Roots and wings

Avigdor Arikha, Sunflowers, 2001.

Twenty years ago I read Gay Talese's book Sons of the Father's. It was  a lovely meditation on growing up in an Italian family in Ocean City, New Jersey after World War 2. I found it a fascinating counterpoint to my own experience of growing up around Italians in Australian a generation later. That book brought to my consciousness the differences in the US and Australian experience - Italians arrival from late 19th Century versus the principally  post-World War 2 phenomenon in Australia. My experience amongst norther Italians and specifically Tuscans versus the immigration from il soggiorno (the South) and also what it means for immigrant groups to arrive into a wealthy country and within a generation take part in cultural leadership. Talese is a great example of what becomes of bright children in a country that integrates immigrants and is rich and in a phase of cultural leadership. 



Guy Talese* is a workman-like writer. It was a thoughtful and enjoyable auto-biography but I don't expect many will be reading Sons of the Fathers mid-next Century - it will be lost to the canon. But it will have served to educate and inspire me and countless like me in the twentieth century. Kids making sense of the world as they navigate between two or more cultures, moral codes and sources of meaning.   


Talese did however give me something of enduring meaningful which I carry with me wherever I go. Inside the front cover of his book, he offered the Italian proverb: "Le due cose piu belle che possiamo dare ai nostri figli sono le radici, e le ali. - The two most beautiful things we can give to our children are their roots and their wings". This has been a deep theme for me and it is very much a metafor for my life and my reflections and it is also a guide on how to pursue each day, coignaissant of I've come and my heritage, but boundless in my sense of what the future can hold. The stronger the roots, the higher you can fly.   

* I paused writing this missive and googled Gay Talese and discovered that he is credited with being the first and best example of the New Journalism for his piece in Esquire in 1966 "Frank Sinatra has a cold" - so you live and learn and it is a marvellous piece. The book that brought him to prominence was a piece of experiential sociology called "Thy Neighbours Wife" which explored and shared experience of the origins of the sexual revolution and the emergence of the porn industry. It rather puts the very nostalgic, sentimental Sons of the Father in the genre of redemptive autobiography, centred as it was on a depth of appreciation for his Father and his Father's Father and their sacrifices and losses in coming to a new land)