Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America [Hardcover]

Maria Laurino (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2000

A thoughtful, penetrating, and hilarious examination of third-generation ethnic identity. "Were you always an Italian?" was the question with which then-Governor Mario Cuomo greeted journalist Maria Laurino. The question struck home. Laurino was exploring the governor's ethnic roots, yet only a few years earlier she had contemplated chopping the vowels off the end of her name. Mixing memoir, social and cultural history, and reporting, Laurino sifts through the stereotypes bedeviling Italian-Americans. With a sympathetic but clear eye, she writes about guidos, bimbettes, and mammoni (mama's boys in Italy). She examines the clashing aesthetics of Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace, and unravels the etymology of southern Italian dialect words like gavone or bubidabetz. And, careful to avoid the perils of nostalgia, she explores the pungent influence on her life of ancestral Italian attitudes towards family, work, and faith. Warmly personal and cleverly objective, Laurino's work is surprising on every page. It is both a celebration of a group often overlooked in literature and a long-overdue critique of romanticized ideas of "ethnicity"--a book that should appeal to the children and grandchildren of every immigrant to America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Recalling guidos, gavones and gedrools, Laurino presents a concise but stimulating look at Italian-American culture as a model for the immigrant experience as a whole. The author, a third-generation Italian-American, grew up in 1950s New Jersey as a minority whose ethnicity was long stifled. Not until then-Governor Mario Cuomo asked her, "Were you always an Italian?" did she consider the implications of her roots and identity. This entertaining memoir chronicles Laurino's experiences from childhood to marriage, eventually getting to the heart of what it means to be Italian in America. She creatively approaches various cultural facets, from clothing to politics to religion, with candor and personality, using specific examples to illustrate general cultural themes. Her take on Italian fashion is amusing; she claims that the contrasting styles of Versace and Armani are symbols of the dichotomy faced by many immigrants and their families: cutting-edge boldness vs. European class. The historically tumultuous situation in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, serves as an example of the friction between Italians and other cultural groups in this country, and Laurino suggests that the Italian-American experience, rife with stereotypes and struggles, is not unlike that of African-, Korean- and Ecuadorian-Americans. She covers the hallmarks of Italian culture, including dialect, family and faith. In examining each component, Laurino openly expresses the mixed feelings of pride and embarrassment she felt as a child, which eventually developed into understanding and veneration. This book will serve as a welcome reminder that there is more to Italian culture than The Sopranos. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Laurino, a New York writer who grew up in suburban New Jersey and was once a speechwriter for NYC mayor David Dinkins, explores the disconnect that many Italian Americans, rooted in the rocky soil of Southern Italy, feel between images from Bensonhurst and Mafia movies, on one hand, and Northern Italian style and verve on the other. Her essays ask questions that follow like beads on a rosary: Do we smell bad? Is our food weird? Why is it so hard to accept leisure in our lives? Her deconstruction of Italian dialect--captured snatches of parents' and grandparents' unwritten past in words like gavone and stunodis mesmerizing, both as a journalist's examination of words and their uses and as a woman's study of what makes her herself. And her witty analysis of the difference between Versace and Armani from an Italian American standpoint is itself worth the price of admission. Essential for Italian Americans, enlightening for anyone else. GraceAnne A. DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; First Edition edition (July 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393049302
• ISBN-13: 978-0393049305
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #992,213 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Maria Laurino was born and raised in northern New Jersey. She is a graduate of Georgetown University, where she received a B.A. in English and government, and of New York University, where she received an M.A. in English and American literature. She began her career as a journalist for the Village Voice and later became the chief speechwriter to former New York City Mayor David N. Dinkins. Laurino examined ethnic identity in her first book, Were You Always an Italian?, which was published in 2000 and became a national bestseller. Her second book, Old World Daughter, New World Mother (2009), a meditation on contemporary feminism, describes the pull and tug of growing up in an Old World family that prized dependence even as she later embraced a New World feminism that championed personal autonomy. Laurino's journalism has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Salon.com, and The Nation, and her essays have been widely anthologized, including in The Norton Reader. She teaches creative nonfiction at New York University.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Read for Italian Americans -- and Everyone Else, June 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America (Hardcover)

What a great book! Were You Always an Italian? made me laugh and think. Laurino uses stories from her life and the lives of others to tell some important truths about what it means to be a third generation American of any ethnicity, especially Italian. She takes on tough issues of class, religion, and even race relations with intelligence and humor. Most of all, she brings a rare combination of warmth and skepticism to topics many of us feel but may find hard to articulate: our families, our religion, our clothes, our appearance. Laurino's book uses the best of memoir, reporting, and essay to tell her story, often with some beautiful writing. This is a clever, yet intensely personal book that people will enjoy whether or not their name ends with a vowel.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Look at Being an Italian American, January 16, 2003

By 

Diana F. Von Behren "reneofc" (Kenner, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America (Paperback)

As my son is a fourth generational Italian American who has assimilated into the American mainstream with a much greater and unconscious ease than the generations that came before him, he has the luxury of taking a look at the past without getting beleagured by it. I purchased this book to help him understand how what he calls his difference from other Americans of European descent will help him understand himself and better define his dreams and desires. I grew up on Long Island where many of my peers were also Italian American--certainly the melting pot of Irish, Italian, and Polish middle to upper middle class groupings has little to do with the more mainstream America in which my son matured. My first foray into the canyons of Wall Street quickly altered my sheltered definition of American society. Suddenly, ethnicity was not something you declared as easily as your name in an introduction. On the contrary, your surname, ending with that telltale vowel, relegated you to a second ranking of sorts--nothing that was actually said in so many words, but indeed felt. Not my idea of the American Dream.

The title of Maria Laurino's book of essays addresses just this issue. Were you always an Italian? I'd have to say 'yes', but I didn't go out of my way to share my culture with anyone that was not of the fold. I don't think Laurino did either; she speaks knowledgeably of her 'difference', at first speaking of personal differences of food and clothing choices and then citing Harvard sociological studies on the Southern Italian mentality on issues like family, community versus the individual and distrust of outsiders. She corrects the mistake that many Italian Americans make when they visit 'the homeland' for the first time, erroneously thinking that Florence, Milan and Rome are synonymous with Naples, Corsenza and Palermo. Her study of dialect borders on the hilarious---this is strictly an Italian American viewpoint--no other ethnic group is going to get a kick out of hearing the dialect words compared to their Tuscan Italian equivalents and hear the Naples linguist explain their significance. Eventually, Laurino's own quest for an understanding of her own ethnic identity takes her to earthquake-torn Calabria where she embraces cousins she never knew she even had.

Laurino's book for the most part is a personal journey of ethnic discovery and acceptance for the Italian American who breeches the gap between the immigrant and full-fledged American. Her particular issues don't always reflect my own, but there is a thread running through each of the individual chapters that resonates some deep chord within me that I thought I'd forgotten.

Bottom Line: I enjoyed this book immensely. I recommend it with the same reservation I made to my son: use it as a kickboard to your own voyage of discovery, don't expect it to answer your specific ethnic assimilation quandries---you're better off speaking to an older relative and actually writing down what this elder statesman tells you so that your adult mind can see what your child's mind wanted to forget.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I always was italian, July 29, 2002

By 

Maddalena "la_maddalena" (United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Were You Always an Italian?: Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America (Paperback)

I really enjoyed Maria's book. She grew up in the same era
as myself, but she grew up isolated in the 'burbs, while I grew
up in a largely italian area. The difference of her experience
as well as her reactions to it were fascinating. Well written, interesting and informative. A good read, and explains a lot about the "mobster mentality" that is erroneously associated
with Italian americans