separate droplets, she screamed, “You have it!” They flushed the mixture as rapidly as possible; happily, plumbing is not susceptible to the maloik—but who knows? They repeated the oil and water test, and again the same result. Upon the third try, the water droplet did not disperse, and Sandy was declared “cured” or freed of the maloik. Her headache immediately went away, and all the saints were thanked.
To be able to deal with the malocchio, according to Sandy, involves reciting a special prayer, in Italian, in front of a church on Christmas Eve. Sandy does not know Sciacchitano, but her sister Vivian does, and so could become a practitioner. (Curandera in Spanish and English in the southwestern United States. The Italian Strega, or witch, is probably too strong, the latter more likely to cast the malocchio on the unsuspecting.)
Another means of warding off the malocchio is to wear the “little horn,” or cornetto. The cornetto looks like a golden chili pepper, and I have seen it often in Bensonhurst, a pendant on hairy-chested “goombahs.” GoomBAH is now part of American popular culture, thank you Hollywood—and HBO’s The Sopranos. It is derived from compare—not only the religious godfather but also countryman— and based on the Neapolitan form, cumpà. The female equivalent, comare, is “goomAH-dey.” The goombahs may be “inoculated,” but to me they looked like carriers. When my daughter came on the scene, over forty years ago, a charming elderly guy in the ’hood told Mom to pick up the “horn” in Little Italy—he made the horn sign with his index finger and pinky—’cause she was sure to attract the malocchio. However, Sandy’s kin had another pre-emptive measure: the grandma of her daughter’s boyfriend gave her a red ribbon to wear in her bra to ward off the “eye,” as did Sandy’s grandma on her own wedding day. I keep on having to ablate the image of an accessorized training bra.
Finally, I don’t want to convey an assertion that the maloik is an Italian invention; it is probably universal. I lived in both Colombia and Brazil, and folks feared the mal de ojo in the former, and the mal-olhado/olho gordo in the latter. In both places, the fusion of African and Catholic rites has engendered a rich tradition, and trade, in repellants and cures. Even Maimonides railed against belief in "the eye."
Photo courtesy Sandy Irrera
Sandy and Mom with some cancer survivors. Sandy is second from left, top row, and Mom, second from right, bottom row. September 2012.
Photo courtesy Marty Neuringer
Presentation of Women of Year award by New York State Senator Marty Golden, March 2011.
6. Georgette, La Vucciria, and La Moda
No story about Georgette Adams is complete without including her never-married aunts, Mary and Rose, ninety-six, and one-hundred-one years old as I write this. “Spinster” is, yes, a pejorative, but if a pair of unmarried sisters deserves to wear the title as an honorific, it is Mary and Rose. They live together by their lonesome in a large wood-frame house, and their backyard is just “katty korner” from where Georgette’s backyard was. Georgette’s house used to be on 21st Avenue, two houses south of commercial 86th Street, but seemingly in a different, more rural world—rural by Bensonhurst standards. In the not-so-old days, sweet Georgette would call in on her aunts daily. While Mary was perfectly able to engage in the Olympic event of shopping on 86th Street, Georgette often shopped for the sisters, and ministered to them in other ways.
I need to digress about 86th Street, the “Casbah” so important in the life of Mom and of those she touched. The north side of the long block between Bay Parkway (22nd Avenue) and 23rd Avenue consists of open-air produce and schlock markets cheek by jowl, most of which have space inside for cash registers, dry goods, and more merchandise/produce. The owners have changed over the years, from Jewish and Italian in the fifties and sixties, to Koreans, Chinese, Egyptians, Arabs, Russians, et al. While Asians have conglomerated neighboring businesses into open-air “supermarkets,” at least one Italian family has done the same. Hence, La Vucciria encompasses at least three contiguous properties and on the inside, in addition to Italian favorites such as artichokes and broccoli di rapa (robbies), there is a functioning Russian deli counter, tended by white tunic-clad young Russian ladies. You vant smoked fish? You got it. Ochin xharascho! Molto bene! That’s Brooklyn. La Vucciria is aptly named. It means, loosely, “madhouse,” and is the title of Renato Guttuso’s famous painting of the “palermitano” market, which depicts a scene reminiscent of 86th Street. It’s life imitating art, imitating life. A large picture, a mural almost, of La Vucciria adorns the Bensonhurst namesake.
Now, fresh produce has always made 86th Street famous, even before fresh produce was cool and co-opted by the young hipsters by the Brooklyn Bridge and DUMBO. DUMBO? Well, almost Disneyesque, but it stands for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.” The West End line goes over the Manhattan Bridge— flanked by the Brooklyn Bridge to the south and the Williamsburg Bridge to the north. Back in the day, you were more likely to find bodies by the bridge than the modern, more genteel tourist attractions like picnicking and kayaking.
On 86th Street in Bensonhurst, if you’re picking through produce when a bunch of new carciofi (artichokes) or string beans is dumped on the stand, you have to fight a gaggle of aggressive ladies (and a few brave, battle-hardened men) on the lookout for the prime specimens. And they also know about positioning, blocking out, and using elbows. Rose Seminara, the elder, when she was in her late eighties—early nineties, was right there. From Georgette: “Your mom was helping my Aunt Rose pick out string beans. They were picking them out one-by-one, not by the handful, because Mary would have a fit if Rose came home with spotted or rotten beans.” Now, this was a bitterly cold day, mind you, and Rose was putting bony, delicate, yet rapacious fingers on the choice specimens.
When the man came and dumped a new crate of string beans over the old ones, my aunt emptied the already full bag and proceeded to start over, and your mom said, “Enough! Rose, you got to be kidding!”
I heard this story from Mom as well as from Georgette, and I could just see Mom saying: “Abbastanza! Ma, quando, MAI?!” Roughly translated, “Enough! When will you be done, NEVER?!” Not even Mom could put her numb fingers through another string bean hunt. Now, if they were for her own table, probably a different story.
Rose, Mary, and Georgette are of the talented and accomplished Seminara clan—Sicilians who belie Hollywood stereotypes. Their numbers include dentists, lawyers and doctors. Aurora Seminara, PhD, was a student of 1998 Nobel Prize winner Ferid Murad. Stephanie Seminara is currently Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Earlier in her career she was able to master human genetics and genomics to identify a “puberty gene” which she called part of “the pilot light of puberty.” Georgette married Arthur Adams, of Canton, Ohio: “I met Art after he came out of the Navy (six years—during Vietnam). He went home for a while, and then came to the big city, New York. We met through a friend.”
To me, Arthur has thoroughly demonstrated how the environment can influence the “epigenome,” so that he is now a full-blown goombah. Talk about the confluence of the ’hood and rural mid-America: Arthur is now a conductor for the New York Transit Authority, and pilots the West End Express. (Currently the D, but we all know, and use, the real name.) As he barreled down 86th Street between the 20th Avenue and Bay Parkway (22nd Avenue) stations, he tooted his horn to his bride, who stood waving at him from her 21st Avenue back porch. Alas, no more. They had to sell a house that was sitting on a large footprint, on which will soon stand a five-story luxury condominium, with stores at ground level and subterranean parking. And so continues gentrification; enough of that.
I should not get too maudlin or hand-wringing, ’cause in the very old days, Brooklyn was a collection of Dutch farming communities, and efforts to stem urbanization bore no fruit. Old Peter Stuyvesant, New York’s last Dutch governor (1664), probably did a few roll-overs in his grave over the Bensonhurst of my youth.