Crossing Ocean Parkway

by Marianna Torgovnick

Growing up as an Italian American in Bensonhurst, Marianna De Marco longed for college, culture, and upward mobility. Her daydreams circled around WASP heroes on television - like Robin Hood and the Cartwright family - but in Brooklyn she never encountered any. So she associated moving up with Ocean Parkway, a street that divides the working-class Italian neighborhood where she was born from the middle-class Jewish neighborhood into which she married. This book is Torgovnick's unflinching account of crossing cultural boundaries in American life, of what it means to be an Italian American woman who became a scholar and literary critic. At the start, Torgovnick goes home to Bensonhurst soon after the shocking racial murder of Yusuf Hawkins. The first essay describes life in "the neighborhood" as viewed from the present, with clarity, empathy, and tough critique. The title essay, "Crossing Ocean Parkway," revisits the famous Brooklyn thoroughfare as a symbol of culture that gradually lost