ABSTRACT
Everyone says that my second cousin Monica’s was the first mixed mar riage in the family. Technically, this isn’t true. Not if you count all the cousins in the previous generation—my first cousins—who married non-Italians. There was Angela, who married a Greek, and Denise, who married an Irishman, and Robert, who married a girl of indeterminate extraction. (My grandmother always referred to her as I’inglese, “the English-woman,” a phrase that delivered more disdain than you might imagine). In the late fifties, my oldest cousin Johnny even became engaged to a Protestant, though apparently that doesn’t count either, because she converted some months before the wedding. So what the family means, then, by mixed marriage is this: that Monica Scarpetto—the daughter of two nice Italian parents—married a Jew.
