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The smells of New Jersey . . . to outsiders, they range from the chemical smells of the turnpike that bombard drivers as they pass the state's chemical plants to the saltwater smells of the shore that come wafting into the minivans of day-trippers as they turn off the highway onto local shore roads. To insiders, the smells of New Jersey exist on a more complicated scale, a range of topographically and culturally diverse scents, from the saltwater scent that permeates Ocean Boulevard in Long Branch to the espresso scent that wafts onto Cianci Street from the Roma Club in Paterson. Some of the most pleasing smells emanate from the gardens, kitchens, grocery stores, restaurants, and bakeries of New Jersey's Italians. New Jersey triumphs as a full sensory experience, a place that seeps into one's body, into one's memory with its sights-the Great Falls, the Great Gorge, Cape May, the Meadowlands, the Palisades, and the Pine Barrens; its sounds-the crash of waves at Wildwood, the pulse of the cicadas chirping at Greenwood Lake, the bustle of its myriad small towns and neighborhoods, the multicultural choruses in the streets of Paterson, Newark, Union City, and Jersey City; but perhaps most of all, with its tastes and aromas-prosciutto, pecorino, salami, provolone, bread, pizza, lasagna, calamari, meatballs, tomatoes, rosemary, garlic, and basil.
Smells trigger sensory memories, conjure our pasts, make our families, our gatherings, our homes materialize before us, no matter whether we are still in those New Jersey neighborhoods or are living or traveling in some other part of the world. The sensory memory of food still brings Italian Americans of every generation together-it is the memory of pastchille, of strufoli, and of twisted Easter egg bread. It is the memory of figs, freshly picked from backyard trees. It is a smell associated with early fall. Before the first frost, the trees are wrapped in burlap to protect them, a ritual early Italian immigrants passed on to their descendants.
Not surprisingly, the sensory memory of food became the topic of discussion at a table of writers at a recent symposium on the literature of Italian American women called Speaking of Jersey: Italian American Women on the Garden State. During the symposium we discovered that pastina had been a source of comfort for so many of us. Even though we had grown up in different Italian American communities and were of different generations, we all associated this simple, characteristically Italian dish with the memory of being soothed. During the symposium, around the suddenly quiet table, each woman had returned momentarily to her childhood home and was looking down at the steam rising off the bowl of pastina her mother or grandmother had placed in front of her.
It was at this symposium, organized to celebrate Women's History Month, that the seeds of this anthology were planted. Held at the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College on March 31, 2001, and coordinated by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Edvige Giunta, this event was co-sponsored by the Poetry Center and the Collective of Italian American Women (reborn in 2001 as Malìa: A Collective of Italian American Women), which is a New York- and New Jersey-based group that promotes multicultural relations; since 1998 it has organized gender-focused events on the Italian American cultural experience. Speaking of Jersey was one of the many cultural gatherings that has occurred in the last decade across the United States, and one of the many that testifies to the growth of this literature, one that in the last few years has begun to receive due recognition as an important segment of American literary and cultural history. This symposium was perhaps the first to focus specifically on New Jersey as the subject matter chosen by so many Italian American writers.Here we challenged many of the cultural expectations and stereotypes that have thwarted the authenticity and diversity of Italian American experiences. We found it especially productive to hold this event in the context of a critical discussion of the stereotyping to which New Jersey has been subjected. The women authors who gathered in Paterson had different stories to tell, stories that pointed to a complexity and richness of experiences not yet widely depicted by American popular culture and media.
In the intimate atmosphere of the conversation that followed the writers' presentations, authors and audience shared stories that revealed that indeed New Jersey has been and still is a fertile site for Italian Americans and their creative work. Speaking of Jersey captured the warm feeling of sitting around a table with other Italian Americans and marveling at the commonalities we shared despite our differences in origins, in ages, in life choices, and experiences. It became clear that these stories, while specific to the histories of Italian American communities, also spoke to a large and diverse constituency- across gender, racial, and ethnic borders. Like other anthologies of its kind, Italian American Writers on New Jersey: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose bespeaks the achievement of cultural consciousness and claims the relevance of the stories and histories of the writers included in this volume to Italian American as well as American literary and cultural history.
As the three of us sat down to revisit and reconceptualize the ideas that had shaped the symposium, we began to envision a project broader in scope and subject.While the symposium had focused on the contributions of contemporary women writers, primarily from northern New Jersey-many of which appear here-the anthology that it inspired includes male and female Italian American writers from the late nineteenth century to the present from diverse geographical areas of New Jersey. Gender and ethnicity were the focus of the symposium, but this anthology also draws from our commitment to the study of the culture produced by working-class people. As scholars and writers, the three of us also share a deep interest in literary history and the awareness that projects such as this anthology can impact the formation of that history.
Italian American Writers on New Jersey combines fiction, poetry, memoir, oral histories, and journalistic pieces to offer a chronicle of the Italian American experience in New Jersey from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. It features writers who are natives or residents of New Jersey or whose writings focus on Italian American life and the distinctive culture of the Garden State, which has long been home to a large and vital Italian American community. A fertile site for the aspirations of this community,New Jersey has produced Italian American artists, scholars, chroniclers, and participants in the public life of the state and the nation.
The pieces in this anthology collectively represent a document of a literature that has been in the making for over a century, a literature that both maintains distinctly regional traits and fully participates in the national American literary project.At a time in which the literary and publishing world are showing an interest in Italian Americans that transcends the sensationalist interest in mob culture, this anthology documents the present condition and traces the origins of the body of work produced by authors who maintain deeply diverse ties to their Italian ancestry and to the Garden State.
New Jersey is a fitting setting for an exploration of American identity and the place of Italian Americans in the American mosaic. This state has been fruitful ground not only for writers, but also for the growth and intermingling of various ethnic American cultures. The variety of New Jersey communities is complemented by the diversity of its topography. From the shore to the Pine Barrens, from the northeastern cityscapes to the southwestern farmlands, and all the suburbs in between,New Jersey represents America in microcosmic form. Similarly, New Jersey's Italian American communities and their experiences of what it means to be marked as "hyphenated" embody the complexities of American identity as it is rooted in geography, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.
Like many ethnic groups, Italian Americans have often found themselves confronted with cultural, linguistic, and psychological challenges that grow out of the experience of being different from the standard Madison Avenue and Hollywood conceptions of American identity. The poems and stories in Italian American Writers on New Jersey depict situations and convey emotions that will resonate with people who trace their ancestries to other ethnic groups and to working-class people. Indeed, these works articulate crosscultural themes of alienation, dislocation, and passing that permeate the histories of marginalized and disenfranchised groups in the United States.