Stalin’s purges, partition in India, and revolution in China uprooted and killed millions more, sometimes under government auspices. I was writing about somber stuff, anything but cheery.

As disasters piled up in our own century—earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, famine, drought, fires, the impending doom of climate change, wars, refugees, unwelcome migrants, deep political divisiveness—it seemed like the world and I were sharing a mood. As I revised Crossing Back for publication, the COVID-19 pandemic kept us at home, and we saw both racial tensions and a frayed America. But way before 2020, the constellation of facts and feelings already made it hard for me to acknowledge my personal grief. Like Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, I wanted to be high-minded: Amid such wholesale devastation, how could I claim my personal grief? Hadn’t I learned a larger view regarding what Susan Sontag calls the pain of others?⁴ Shouldn’t I shoulder my load and, like billions of others, soldier on? Grieving seemed impossible, monomaniacal—the microcosm challenging the universe. And yet, as I was aware all the time, I could not choose my grief, because my grief had chosen me.

I used to call my mother every Sunday in the perfunctory way many of us do, asking and answering the same questions about relatives, health, food, the weather. Now I found myself wanting to shout out across time: Ma—how long do I cook the sauce for the pasta, and do I brown the meatballs first? Or, equally small but the kind of thing my mother always knew, how many fifty-two-inch curtains to cover a 116-inch window? Or, more pointedly, Ma, where in Sicily did Dad’s family live? What was the name of the tiny village where you grew up? I can Google the meatballs and the measurements, but the more personal questions echo, forever unanswered.

After each of these two deaths, epochal for me but what we call in common parlance natural, I participated in traditional forms of Italian-American mourning. I sat nightly at the funeral home, receiving relatives and neighbors and