Page 2 - Boca ViewPointe - June '23

Page 2, Viewpointe June 2023
Pasta And The Map Of Ireland

By Robert W. Goldfarb stood erect in it. Only the tomato paste came from a can; sell loose eggs, say they’re for Mrs. Goldfarb. They’ll do
everything else was lifted from a pushcart for inspection. that if they think you’re Jewish.” As gentle as my mother
My mother was easily intimidated except when she Every week my mother handed me a shopping list, was, she’d stab you with a glare if you suggested more
had a ladle in her hand. She always seemed poised written in the elegant cursive script taught her by nuns. garlic in the arancini, or anchovies instead of sardines in
to curtsy to those she considered her betters: priests, Over the years, she became more Roman than the the pasta con le sarde, or fewer minutes on the stove for
teachers, policemen, doctors. But in her kitchen, she was Romans. “Get the ricotta from Calandra’s,” she would the pasta e fagioli.
the aristocrat, creating dishes that seemed too grand for tell me, “but, don’t let them sell you mozzarella; that Once a year, my children and grandchildren insist we
our dark apartment. Born Cecilia Bridgett Connolly in you get from Calabria Pork Store.” We were as poor go to Arthur Avenue for lunch. As we stroll through streets
1906, she was a devout Irish-Catholic married to a non- as our neighbors, but meat-rich. My father worked in a once crammed with pushcarts and loud with bargains
observant Jew, living in Little Italy in The Bronx. slaughterhouse in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. On sung with Neapolitan bravura, I remember the lady with
My mother’s family attended St. Malachys church Saturday evenings when the doors slammed shut, the boss the map of Ireland on her face, offering me a spoonful
on Manhattan’s west side, passing through my father’s would call out to the workers, “Take home whatever is of red sauce. “I think it’s as good as Mrs. Nappi’s,” she
neighborhood to get there. My father knew just enough cut, but not sold.” A hunk of prime beef lounged in our would say. And it was.
about Catholicism to assume girls who went to church Sunday gravy.
with their parents must also have reason to go alone. Hints we were poor came in curious ways. My mother Bob’s articles have appeared in The New York Times,
She did, and they met. They met not long after the play would talk to me quietly, as though sharing a secret, “I’m The San Francisco Chronicle and in Next Avenue, the
“Abie’s Irish Rose” opened on Broadway. It’s a story of making pasta n’casciata and need eggs. We can’t afford a publication of the Public Broadcasting Service. His
young lovers of different religions and uncompromising dozen. Go to Teitel Brothers, the Jewish place on Arthur book, “What’s Stopping Me From Getting Ahead?” was
parents was their’s. Both had friends who married out Avenue. Ask them for two eggs. If they tell you they don’t published by McGraw Hill and is in five languages. 
of their religion and were mourned by parents as though
dead. After months filled with pleas and rejection, their
fathers finally met.
Bill Connolly was a coal-yard foreman. Jacob
Goldfarb spent thirteen hours a day, seven days a week,
in his newsstand. My mother told me when the men
finally shook hands the calluses they shared became more
important than the religions they didn’t. Impatient with
any further debate, her father waved his hand, broad as
a shovel blade, and said “Let the kids marry even if we
all go to hell!”
The mothers of my friends, most of them from Calabria
or Sicily, found her exotic, a woman with a Jewish name
with what they called the map of Ireland on her face.
She attended mass at Our Saviour, which they dismissed
as “the English place,” asking “How can it be a church
if the priest doesn’t speak Italian?” They insisted she
accompany them to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a church
which looked as though immigrants had carried it carried
brick by brick from Palermo.
They also insisted she be equally authentic in the
kitchen. Irish cooking, they told her, was for skinny
people. When I was little I overheard her confiding to
my father that Mrs. Salci pointed to her hips and bosom,
saying “You want these, you simmer your Sunday gravy
for two days!” I often came home from school to find
Mrs. Arrigale or Mrs. Nappi in the kitchen, leading my
mother through the intricacies of dishes with names you
could almost taste, like melenzana con ricotta. My friends
Vinny, Carmine and the two Tony’s would say “Bobby,
you’re not Italian, but you have the same sauce on your
shirt we do.”
We lived under the tracks of the “El,” the Third Avenue
Elevated Railway, and the kitchen trembled when a train
rattled by. But, I loved being there with my mother in its
opera of sizzling sausage, buratta bubbling over peppers
and simmering soup so thick my mother’s wooden spoon

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