Identity

Out neighbor across the street like so very many  residents in this town hangs a large American flag from his porch.  But he also pairs it with an equally large national flag of Italy.  His surname is indeed Italian, as is true of a large percentage of the population of the town.  I was therefore surprised when we moved here and set up on the front of our house an amusing plaque in the Italian language, and found that this produced absolutely no response from him, either of recognition, or of connection.  The same could be said of all our other Italian-American neighbors.  I am not sure what being a Italian signifies.  I do know that one day when another neighbor brought us freshly caught and filleted cod, as was his kindly wont, I responded by offering to give him some smoked salmon.  A look of horror came over his features.  "That's pink, isn't it?  I don't eat pink fish," he exclaimed.  "It's delicious," I said, "a great delicacy.  You know smoked fish, lox, it's something that Jews particularly love."  "I'm not a Jew, I'm Italian," he said, the horror at having to eat something smoked, pink, and a treat of some other ethnic group clearly mounting.  Visiting the country does not seem an option, much too expensive for most folks.  The one couple who went for two weeks on the beach in Puglia, where the Italian-born husband hailed from, were back in a few days.  Neither could tolerate the locals; she who had never been before to her parents' birthplace did not like what she found ("So loud, so rude") and claimed that he had quite forgotten how much he did not like his former compatriots.  And they were always quick to claim that they were "Italians," not even "Italian-Americans."  Some distinctions die hard.  A former student of mine, the daughter of a couple who spoke Yiddish when they didn't want their children to understand, had a habit of characterizing what some persons twenty or thirty years ago might call "average Americans," as "real Americans," (the contrast being with, obviously enough, herself and the rest of her family).  According to the last census, the town contains one of the largest concentrations of persons of Irish descent.  Around me it's pretty much all Italian, although if you continue down the street for a couple of blocks you are suddenly confronted with shamrocks as a decorative motif to the houses.  About ten blocks away is a rather large and beautiful synagogue signaling the third ethnic group of the town.  Persons often remark that there is a dramatic paucity of African-Americans, Asians of any kind, or Latinos, and wish to ascribe this to discrimination.  I used to think that myself until I realized the fact of the matter is that the families of these earlier immigrant groups who settled here were large and tightly knit.  No one has moved away and the urban space is limited.  As in many small towns the truly unifying cultural cement is the local public school's athletics program, particularly high school football, the stars of which are featured regularly by photographs in the local weekly newspaper.  The various town governing boards to which the members are elected are predominantly persons born and bred in the town.  A year or so ago the issue of cronyism was much in the air, people noted that almost no one not born here was elected to any office, more specifically that veterans of the high school football team seem to predominate.  But perhaps at last their opponents will be able to make use of the growing contemporary disenchantment with football as more and more players turn out to be somewhat permanently befuddled by blows to their heads.