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Writing Back To A Brick Wall
By Helen BaroliniI read the New York Times every morning with my cappuccino. It informs, intrigues, surprises, delights and irritates me. In exchange, I write back what think to the editors, who seem, by having a Letters column, to encourage an airing of disparate views. My letters are never printed, my thoughts never get aired: it is like writing to a brick wall.
Was it, I wondered, because I write frequently of Italian American matters? Because I sign with a name that signals an Italian American background?... But I'm not alone. In my acquaintance of Italian American authors, scholars and professionals, a surprising number have all had the same experience of writing to a brick wall. And each one thought he or she alone was being ignored until the real pattern emerged we were all being ignored....
The Silent Majority
From their scant appearance in the New York Times as reporter, author or letter writer, it might be concluded that Italian Americans, as a group, are not concerned with expressing themselves. The opposite is true: there is a deep and passionate longing to be part of the national debate and to share cultural exchange, to be seen as intellectuals, not bimbos and dons. And just as strong is the shared perception that, aside from Mafia references, Italian American names too seldom appear in the pages of the New York Times. It is rare to find an Italian surname topping a report of cultural affairs, a major book review, an Op-Ed piece, or a lead essay in the Sunday Magazine. Combined with the non-appearance of our letters, it adds up to an “emargination” of Italian Americans from this nation's intellectual life.The cumulative effort is pernicious, conveying to Italian Americans readers, directly or subliminally, that we have no spokesmen on cultural or intellectual affairs; our opinions and thoughts do not count. And in the American scheme of things an individual's progress can be limited or enhanced by the status of his /her larger ethnic group – a status of that is determined by the supposedly “neutral territory” of mass media.
Neglect or Prejudice
Is this disinterest symptomatic of insensitivity, begin neglect, or is it closer to prejudice? The suspicion grows that there is an editorial bias, unwritten and universalized, but subtly present in mindsets and tacit understandings, and all the more sinister for not surfacing into policy where it could he confronted.How can the New York Times, which once ran a front page story to report that Italian Americans are on a par with Blacks as the largest ethnic group in the city, justify the lack of Italian American material in a paper that purports to represent the whole community it covers? How can the Times claim to represent adequately the city whose voice it is without an Italian American presence? I began to wonder why it seemed unimportant to the Times’ editors to amplify or correct the record on Italian Americans through printing our letters, reviewing our books and running our articles. Surely not only the coverage but also the staff of the city's pre-eminent paper should reflect the fact nearly one in five New Yorkers is of Italian descent. Yet a roster of Times bylines showed that of some 364 reporters’ and editors’ names, only a half-dozen are Italian American.
New Bias
It is not only in what it chooses not to print that the New York Times exerts incredible influence over popular perception, but also in the reviews and feature articles it does print. Coverage of Italian American affairs become full and even exhaustive when a reputed Mafia boss or racism in an Italian American neighborhood is being reported, as in the past reportage of the Bensonhurst and Howard Beach incidents in the 1980s. That coverage was notable for the peculiar slant in the way Italian Americans were depicted in their speech reported, while no probing effort was made to understand the complexity of their community fears and frustration. The Times coverage was filled with quotes of grammatically poor English, dialect words conveying an ethnic emphasis, and weighed description of the neighborhood people: “Young People with baroque hair and their names spelled out in gold necklaces wear tight slacks and spike heels.”Were there ever equivalent stories on other ethnic groups so peppered with odd words and phrases, or such personal descriptions, to single them out in deprecating way? Such personalizing even appeared gratuitously in a theater review when Times critic David Richards took note of “Laura San Giacomo’s vulgarity” and “native sullenness” and then decided that this fine actress had little acting skills to accompany those personal attributes.
I once had an opportunity to ask the late Times reviewer Nona Balakian why she thought my novel Umbertina was not reviewed in that paper. Uniquely, the work depicted the Italian American experience not from the slant of males of males, mobs, and Mafia, but through the lives of the women who lived it and was a first recounting of generations of Italian Americans in a complex cross-cultural narrative. “Why don't you write about Americans?” Balakan answered, leaving me to wonder what she thought the descendants of Italian immigrants were.
Did that mean that any novel about Jewish Americans, Pakistani Americans, Chinese Americans, or whatever American is okay, but that the only novel about Italians Americans that is “American” enough to be noticed is one about the Mafia?
Italian American Literature
It takes a body of work, from all ranks and persuasion, to build a strong literary identity. There has been a Jewish novel since the 1950’s; now there is Black literature. What makes them viable is bulk-the weight of many voices. Not only the pre-eminent authors, but the lesser ones, too, are reviewed and noticed and carried forward into collections. This has not happened to Italian American writers, who too often go unnoticed. And as was noted at an Authors Guild panel discussion, if you're not reviewed in New York Times, you're deadStill, I write my letters. Years of them. I have written on varying subjects but often to correct misinformation about Italian Americans, or to enlarge understanding of the literature about them, or to mention oversight as, in my response to Jonathan Raban’s review of the Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee.
“In modern American fiction,” Raban wrote, ‘‘the immigrant has classically been Jewish….” In reply I pointed out the immigrant has also classically been Italian, as in Pietro Di Donato’s powerful novel Christ in Concrete, a classic of American literature, and in novels by Fante, DeCapite, Tomasi, Benasutti, Fumenti, DeRosa, Mirabelli, Marotta, and even in Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim Italian American writers have created a literature from the immigrant experience, but it has been largely ignored by reviewers, critics, editors of anthologies, curricula writers and those who create literary canons. And where that great chain of literary presence begins is often in the pages of the Times.
In what must have been an editorial decision, Pietro Di Donato’s death was recorded in a Times obituary abridged from Richard Severo’s originally longer piece that quoted from Di Donato and gave a distinct notion of the author's range. The slight to Di Donato was compounded by the paper's slight to Severo who has been relegated to “DeathRow,” the paper's obituary desk, for the past few years, his punishment for having challenged the Times in a suit over his right to publish a book with a publisher other than Times Books and using material he had gathered as a Times staff writer.
Joseph Goulden documents the case in his book, Fit to Print where he reports that other Times writers such as Russell Baker, Jane Brody and Leonard Silk all went to other publishers with their Times material and were not penalized. Severe won a bitter Pyrrhic victory: he published his book and kept his job at the Times, but at the cost of his byline all but sinking out of sight except for an occasional review or obit
Years ago, before he fell into disfavor at the Times, Severo did a lengthy report headlined “New York Italians: A question of Identity Within and without,” following a Columbus Circle rally to protest the smear effects of the “mafia" label. Despite their assimilation, he found, Italian Americans of Italian descent still suffer “a consciousness of unbelonging.” Things have not gotten better since then: Severo has been diminished as a feature writer, and the word “mafia” continues to appear on the pages of the Times.
When on September 30, 1990, the Sunday Times put out a special anniversary insert of Op-Ed pieces from the past twenty years it featured Toni Morrison, Woody Allen, Henry Ford II, Salman Rushdie, E.B. White, William Styron, MeirKahane, Eldridge Cleaver…and one token Italian out of its sixty-eightselections: Joseph Califano, who at the time his piece was written was in President Johnson’s administration, and so was a political choice.
Conspicuously absent were Italian American writers and intellectuals in the selective sampling. And one has to remember the paper’s emphasis on Italian Americans’ poor use of language on the one hand, while on the other it excludes from its pages many who, as writers, are practiced users of language.
No story of Italian American writing has appeared in the New York Times book review comparable with the front-page story “Americans on Their Own Terms,” featuring Black, Chinese, and Japanese writer. One front-page story on Italian American writers that did appear was gay Talese’s misleading piece. “Where are the Italian American Novelists?”, his attempt to say there were none. The editors found space for that kind of negativism but not for my rebuttal letter in which I addressed Talese’s misperceptions and ignorance of the record. The question he asked was not where were the Italian American novelists, but why they have been ignored.
Fighting Back
On June 18, 200, the New York Times “Week in Review” section ran a piece called “We’ve Got an I.P.O. You Can’t Refuse,” completely couched in Godfather lingo and presented in memo from “Vinnie (Sausage Lips) Delicatessio chairman, La Cosa Nostra 2000 committee,” together with a photo illustrating “mob chic.”Just a week later, Michiko Kakutani’s review of Mario Puzo’s posthumous novel Omerta was headlined “Goodfellas Goin’ Bad or what, Capeesh?” and peppered throughout with slang and simulated mob language to make the point that the book was poor stuff. Would she have offered the same ethnic slurs for an Asian American writer? An African American? A Hispanic
When in July 2000 the Times ran a front-page story on “mobs” lining up for a casting call for the television series “The Sopranos,” about a mob boss, I and many other readers were disgusted with that kind of disproportionate coverage and the descriptions of the crowd: “cigar-chomping men in muscle T-shirts and women with tall hairdos and spiked heels…” “ Isn’t there an Italian American anti-defamation league that would protest this?” an Irish friend of mine asked.
Evidently there isn’t, nor should there be need for an organization to oversee the newspaper that is the nation's paper of record. But how to explain that there seems to be no editorial interest in correcting oversights or halting the ridicule aimed at Italian Americans?
Perhaps our answer to getting attention is, don't write, call or e-mail! Call the editors each time something slanted appears, and protest. With enough calls they may be pressured to change their heads, and will stop perceiving Italian American as ‘Too fragmented politically and socially” for their opinions to count. That may change editorial policy, but for public recognition and becoming part of the national debate it will take getting our letters and opinion pieces published as well. It may seem minor to complain that one's letters to the New York Times are continually by-passed, but if our letters of comment are never printed, we are seen to have no opinions or none worth printing. If our books are not reviewed, we are perceived as not being authors.
For the moment it looks as if our trying to get the attention of the Times is like knocking our heads against a brick wall. The Berlin wall came down. How long will the invisible one in editorial offices of 43rd Street remain standing?
Helen Barloni Objects to the New York Times Ignoring Italian Americans. She is a prize-winning writer who has written essays, stories, poems and novels, including Umbertina. She lives in Hasting –on-Hudson, New York. This essay is an edited version of one that appeared in her 1997 book, Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity, and is reprinted by permission of Bordighera Publishers. Her book More Italian Hours and Other Stories, will be published in the spring of 2001 published by Bordighera, contact Bordighera atatamburri@Fau.edu . This article appeared in NIAF's Winter 2001 edition of their Ambassador Magazine.
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