Leaven of the Pharisees : The Dark Side of Italian-American Life

by Lina Del Tinto Demarsky

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0963819801
• ISBN13: 9780963819802
• Release Date: October 1993
• Publisher: D'Angelo Books
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.

Customer Reviews

"The Dark Side of Italian American Life" is the subtitle...

I offer this review by by Fred L. Gardaphe, Fra Noi, 31 July, 1995With a subtitle like "The dark side of Italian-American life", readers of Lina del Tinto Demarsky's novel, Leaven of the Pharisees might expect an expose of life in a crime family. But Demarsky violates a code more sacred than the Mafia's omerta. In this novel, the author focuses our attention on the crimes a family can commit on its members, especially its females. The story revolves around a daughter of Italian immigrants, Concetta Grimaldi, who falls in love with Chuck. Chuck is a wonderful man (for an American) who refuses to even pretend to convert to Catholicism so that the couple might be married with her mother's blessing. Demarsky takes us slowly throughout the agonizing experience of a woman's attempts to please both her family and the outsider whose love can take her out of range of the family's influence. While the story depicts Connie as both victim and heroine, Leaven becomes a literary antidote to the stereotype of the healthy, nurturing family found in many similar novels about Italians in America. Connie's mother, Marietta, is more concerned with "che figura" her daughter makes, than she is with her daughter's feelings. This obsession with control over children for the sake of not making a "brutta figura" in public strikes at the heart of what is often oppressive in a close-knit Italian family. It takes Connie many years to overcome her mother's demands and to come to terms with her own identity; however, in the process she not only loses the man she loves, but nearly is destroyed by an Italian man whom her parents have bribed to marry her. At 27, Connie is close to becoming an old maid, according to old country thinking, but the point of this novel is that old country customs and ways of thinking don't work in America: "It was funny, reasoned Connie, her mother had been in America for over forty years and still none of its thinking, none of the American mentality had rubbed off on her... she still had the same closed mind, the same ignorant outlook that she must have had as a young woman in Italy. Was that possible? Not only was it possible, but it's enforced by a mother who fakes heart attacks when mutiny threatens her command. And while such tactics might work on her siblings, Connie's ability to see through it all nearly costs her her sanity. That she survives her family is a heroic feat in itself. That she learns how to live with them and without them is the novel's message. The novel's title comes from a warning Christ gave to his disciples about how the ritual obsessed Pharisees followed customs without considering how they might affect the way we love. The realization that Connie comes to is that what often passes for love is nothing more than a disguise for control mechanisms designed to make us fit in. For Connie, the easy way would have been to resign herself to being a nonentity, to do what she was told, to be norma