A Jewish last name, an Irish heritage, and pasta to rival Italy’s best | Opinion
My mother was easily intimidated, except when she had a ladle in her hand. She always seemed poised to curtsy to those she considered her betters: priests, teachers, policemen, doctors. But in her kitchen, she was an aristocrat, creating dishes that seemed too grand for our dark apartment. Born Cecilia Bridgett Connolly in 1906, she was a devout Irish-Catholic married to a non-observant Jew, living in Little Italy in The Bronx.
My mother’s family attended St. Malachys church on Manhattan’s west side, passing through my father’s neighborhood to get there. My father knew just enough about Catholicism to assume girls who went to church with their parents must also have reason to go alone. She did, and they met.
They met not long after the play “Abie’s Irish Rose” opened on Broadway. Its story of young lovers of different religions and uncompromising parents was their story too. Both of my parents had friends who married outside 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 13 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.”
When I was a kid in the 1930s and ’40s, the mothers of my friends, most of them from Calabria or Sicily, found my mother 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 that looked as though immigrants had carried it brick by brick from Palermo.
They also insisted she be equally authentic in the kitchen. Irish cooking, they told her, was for skinny people. 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 Tonys 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. The kitchen trembled when a train rattled by, but I loved being there with my mother, amid an opera of sizzling sausage, buratta bubbling over peppers and simmering soup so thick my mother’s wooden spoon stood erect in it. Only the tomato paste came from a can; everything else was lifted from an Arthur Avenue pushcart for inspection.
Every week, my mother handed me a shopping list, written in the elegant cursive script taught her by nuns. Over the years, she became more Roman than the Romans. “Get the ricotta from Calandra’s,” she would tell me, “but don’t let them sell you mozzarella; that you get from Calabria Pork Store.”
Hints we were poor came in curious ways. My mother would talk to me quietly, as though sharing a secret. “I’m making pasta n’casciata and need eggs. We can’t afford a dozen. Go to Teitel Brothers, the Jewish place on Arthur Avenue. Ask them for two eggs. If they tell you they don’t sell loose eggs, say they’re for Mrs. Goldfarb. They’ll do that if they hear you’re Jewish.” As gentle as my mother was, she’d stab you with a glare if you suggested more garlic in the arancini, or anchovies instead of sardines in the pasta con le sarde, or fewer minutes on the stove for the pasta e fagioli.
Once a year, my children and grandchildren insist we go to Arthur Avenue for lunch. As we stroll through streets, once crammed with pushcarts and loud with bargains sung with Neapolitan bravura, I remember the lady with the map of Ireland on her face, offering me a spoonful of red sauce. “I think it’s as good as Mrs. Nappi’s,” she would say. And it was.
Robert W. Goldfarb is a 94-year-old widower living in Boca Raton.