Week 10 Readings and Responses

          Myrna and Me, by Laura Boss
        Laura Boss is a poet and short-story writer from New Jersey.  An award-winning poet, as well as the founder of a poetry magazine (called Lips), Boss's work shows a preoccupation with loss, as we see in the short story under discussion here (Boss).  Myrna and Me is a short story that examines notions of cultural fidelity, friendship, and the negotiations that one must make between one's personal views (of interests, of what is right and wrong, of whom to surround one's self with) and the views that form the cultural paradigm of one's culture.  More specifically, in this story, we see the way in which a friendship between the narrator and her "friend" Myrna, is forged on the shaky foundation of a shared cultural heritage (they are among the few Jewish girls around) and how the friendship fails to flourish on this shaky ground.

      Myrna, clearly, is a smug and mean girl.  She and the narrator are friends, though this is clearly only because they are two of the only three Jewish girls in their grade at School Number Eleven.  We see, for instance, that Myrna seems to believe herself superior (she gets around Sabbath restrictions by having the narrator pay for her, and then pays her back “with a sanctimonious smile on her face”).  She actively engages in mini-betrayals meant to get the narrator in trouble – telling her own mother in one case that the narrator has eaten ham at a birthday party, knowing that the news will get back to the narrator’s mother.  Her greatest betrayal, however, is her attempt (we don’t know if failed or not) to steal Richard Gold from the narrator.  It seems pretty clear that she knows exactly what she is doing and that’s just a mean person.

                Interestingly, it is mean Myrna that is the vehicle for the narrator’s freedom, and her behavior is an impetus for the narrator to break free from the rigid, controlled world in which she is confined.  Both of the girls exist within a rather traditional and controlling Jewish society in which they are expected to only marry (and only date, so that they “were not tempted”) Jewish men.   This self-exclusion, when combined with something of an exclusion on the part of the larger society (symbolized by the fact that they will never be asked to pledge for “Rainbow Girls”), results in their living within a totally separate society, essentially forced to make relationships with people whom they don’t really like.  Myrna’s meanness breaks this ‘invisible code’ and allows the narrator to “become friends with girls [she] really liked even if [they] came from different worlds.”

Works Cited
Boss, Laura.  Interview by Rebecca Gambale. The Dodge Blog.  The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. 7        June 2013. Web. 26 October 2013.

               

How I Changed My Name, Felice, by Felix Stefanile

        “How I Changed My Name, Felice,” is a very funny poem, and a light-hearted take on a theme of wide importance among immigrant communities.  The theme is fairly common – we can see it, of course, in other poems in this section (which is called “Naming”), such as Chin’s “How I Got That Name”—for names, as markers of who we are, are both very important and un-important.  They are filled with meaning and devoid of meaning.  They carry information about a person (ethnic identity, parental choices, etc), and yet it seems that most anyone can “grow into” a name.  A Harry becomes a Harry, and a Jennifer becomes a Jennifer.

                Part of the humor of this poem lies in the name itself, which Felix of course had little choice in (at least originally), but which serves the poem well, for “felice” means “happy” in Italian, and so there is a nice turn of phrase in the title of the poem, for we could think of it as “How I Changed My Name, Happ(il)y.” 

                Interestingly, the name is totally unimportant at first, and does not seem to be an issue at all.  “The teachers hardly cared,” we read, and the Italian boys don’t seem to find it strange.  They easily “code switch” like characters in our short stories this week, and pronounce the name differently in class (we imagine that they say “Fe-LEEse”) and outside of class, when they say “feh-LEE-tchay” (the proper Italian pronunciation).  The name only becomes a problem when the speaker commits a small “crime,” (breaking a widow’s window) and comes face-to-face with the American justice system, in the form of a police officer.  The name change, it seems, is something of the penance that this boy must pay for his crime (though he must also pay with shame).   This is his initiation, the point, perhaps, at which he becomes somehow more “American.” 

                What’s great about this name change, and works to further provide this poem with levity, is the speaker’s father’s reaction to the new name, which according to a book is a “Roman name.”  No connection, though, with Roman grand buildings, democratic traditions, theatre, or philosophy, for as the father points out, “no Roman broke a widow’s glass, / and fanned [his] little Neopolitan ass.”  This final, brilliant line, which seems "perenially lively and vigorous," (as X.J. Kennedy has described his work as a whole, in a review of The Dance at St. Gabriel's) seems perfectly nonchalant, humorous, and, of course, a touch violent, which seem like perfect terms to apply to the poem as a whole, which approaches what could be considered an important and serious topic, yet with a levity that deprives it of a heaviness that such an event does not, perhaps, deserve.  

Works Cited

Kennedy, X.J.  Review of The Dance at St. Gabriel's by Felix Stefanile. Harvard Review , No. 9 (Fall, 1995), pp. 169-170