Author recounts childhood on last working farm in Brass City.By Mike Partrick, November 29, 2019
Joanna Clapps Herman signs a copy of her latest collection of memoirs, “When I Am Italian” at the book’s launch party in New York City. (Contributed)
But is she really Italian?Just how Italian an Italian-American can be is the focus of Herman’s latest collection of memoirs, “When I Am Italian.”Her essays try to reconcile her traditional, insular and deeply familial Italian upbringing in Waterbury with the globetrotting, academic and cosmopolitan New York work of which she has become a part.“I was in the middle of a deeply, deeply Italian world. And when I then left in the-’60s – I was a-’60s kid – it was a complicated arrangement,” Herman said in a phone interview from her New York City co-op.While she was absorbed by the counterculture ideals of the era, she said, “There was no expectation that we would leave home. That just was not on the table. But we didn’t know that.”Yet she did leave.“I thought I was ‘Miss-’60s’, hippie, all of that. I was having a good time,” she said. “I got married, had a son and I realized there was this underlying loneliness I could barely articulate.”Even these many years on, she struggled to describe what prompted her, at 21, to leave her close-knit family in Waterbury for a freewheeling, bohemian life on New York’s Upper West Side and later in Greenwich Village.“Don’t forget, I was a good Catholic girl when I went to Boston University and by the time I dropped out three years later, the civil rights movement had come fully blown, which I was very involved with,” she said. “Sex, drugs and rock and roll were completely blowing all traditional mores apart.”Ultimately, she said, she knew she needed to ground herself more.“You have to pay the rent, right?” she said.So, she began teaching, first at a daycare center, then the New York Public Library, and then, she said, at the private and progressive Walden School (which has since closed).In 1973, she said, she married City College of New York literature professor William Herman, and they settled down to raise a son, James Paul Herman, now a neuroscientist.She went back to finish her college education and later taught writing at City College in Harlem for 37 years.At first, she taught basic college essay writing, but when she began teaching literature classes, it changed her perspective, she said.“That was a revelation to me,” she said. “That’s when I started to teach myself writing.”And that, she said, began her late-life writing career.She connected with a group of Italian-American intellectuals who often discussed their heritage, and began to write to investigate the dichotomy between her American life and her Italian childhood. The first fruits of her labor was a collection of essays called “The Anarchist Bastard.”The book, with its warts-and-all depiction of abusive males in her culture, lost her a few friends, she said. Just the title was enough to offend, she said.In that same vein, “When I Am Italian” is not always wistful about the good old days in grandma’s kitchen.Suggestions of patriarchal brutality may strike many readers negatively. In one chapter, she writes,really Women’s lives had unfair and terrible limits: for some there was horrible violence. There was very limited access to education, limited access to the world at large, to jobs, travel, money. Yet there has been something overlooked in our backward glance. What their lives had in abundance – full and important lives.Although we lived in this patriarchal Italian world, in its absolute rank and order, this didn’t diminish the women in our family. Simultaneously, paradoxically, they were strong, smart, hard-working, opinionated, full of their own authority, certain of their value. They had a vast panoply of highly developed skills. And they knew it. Not self-consciously, but with an in-the-gut sense, something our backward glances often overlook.”Now 75 and widowed, her new book explores unexpected moments when memories of her growing up become warm and vivid.really Two years ago I began obsessively searching for French bistro dishes with an orange stripe around the rim. At some point I realized this search had overtaken me, because they looked so much like the dishes that had always been on my grandmother’s farm table. When I tripped into that recognition I bought even more of them. They belong to me. These dishes happen to be French bistro, but who’s keeping this record? È mio.All this belongs to me. Is me.Herman grew up on the “Becce Farm,” the last remaining operating farm in Waterbury. (The building still exists but operations have ceased.) Her memories of that time explore a sense of community some say is missing in modern family life. “It was an extraordinary way to grow up. It was really like growing up in this Old World while we were growing up in America,” she said. “Human relations can be thinner. The joy of growing up in a clan, when you’re with your people all the time, the safety of that and the surround of that, there was never a hint of loneliness. No one was ever lonely or bored. I think that is the modern secular dilemma.”She still has close family in and around the Brass City, and some of them still keep the old Italian traditions.Though she admits her apartment at the edge of Harlem is small, she boasts of its big dining table, and the large circle of friends that often gather at it.But she’s coy about whether her writing journey answered the question she asked at its start: Can a person who was not born in Italy truly consider themselves to be Italian?“It’s an ongoing question that doesn’t have a final answer for me,” she said. “Finding an Italian community, an intellectual Italian community, has resolved a massive amount of it. We talk about it It decodes the way in which some of this is so deeply in me that it’s real.
