Play Jimmy Roselli: A Synopsis

Visiting the area around Ground Zero one sunny Fall Sunday, I walked through the new transportation hub that looked like it belonged in a futuristic science-fiction movie, and took the voyage to the top of the new One World Trade Center and viewed my city laid out below. This is the city where I was born, worked, and lived in most of my life. My thoughts drifted back to September 11, 2001 when I exited the subway in midtown and saw smoke billowing from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Since my train ended where the planes hit, it stopped far uptown. I called my office to let my staff know that I was on the way. In the background I heard shrieks and screams and was told that one of the towers had just collapsed. I knew my city and my country would never be the same.

Across the street from the One World Trade Center, at 90 Church Street, is a building where my mother worked in the Navy Department during World War II. Memories flooded as I thought of the long journey of my life, the thought of my mother as a young woman, my father as a young sailor in the South Pacific, and their parents, brothers and sisters, and of their generation and my generation and their journeys from various countries to the United States and what it really means to be American.

I was born in a mostly Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn. My mother’s father lived with us so my earliest memories were those of my grandfather, mother and father in a small railroad apartment in close proximity to most of my mother’s family and not far from some of my father’s and surrounded by people my mother knew growing up. My grandfather died before I was four and I had no further living grandparents but a large number of aunts, uncles and cousins. While my mother’s elder sister was born in Italy, the rest of my family was born in the US. My life was a mix of Italian traditions and an American present.

As a child, I listened to the coming to America and childhood stories of my family. Yet, I didn’t feel that these stories had a direct effect on me. I was, after all, an American. I watched cowboy movies, loved baseball, and my hero was Davy Crockett, “King of the Wild Frontier.” While I liked “macaroni” and meatballs, I was put off by things that were too Italian. My neighborhood was filled with people who spoke heavily accented English, and women who were constantly in mourning black. This was not the life of an American. Real Americans lived in houses in small towns, not in railroad flats in Brooklyn. Their families were like “Father Knows Best” where the dad came home from the office and sat around in his white shirt and tie afterward. There was an upstairs so people were not on top of each other all the time.

As a child I read constantly outside my school assignments, mostly about American history. I loved the movie “Johnny Tremain” about a boy in Boston at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. It didn’t matter to me, as a family elder pointed out, that our family was in Italy at the time. American history was my history. America was my country. Italy was of no concern to me, nor were Italian things. I was proud of our navy in which my father and favorite uncle served in the War. I was offended that anyone would actually run against President Eisenhower who, after all, epitomized our Nation.

I went to open houses at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and to air shows at Floyd Bennett Field. I was proud of our military now charged with defending us against the Russians.

A theme in my life was who is a real American. To my childhood self, it was not ethnics in wood frame and shingle houses in a nondescript area of Brooklyn. It was cowboys, and the cavalry and Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. And it was baseball, the most American of all games, played by the beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, not very far from my house.

As I learned from my mother, real Americans went to college and worked in offices wearing a white shirt and tie. No one from her family was even close to going to college nor can I recall anyone in the neighborhood who did. Yet, from my earliest days, I was going to college. She learned about a different world from her days in the Navy Department, where she met people who were “American” without accents or foreign-born parents. I have a picture of me at about 4 or 5 with Santa Claus. I was wearing what was called a “college” sweater. So, while still a boy of the neighborhood in many ways, I could not imagine living there as a grown up with a blue collar job like most of the men had. Thus, my life was one of contrasts and contradictions.

I was not a rebel. I was a very good student and was also rewarded for my behavior. I did all the rites of passage of the Catholic Church and memorized the necessary prayers and responses for the big days of First Holy Communion and Confirmation. I hadn’t yet rejected the values or traditions of my upbringing but still lived with the idea that I was American, not Italian, and that my life was going to be different from those around me.

Ultimately, we moved to the suburbs where there was a creek down the street and where going to Main Street was going to “town.” My new school had a tough honors curriculum and very smart kids. That we were going to college was a given. This was my entry into America.

Many years later, when talking to my mother she told a story about people she worked with in the Navy Department. It was then that I learned how I got my name.

All of this came back to me at the top of One World Trade Center. With Ellis Island nearby and 90 Church Street below, I saw the trajectory of my life from my family’s immigrant origins, to our assimilation, to my entry into a world where my ethnic background no longer mattered. Also, thinking about the people who were killed on 9/11 from every country and religion, I believe that there is no one road to America, and that my story is one of millions, that my life is but one example of the diversity that forms the mosaic of our nation.

Play Jimmy Roselli is a novel based upon the experiences of a young boy much like myself who grew up in a neighborhood much like mine.