Crossing Ocean Parkway

By Marianna De Marco Torgovnick

Book Overview

Growing up an Italian-American in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of New York city, Marianna De Marco longed for college, culture, and upward mobility. Her daydreams circled around WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) heroes on television--like Robin Hood and the Cartwright family--but in Brooklyn she never encountered any. So she associated moving up with Ocean Parkway, a street that divides the working-class Italian neighborhood where she was born from the middle-class Jewish neighborhood into which she married. This book is Torgovnick's unflinching account of crossing cultural boundaries in American life, of what it means to be an Italian American woman who became a scholar and literary critic.

Included are autobiographical moments interwoven with engrossing interpretations of American cultural icons from Dr. Dolittle to Lionel Trilling, The Godfather to Camille Paglia. Her experiences allow her to probe the cultural tensions in America caused by competing ideas of individuality and community, upward mobility and ethnic loyalty, acquisitiveness and spirituality.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226808297
• ISBN13: 9780226808291
• Release Date: October 1994
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 187 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Reading and Rereading Crossing Ocean Parkway

I recently reread Marianna De Marco Torgovnik's book of memoir based essays, Crossing Ocean Parkway with a view to remembering what about them had hit me so powerfully in my first reading. And they had. They had hit as the best of all art does with a thud against me. My memory of them lay along the lines of the freshness of her ideas, the strength of her writing, the individuality of her voice, the perspective of a daughter of an Italian American family who makes her way through education from ethnic Brooklyn across the wide divide to intellectual America. But upon rereading the book what struck me deeply was something I had utterly missed on the first ride through and I say ride decidedly. Each essay is a wild tour through lands of beauty and terror, each with its own distinctive geography. You start off as her reader, following with excitement the path of her insights into what it's like to be alive in Italian Brooklyn, and you climb with her up that wonderful hill of accumulating details--for example, her elegant descriptions of the "fortress architecture" of a part of Brooklyn, the absolute pitch in depicting her mother's attacks on dirt--then suddenly turn the corner and arrive at a terribly new place, one that you didn't expect to come to but that is inevitable too. This ever ascending or descending topography expands your view of what you are considering and then suddenly a new view opens at once startling and inevitable. In all its freshness, the place she inhabits is alive. I recommend Ms. Torgovnik's book for its great content, its very original ideas, but don't be like me and miss her stunning ability to take you for a great ride.