Feb 27, 2020
The Curse of an Immigrant Father
Steven C. Levi
P.O. Box 241467
Anchorage, AK 99524
THE MATTER OF THE MISSING STEAK
My father was the most imperfect mix of Italian upbringing and American lifestyle in the history of California. Of course I did not know that when I was growing up. I just knew that my father was different from all the other fathers I knew. He was an Italian-Jewish refugee who had been crushed by a tank during the Second World War. His right leg was stiff as a board and had been so badly mangled that you could see his kneecap poking out on the underside his leg, 180 degree from where it should have been. He spoke with an accent that was so thick you could cut it with a machete and he told the stupidest jokes I had ever heard. (However, when I visited Italy and told those jokes to the Italians, they thought they were the funniest they had ever heard. The world is not that small after all.)
On the other hand, my father was one of the brightest men I have ever met. He had been lawyer in Italy and after he fled to the United States, he became a clinical psychologist. He spoke, fluently, English, Italian, French and his local dialect, Piedmontese. He spoke enough Spanish to carry on a conversation and read Greek and Latin. While I was listening to the Beach Boys he was reveling in Mephistopheles and Rossini. When we went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art he would tell the family about the history of the artists, their time period and incidents that I am still confirming in my studies two decades after he passed away.
Since my father came to America as an adult, he never had the opportunity to become Americanized. When he landed in New York, the family was close to broke. Even though the family had been multi-millionaires in Italy, the Fascists had absconded with almost all of it — along with their home, library, art collection and every piece of moveable property including the furniture and even the ice box. So had gone to work in a glass factory drilling holes in glass prisms that would be hung around light bulbs. And he was working shoes that cost more than the entire light fixtures on which he was working.
Before he had a chance to learn English he volunteered for the American Army. In spite of the fact that he spoke French and Italian fluently and had lived in France and Italy, the United States Army, in its infinite wisdom, sent him to the South Pacific. After being wounded he went back to school and earned a degree in psychology.
In our house the old country was never far away. Though my father never talked about Italy, our table was very European. We had pasta in all its incarnations, fruit, fruit salad, salami , prosciutto and seafood while our neighbors were having tacos, tamales, fries, fried rice, ribs, American-style pizza and hot dogs. The living room wall was an art museum of posters of Van Gogh, Lautrec, Monet and Modigliani. We had a carved Don Quixote on the top of the television, a miniature of Da Vinc’s horse on the window sill, a terra cotta mug from an Etruscan excavation on the book case and color books of Europe and the history of art on the coffee table.
One of the missed opportunities in my life was the failure of my father to teach me Italian or acclimate me to the Italian culture. I was the oldest and when I was growing up all he wanted to do was forget Italy and what happened to him and his family. So he did not talk of Italy. That all changed in my junior year of high school when I decided to take a trip to Italy with a tour group. That spurred my father to take a trip back and he fell in love with Italy again. After that we became a truly multi-cultural household. But nine months later I was gone to college and did not derive any of those cultural benefits.
Even though my father had lived in America for decades, until the day he died he still ‘thought’ like an Italian. He was not familiar with American slang and when he did not know the correct American word, he just took the Italian or French word and translated it directly. This lead to embarrassing consequences. We were in a restaurant being served by a black waiter when my father needed something. Waiter didn’t seem like the appropriate word so my father took the French word, garcon, and translated it directly. In French, garcon, does mean waiter. But it translates as boy. So my father called for the boy which brought a lot of astonished looks by the rest of the people in the restaurant.
His breakfasts — in the plural — were also very European. During the week he would have a cup of tea and a piece of toast. Every once in a while he would have a cup of coffee but he preferred tea. He was an early riser and I could hear him shuffling around in the kitchen putting water in a small tea pot and then turning on the oven. Then the toaster would shriek as he depressed the lever.
Weekends, however, were a whole different matter. Those were days for fried chicken livers. Seared in my childhood memory is the smell of frying chicken innards wafting through the house. No one else in the family partook of what he considered a delicacy. No one, that is, except Scamper the family cat. Scamper loved Saturday and Sunday mornings. If my father did not give the cat a bit of fried liver, she’d jump up on the chair beside him. If that didn’t work, she step onto his lap. She never had to go quite that far because she trained the old man well. When I came back home for Christmas one year my father had taken to buying chicken hearts and beef kidneys which he kept for the cat. The former he fried with his liver and the latter he served raw.
One of my most memorable examples of my father’s cultural mixings came when he was sent to the store to buy eight steaks. Beef was one of the few American foods my father relished, excuse the pun. I believe it was because he never had that much beef in Italy. Pork, lamb, chicken, rabbit, fish and other seafood, yes. But not beef. And when he did have beef it was in the form of meatballs. So eating steak was an American habit he took to well.
What many people do not know is that Europeans count visually different from Americans. For instance, the visual representation of “one” for an American is the index finger raise. “Two” is the index finger with the middle finger and “three” is the index finger, middle finger and ring finger. “Four” is all fingers raised and “five” is the addition of the thumb. But in all cases, the hand is erect and the fingers point upwards.
However, for the European, “One” is the thumb thrust upward. “Two” is the thumb and index finger but the hand is held as though it was the representation of a pistol. “Three” is the thumb along with the index and middle finger raised. “Four” is the hardest number to do because it is hard to raise the ring finger without having the little finger come up as well. In America, we solve this problem with “three” by having the thumb hold the little finger down while the ring finger goes up.
So off my father went to the butcher. (In those days you got your meat from a counter in the grocery store. You told the butcher what you wanted and he found it in the freezer in the back room and wrapped it for you.)
After chopping through my father’s accent the butcher asked him how many steaks he wanted. My father said “eight,” which was hard to understand, and held up a European “eight” which consisted of all the fingers (and thumb) and on hand and all digits but the little finger and ring finger on the other. To my father, that was “eight;” to the butcher, he saw “seven.” And that’s what he gave my father. What my mother gave my father was a world of grief mixed with a visual lesson of why you visually count like an American in America, not like an Italian.
[Steven Levi’s mysteries can be found at www.authormasterminds.com. His other books are available from Kindle and ACX.]
