DANDELION SALAD IN BROOKLYN: A MEMOIR, by CAROL FALVO HEFFERNAN
Publication Date: May 15, 2022
Paperback, 152 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-09-7
$30.00 retail, $25.00 from publisher
Carol Falvo Heffernan grew up in an Italian-American family in Brooklyn during the 1940s and ’50s, but her account of her childhood, recalling an large circle of relatives and friends, extending through her schooling and first years of marriage, is no mere exercise in nostalgia. To read her story is to encounter once again the foundational American truth that we are a nation of immigrants, even if each new wave of immigrants has encountered suspicion, all too often hatred, and hardship at the hands of those who came before. Our fabled “melting pot” is a rich stew of cultures – and it’s no accident that Heffernan devotes many pages to descriptions of feasts and foodways, including recipes (not least the titular dandelion salad), for it is through food that we most often identify with our roots, and invite others in to share in our various traditions. Part family saga, part Bildungsroman, part scrapbook of old New York City locales and activities, part travelogue, this is a rich cultural document that rewards the reader with a host of details. (For instance, we observe that some Catholic families were already disregarding church proscriptions against birth control as early as the 1940s; and we’re invited along on a European holiday, infant in arms, as part of the first generation of middle-class Americans to embark on such travels.) In the span of only a few generations, Heffernan’s family went from laborers and horse-drawn ice wagons (her grandfather appears on the cover) to the music rooms of Julliard and classrooms of major universities. Her story is both unique, and universal, quintessentially American. There’s a whiff of the mythical to it: she reveals in the opening pages that one homeplace of childhood memories is long-demolished, and her epilogue is largely an obituary for many of the people we have just met. Her main narrative concludes fifty years ago. How the world has changed since then – and how much it hasn’t. By sharing her personal memories, Heffernan invites us to learn from them – and just maybe, be better for it.
Praise for Carol Falvo Heffernan & Dandelion Salad in Brooklyn
This memoir will be of interest to those who grew up Italian-American in New York City, specifically in Brooklyn. However, it is also a coming of age tale and a narrative of assimilation to which anyone growing up in the 1940s and 1950s will be able to relate. The author conveys the impact of family on one’s development as she shares her experience of reaching out beyond the boundaries of her ethnic community, traditions, and a world taken for granted, thus enabling readers to find parallels in their own lives.
—Salvatore Primeggia, Ph. D.,Professor of Sociology, Adelphi University, Co-editor of The Italian-American Experience: An Encyclopedia
From fifties Brooklyn to current Garden City, Carol Heffernan takes us by the hand, like an old friend, through the daylight dramas of extended Italian family life, period shops and churches, young girlhood friendships, teenage infatuations, Barnard and graduate school at Columbia where she and her future husband, the professor, first clicked. The memoir is acutely observed never self-absorbed. A senior professor who has written delicately focused studies of medieval texts by and about gifted women, Heffernan is ever the guide through the times past as experienced through her life, not just her own private times. We arrive at the present a bit abruptly. A widow now after a well-traveled life as a scholar partner with her husband, a grandmother of two boys, the mother of a son of unusual breath of education who himself already has tales to tell. Although short, as the book ends we have a feeling of a long vision, a generous spirit, and of a warm sensitive woman who yet keeps her watchful eyes wide open. Keen sentiments with no sentimentality. Regrettably, she skips over much anyone would be curious to know more about from Manhattan to Dublin to France and Italy. Is there such a thing as a gap sequel? Bring it on.
—John Phelan, author of People Like You: Casting and the Public Interest & others
About the Author
CAROL FALVO HEFFERNAN is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. Among her published books are Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2009), The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2003), The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Early Medicine (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne UP, 1995), and others. Her articles have appeared in such scholarly journals as The Chaucer Review, Magistra, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Modern Philology, and Notes and Queries.