Night Bloom: An Italian-American Life

by Mary Cappello

Book Overview

Of the mysterious Night Blooming Cereus, Mary Cappello writes: "The flower fell into our neighborhood like a shooting star." That neighborhood was a working-class suburb of Philadelphia riven by class distinction and haunted by contradiction. In tracing the marks that immigration and assimilation have left on her Italian-American family, Cappello also offers us her family's unsung art-their gardens, letters, and rosary beads-for the lessons they teach...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807072176
• ISBN13: 9780807072172
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.7" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Intelligent and Moving, But Often Opinionated

Mary Cappello's "Nightbloom" presents a poignant and often lyrical portrait of her early life in a working-class Italian-American community. However, she displays a blind spot when casting her gaze towards Sicilian culture. Granted, her Sicilian father was abusive, uneducated and excessively macho, but not all Sicilians have these negative qualities. While most were very poor when they first came to the United States, they brought with them a rich cultural and ethnic heritage with Arab, French, German,Greek, Italian, Jewish, Norman and Spanish roots. Contrary to the popular Mafia stereotype, most came from agrarian backgrounds which nurtured a solid work ethic that enabled them to develop high educational and socioeconomic goals. For this reason, I take issue with Cappello's subtle generalization that most Sicilians are like her father's relatives who jokingly referred to a bust of Giuseppe Verdi as "Joe Green." Most of the second and third generation Sicilians in my large extended family are intelligent upward strivers who would find this denigration of Verdi embarrassing. Capello rationalizes her own embarrassment about this by claiming that her relatives were engaging in a "parodic" approach to high culture. This is indisputable from the perspective of sophisticated cultural theories that analyze the relationship between "high" and "low" cultures. Yet from another equally valid viewpoint, Cappello's relatives blindly ridiculed an important composer about whom they knew very little. Cappello tries to take a culturally relativistic stance when she says that when she was younger she had "naively" and "studpidly" regarded her Sicilian relatives as less intellectual and "cultured" than other Italian groups. Yet, while she claims to believe that all groups produce their own interesting cultures, she clearly identifies more with her mother's more creatively gifted and intellectually ambitious Neapolitan family. Both Cappello's younger and current self seem to long to participate in the elite culture that many academics in the humanities feign indifference towards, but secretly admire and desire. Capello's stereotypes of Catholicism are as troublesome as her tendency to slight Sicilians. While Catholicism at its worst presents authoritarian and tyrannical priests and nuns who peddle morally narrow attitudes, the Church is based on a rich intellectual tradition that often offers interesting alternative views to mainstream Protestantism. Fascinated by Catholicism's intellectual coherence and spiritual power, many wealthy New England women from the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century shocked their Brahman families by converting to this religion. The nasty, neurotic nuns that Cappello encountered in a Catholic elementary school during the late 1960's, should never have entered the teaching profession. During the 1970's, I had many similarly mean, caustic and bullying teachers in a public elementary school that had progressive pr

An insightful and poetic view of family and self

Ms. Cappello has a rare talent for illuminating the complex -- and bringing out the poetic in the everyday -- nature of family and its effects on self. Her autobiography is an intimate view of her self actualization as a scholar, lesbian, and human being in the contextof her Italian American upbringing. Even though this is a very self directed work, it continues to push the reader to understand his or her own context and self. A very beautiful work.

A beautiful and engaging journey!

In a very poetic way, Mary invites us on a journey into herItalian-American heritage. We learn first hand, through the writingsof her grandfather, the life of first-generation Italians struggling to make a living in America. I was deeply impressed how Mary is able to see the strengths as well as the human frailties in her family members; in spite of the suffering, there is much to remember and honor. The themes in many ways are universal, and I felt a deep reverence and importance to understanding my own ancestral heritage. I kept having an image of a weaver weaving life currents - her ancestor's stuggles to survive, Mary's life with her violent-tempered father and agoraphobic mother, and her own journey to understanding who she is as a lesbian academic rising beyond the working class - with each individual thread important to the beauty of the tapestry. This book is poet psychology and is must reading for those who search for meaning and importance in their own lives. It is a great read!

An engaging, touching journey to self and other discovery

I really enjoyed reading this memoir. Although the background is Italian-immigrant, the essays and stories are univeral in terms of how we integrate and transcend our past. The book is like watching a weaver working all the individual threads and colors that come together in a unique pattern. Mary weaves her story and the stories of her parents, siblings, and grandparent together and shows that we truly are a product of our cultures, what we become can and should never be separated from our heritage, and that beauty exists even in the darkest memories. Mary tells a story that ends with no ending; likewise, our own stories blossom as we search into our past. The book reads in some places like a journal; it is always poetic psychology, exploring her mothers agoraphobia, her fathers violent temperament, and her own process of discovering her self as a lesbian woman moving up from the working class in which she was immersed.I highly recommend the book; it is a sweet complement to anyone's own process of self-discovery. ((: