LITMIR.BIZ

      To Nancy, a woman with energy radiating from within, much as Vina’s light.

      Introduction

      About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people, and as they do so, their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.

      —David Brooks, The Road to Character, 2015

      When my wife, Nancy Malugani, read David Brooks’ words she told me that they described my mother, a woman of Inner Light. Imagine, a cherished Mother-in-Law. My mother, Mom, Vina, left us three years ago after a valiant struggle against recurrent breast cancer. So, why have I undertaken a book about my mother? Are not all mothers special? Indeed they are, and my hope is not to advertise my own, so much as to share her light. I do not mourn Vina’s passing as premature (she was eighty-seven), nor as particularly painful for her, though it was. I mourn her passing as the dimming of a light in so many people’s lives. She was good, she was funny, she could cook, she could sew, knit, and crochet—boy could she sew, knit, and crochet. She, a child of Neapolitan immigrants, could tell Garment District jokes in a Myron Cohen Yiddish accent.

      But mostly, Vina was a human beacon. She cared for the various street denizens of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. She helped Superstorm Sandy victims, comforted battered women and gave Christmas presents to their children. For twenty-two years, to age eighty-six, Vina volunteered at The Holy Family Home, a shelter for the elderly and disabled. She was probably older than many she looked after; she was giving and nurturing even while suffering the effects of recurrent cancer.

      I feel that her star is receding, and her light is slowly fading. She meant so much to so many—she was everyone’s Aunt Vina—and they reinforce my slanted viewpoint. Aunt Vina was not in the league of Brooks’ Dorothy Day, George Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, George Eliot, St. Augustine of Hippo or Samuel Johnson. She did not play on the world stage; hers was family and neighborhood— really the same concept for her. Here I try to capture a few rays of this woman’s light: mother, aunt, friend, confidante, grand-mother, Godmother. The last descriptor may sound like a “woman of respect,” but Mom was all about selflessness, and not about seeking respect. In fact, our three-room home in back of our linoleum store was known informally as the “The Brooklyn Rescue Mission.” Aunt Vina presided.

      So, here, just one vignette—no, not Italian for “short Vina story.” I was with Mom at Manhattan’s South Seaport circa 2007. We had arrived very early to meet cousins Jim and Rosalie Mangano and then to spend a lovely fall day in lower Manhattan. Having time to spare we had a nice long visit, just we two. Time to use the rest room: I awaited Mom outside a long wide corridor leading from the ladies’ room. After some time, I could see her leaving, accompanied by a woman of color—a woman I did not know. They were chatting like old friends, and before they got to me the lady and Mom embraced and bade farewell. Naturally, I asked. Seems the lady took her young son into the ladies’ room—after all, who would leave a little boy alone in the big city? The lad was naturally upset and uncomfortable. Mom jumped to his rescue, chatted with the boy, mentioned her own two boys, etcetera, etcetera. His mom instinctively trusted my mom and, after tending to her business, she chatted some more with Mom, a conversation that continued until I saw them leaving. So, now you know the rest of the story. But this story is one of many.

      This was Mom—Vina—she could capture people’s hearts and trust in seemingly ordinary, casual interactions. So, I have written Vina, A Brooklyn Memoir—and included many stories contributed by those she touched. The stories also describe the colorful characters Mom associated with in our Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst. Not all characters are “old broads,” as she often called herself and some of her friends, but include men and some very “with it” young people. I realized as I delved, that no matter their age, the women with whom Mom associated were strong and self-sacrificing, much like she was, and I am happy to shed some light on them as well. That such a noble jury comes out so strongly for Mom validates my effort in compiling Vina. Mom lived in Brooklyn all her life, but the old country, Southern Italy, the Mezzogiorno, was inside her. It shone through all of her interactions, and it figures in the stories of Vina.

      As I wrote them, I realized that the stories were as much about me as about Mom. During Mom’s last fourteen months, I made at least monthly trips back to the old neighborhood. I reconnected with it, and with my Brooklyn inner self. So, I figure in this more than I wanted to at first. But I comfort myself by saying that this is fitting, because Vina’s goal, even trumping her charitable efforts, was to raise her two boys well, a challenge in a neighborhood with negative distractions. My brother and I were the motivation for Vina’s struggles, travails, and sacrifices—her raison d’être. Of course, Mom would never use the French term, not even ragion d’essere in “high Italian,” or Toscano. She could speak it, when necessary, but was more at home with the dialects of Bari, Naples, and Belmonte Mezzagno, Sicily.

      Enjoy Vina’s light, her bringing joy and comfort and humor and food and recipes and clothing and, yes, gossip, to the many who loved her. So, this is for the roads that she lit for all of us, and she loved all of us. The narrative is not chronological, the roads not sequential. I have chosen different stretches—those with which I am most familiar, and those stretches on which Mom has left a “verifiable” mark. Many of her fellow travelers are no longer with us, and I wanted to record those still traveling, albeit now without Mom. Most of the above was written before I finished the majority of the stories, and today, about a year on, and on Frank Sinatra’s one-hundredth birthday, the old boozy tune goes through my head: “Make it one for my baby, and one more for the road.” The stories begat stories, and laid bare layers of dormant memories of incidents, places, and people. I re-traveled many roads, some dark. But here I present a sampler of the much more abundant roads sunlit by Mom.

      “It’s quarter to three

      There’s no one in the place, except you and me

      So set ‘em up Joe, I’ve got a little story you oughta know

      We’re drinking my friend to the end of a brief episode

      Make it one for my baby, and one more for the road.”

      Thanks to Johnny Mercer and “The Boss.”

      Photo courtesy Polacco family archives

      Vina and Nancy.

      Circa 2006.

      1. You Don’t Have to be Jewish

      …to live in Brooklyn. It just rubs off on you. Bensonhurst in the old days was a Jewish-Italian enclave. I was born in 1944 in the Bensonhurst Maternity Hospital on 79^th Street and Bay Parkway. The property now houses a Jewish school, and has been across the street from the Jewish Community House—the famous “J”— since 1927. The J was “all-inclusive;” my Sicilian

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