| Chapter 1: | Italian Americana 1920s–1930s |
|
|
and although I did not witness this personally, another block resident swore that when he went to the house of the young German friend, he saw a poster of Hitler on the wall of the apartment.28 For a time in the 1930s, I was friendly with Willy, a German boy who lived down the corner and whose home I occasionally visited until his family moved back to Germany. I always wondered what ever became of him because he would have been of draft age during the war.
So prevalent was the Germanic characteristic in the area that some students of Italian descent who attended parochial school were required to study the Teutonic language. For example, Sicilian-born Alex Pisciotta, future New York City Magistrate and Army officer in World Wars I and II, was taught by German nuns and studied that language in elementary level grades. Although the acculturation process would eventually erode the Teutonic flavor, Germanic customs were still in evidence in Ridgewood throughout the 1940s and even beyond.29
Together with other young neighborhood boys and my brother, it was to the German bakery on Wyckoff Ave. and Bleeker St. that I went on Saturday mornings, with the ten cents my mother somehow managed to squirrel away, to buy twenty pretzels at a cost of two for a penny. Fresh out of the basement oven that threw off a warm, wonderful aroma of dough being baked, the baker tossed in a warm, golden brown extra pretzel for me. Then I would place the pretzels in my makeshift former fruit basket, cover them with a towel to keep them warm, and try to sell twenty of them for one cent a pretzel—the amount required for my brother and I to go to Saturday afternoon movies. These movies usually consisted of a cartoon, chapters from serials like “Buck Rogers” with implausible conclusions, and a double feature including a B grade or unmemorable A grade film.
Growing Up Italian
To grow up in the Ridgewood / Bushwick section of Brooklyn, New York, in the 1930s was to acquire a sense of identity and pride that one was part of communal lifestyle characteristic of Italian immigrants and their descendants, one that was in marked contrast to much of the world beyond.