How to Lose Your Culture in 40 Years

Memories are long; life is longer. Away and back in five parts.

“Papa was born in France.” That was about the size of it. That’s what my Mama told me, in perfect English. I was maybe six years old. That, of course, was never the whole story — it never is.

We don’t have time to really process the entirety of what was lost between 1982 and 2023, or what I’ve tried to reclaim over that time. We only have time to talk about how it was lost, and how I’ve tried to reclaim it.

The short net-net: I was born 40+ years ago in Niagara Falls, New York, to the daughter of a man born in Marseille, France, and the son of a woman born in Naples, Italy. I have great aunts and uncles born in Tunis, Beirut, Valletta, and Agrigento. We all ended up in New York. I am a second-generation American on both sides of my family.

I spent my youth engaged in conversations on fishing trips or patron saint feasts or boating outings, unaware of what was being said. It was always spoken in French or Italian or Arabic, or some Maltese-adjacent compromise that let everyone understand each other.

We had all this nonsense in our home that didn’t look like anywhere else in the neighborhood — globes, National Geographics in international languages, run-of-the-mill pottery that would fetch a pretty penny on eBay. We had all these rituals I didn’t understand and no one bothered to explain; they just sorta assumed I would know. Sometimes I did.

We used to grab fresh bread from the back loading docks of bakeries, have scarlet-red sauce on Sundays, roast lamb spit and kebab on holidays, indulge in feasts of seven fishes on holidays, and nibble on biscotti and Mamoul for both breakfasts and desserts. I drank wine at 12, and coffee at 13.

I was baptized and confirmed Catholic; I no longer believe in god and the folks in my family who still no longer go to Catholic churches. But I mean … look at this first communion pic.

That party, man. You can imagine the wedding scene from the Godfather, and that’s what I remember as a little boy. Not the shady business shit or the subsequent violence — we weren’t them kinda folk — but the rest of it. The Che La Luna and all that. Shit was real. I can feel it, hear it, see it, and sometimes still touch it.

My great grandpapa was an intelligence officer for the French resistance in WWII. In 1943, he was captured by the Nazis in his hometown of Marseille and got sent off to a concentration camp. He wouldn’t be there long. The allies would roll through Provençe soon enough.

In the late-1940s, he’d seen about enough of that bullshit and sent the oldest of his four kids (my Papa) on a boat carrying Holocaust survivors over to the US.

On June 2, 1947, that ship arrived at Ellis Island, New York, carrying 26 passengers, 22 of them immigrants. One of those passengers was an 18-year-old mechanic. He was the youngest solo traveler on the voyage.

After arriving at Ellis Island, he journeyed to Buffalo, New York, to live with his — I shit you not — Uncle Sam. He worked and saved up enough money to pay for his family to come to visit.

On November 3, 1950, the S.S. Atlantic carried the rest of the family, featuring names like Francesco, Concetta, Colegero, Julietta, Theresa, and Felicia. They were not issued visas, but they were bound for 817 West Ave, in Buffalo, New York. They arrived at Ellis Island on November 13, 1950, and they never left.

By 1952, my dad’s family finally came over, and a couple of years later Papa had my mom. In ’82, my mom and dad had me. Those two were kids of immigrants.

All that Old World shit really happened.

Then it just disappeared.

Part I: Severance

I remember one day I was told, “Johnny” — yeah, I was Johnny, my dad was John — “we’re moving.”

And we moved 18 exits down the New York State Thruway to Utica, New York. Away from the fam. Away from everything I knew. Away from “the culture”.

We saw our fam, my mom’s and my dad’s, hella less than we used to. My mom and dad never quite made friends the way they did back when the Buffalo Bills were losing Super Bowls.

On the other hand, I made a whole new class of friends in high school — folks who’d been in the States longer. Folks who, even if they had vowels ending their last names, didn’t quite hold the long notes the way I could.

Then my parents got divorced, and I got even less of who came around. Then I went to college.

All the late-night “oh, you just came in, lemme make you some sauce (the pasta was implied)” disappeared. And I just kept losing it from there.

I moved back to Buffalo in the autumn of 2002, after two college stints — that’s a longer story than any I’ve already written — and briefly reconnected with my Papa before we lost him to kidney failure in the summer of 2003.

I’d still get that bread from the Italian bakery, and dine out at those French bistros, but the folks I broke bread and sipped wine with — out of regular-ass cups, not stemmy wine glasses — didn’t quite get it the way I did. And that was fine. After all, I was American. This is just what we did.

In the Summer of 2010, I shared a long evening with the Arabic contingent, where I cracked nuts, pitted dates, and hoovered those biscotti and Mamouls I used to love back when I was a kid. We ate lamb kebab on the spit as we used to, with mint jelly and everything. It had been 18 years.

Then I just left.

Part II: Disappearance

I moved to Austin on January 1, 2011. It was the right move. On my way out of Buffalo, I grabbed a whole-ass pizza from Pizza Junction, and a dozen donuts from Dickie’s Donuts, and helped my Nana move a desk upstairs with my uncles and cousins who swore mostly in French, Italian, and Arabic.

I lost whatever was left of me by the time I spent a few years in Austin. I built something else up. My dad moved to Iowa, then Alabama. My mom moved to Florida. My sister moved to Colorado, then Tennessee. My brother moved to Colorado.

We scattered — we left it all behind. The family ties frayed. We still talked, but we weren’t a tight-knit group of second-gen Americans anymore; we were just garden-variety white American kids, now in their 30s. Unfortunately, for as long as memories are … life is just a bit longer.

About a decade ago, I dated an L.A.-born Persian girl for a few years. I related to her family, not because I was Persian, but because I related to her sense of “culture” — celebrating holidays and eating feasts no one else was privy to outside your family and immediate family’s friends who could vibe with it. We both understood Mamouls and kebab. We broke up, but not for any reason other than just it wasn’t time for us and we weren’t it for each other.

I learned how to dial back the dago nonsense when I got my first office job down here in Austin. Nobody understood the New York-ness of it all, much less the rest of it. In the interim, I learned to eat shit food that was cooked without an ounce of love but all the Pinterest cred in the world. I walked into a thousand houses that looked like everything else you’ve ever seen.

“Ah, this is what I’m supposed to aspire to,” I said, red-white-and-blue-pilled as I’d ever be.

Part III: Return

I’d wanted to visit the South of France since 2007 when I told my mom — ironically, at dinner in Epcot Center (she worked at Disney) — I would visit the South of France once I got enough money. I wanted to see where I came from and work my way backward.

My Papa came back to Marseille sometime in the 1990s and snapped one final picture in front of his childhood home. I took a picture of that picture of my Papa while at my mom’s Orlando-ish house in 2015.

In 2018, just after watching France win the World Cup, all while eating Oysters and drinking Champagne in Austin with an Internet friend from Marseille, I got to be the first person in my family who was born in the USA to go back to my Papa’s hometown.

And, lemme tell you: the Mediterranean Sea — my ancestral waterway, I suppose, although I assume that’s true of many of us — is every bit as blue and wavy as I imagined it would be.

It’s a beautiful little bitch — furious surf cutting against the rugged rock, and yet as inviting as a beast I’d ever seen. One afternoon, I found a cozy little patch of rock to sit upon and ponder life. The salty breeze whipped against my face.

Ever since my youth spent on the shores of the mighty Niagara — often fishing with my Papa, but later in life alone as I had now — I would sit by the water to just think and remember and feel things.

I posted pics to Facebook before the question ultimately came:

“You gonna find your Papa’s house?”

I pulled up the pic I took in 2015 and decided to roll the dice.

Part IV: Rediscovery

Armed with only a blurry, dark photo of a man dead for 15 years, I deduced: the 11th Arrondissement. Pont de Vivaux Boulevard.

I opened the Uber app and dropped a pin at the start of the street. I would need to walk just 1000m to find it or find out it’s gone. The driver looked at me cross-ways as if to say, “You want to go … where?”

It’s not a touristy part of town. It’s not even a particularly nice part of town. It’s by the Velodrome where Olympique Marseille plays, and half the buildings looked unoccupied or were turned into discount bodegas or bulldozed into new car dealerships.

I got out of the car and walked, very slowly and very silently, down the sidewalk, scanning the buildings up and down.

200m in, at 42 Pont de Vivaux Boulevard, I stopped and looked to my right. I looked back at the picture. I looked at the house. It’s for sale. I scanned the walls. It was close. It didn’t look quite right. I took a selfie in front of the building — just in case.

“Maybe I can write something about this was the street he grew up on, and this is where my family comes from.”

I kept walking in absence of a better idea. It didn’t seem promising. New condos and housing projects dotted the side of the road everywhere I looked. That house is probably gone, the way so much of life is ever-changing, and nothing gold can stay, and we romanticize pasts that only exist for a fraction of a second and probably never did. I moved into the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s.

Then I looked across the street. That’s when I saw this:

My blood ran cold, and I froze. The sign was gone, but look at the slope of the roofs in the background — one’s a different color now, but, so what? The car in the alley. Look at those five circles that look like they could have, at one point, held the sign he stood under.

I texted the photo to my Uncle.

“Tell me that ain’t it.” He texted back, “Looks it. Mission accomplished.” I made a collage and tried to line the two photos up as best I could.

83 Boulevard Pont du Vivaux in the 11th Arr of Marseille, was my Papa’s house. It is the last house my family lived in before they came to America. On November 3, 1950, they spent their last day here.

On September 1, 2018, I became the first person in my family, other than the man who made the decision to leave 71 years ago, to come back.

To see it with my own eyes.

To touch the cement with my own hands.

To walk in the steps they once did just two generations ago.

And it all came flooding back: all the swear words in French, all the Italian food, all the Tunisian and Lebanese that didn’t make sense because that shit wasn’t letters. All the Latin in the Catholic mass. All the Old World on a spit I could handle.

Part V: Then, Now, and Forever

Ah, if only I had kids to tell this to.

That moment was as close to a spiritual experience as I think I’ve ever had. And a full-circle moment. A closed loop. Every superhero has to have an origin story. Every family and culture has its lore.

Ah, no wonder I loathe fascism. No wonder I’m pro-immigration. Shit checks out. This is my culture, my lore, my family, my soul.

It turned me. I don’t know if now I’m just cosplaying who I used to be or wished I could still become, or if I’m just remembering who I was and where I come from.

Still, ever since being able to walk the streets, eat the eclairs, and drink the orange blossom water-spiked coffee that my family absolutely walked, ate, and drank, I try to honor all of it as best I can. I try to incorporate more of what used to be into what’s still to come.

Every now and again, when I have a bit too much wine — almost never in stemmy wine glasses — the (as my current boo calls me) “Johnny Tomato” comes out. I’m not putting on a costume — I don’t think, anyway — I’m remembering my home, my family, and my beginnings.

I ground my actions in a family tradition of storytelling, globe-trekking multiculturalism, anti-fascism, and also an old-world sensibility. I don’t have a lot else to go on, except all the under-seasoned food and boilerplate Americana that feels as disinteresting as it feels foreign. I ain’t no Dairy Queen or Johnny Cash; I’m harissa and “La Vie en Rose”. I’m the descendant not of this woman, but of the dude she probably slept with while they were both trying to arrest the same Nazis. [There’s evidence to suggest this is actually very true, but that’s a whole other blog post.]

Still, I don’t think I’ll be able to pass any of this on. Not through any bloodline, anyway. Whether I identify as, or honor, someone who can tell you that the Mediterranean in me isn’t just ancestral, but tangibly visceral, doesn’t much matter. There aren’t kids to share this with; only Internet strangers. All this will end with me; it won’t matter how hard I hold onto any of it.

I don’t know a lot about my family, but I know this story. I think it’s a good one. It’s also a sad one.

I also know, but have not yet revisited, about my dad’s mom’s joint in Naples. I could, if I wanted, revisit stops in Malta, Lebanon, and Tunisia, though that would take a bit more time and force me to reconnect with family I forgot to stay in touch with. Still, many of the living embodiments of those places in my family’s real-life history still breathe.

That’s how we lose our culture: not over several generations — trust me, I know enough “Italian-Americans” from Upstate New York who think they’re extras on Goodfellas, despite their fam hailing from Milan, and having come over in the late-1800s — but over the course of life, adapting to whoever’s most proximal to us and daring to “fit in” to a new world that would prefer if you were could just check in the drop-down “White”, “Black”, “Asian”, or “choose not to disclose”. I suppose that’s easier.

My Papa never taught my Mama Italian. My Mama never taught French to the kids. 99% of all things Magrheb got buried and silenced after 9/11.

Our culture is our story. We tell ourselves stories to give our behaviors context, meaning, and a sense of direction.

And yet, without knowledge of our past (or our pasta), all that compelling past won’t help propel us into the future. We need to know who we are to understand who we are capable of becoming. We gotta hold on to something; monoculture is as dull as the capitalism that encourages it.

I barely remember Niagara Falls unless I can jog my own memory, to say nothing of where we were before. I’m not even sure my Mama can still speak French; I just remember her taking it in community college for an easy A while she was in her late-30s.

I’m now 40. I try to hold onto whatever’s left of the kid who lived up there, including all that came before me long before I was a twinkle in either my mom’s or dad’s eyes. I try to remember and reclaim bits and pieces of the story before the whole story leaves this Earth forever.

The short net-net: I was born 40+ years ago in Niagara Falls, New York, to the daughter of a man born in Marseille, France, and the son of a woman born in Naples, Italy. I have great aunts and uncles born in Tunis, Beirut, Valletta, and Agrigento. I am a second-generation American, but let’s be honest: by now, I’m just an area American white man who should resign himself to enjoying things like neutral colors, British period dramas, and “authentic” “ethnic” cuisine.

Still, I mourn the loss of what was only sometimes given to me. I mourn the distance I put between what I used to implicitly know and what I now only remember or reclaim.

I remember back in 1993 when a half-dozen cousins about my age came over from the Old World — a big heaping pile of folks whose names I couldn’t recall, or even spell if I could recall them.

We sat down in my Papa’s basement, playing the old analog nickel slot, while the adults upstairs drank Amaretto and sounded either upset or elated (who knows?). They seemed awesome as all hell, I tried to converse with them.

Every breakthrough, every word, every interaction is gone now aside from all I can still recall: the few of them humming the Pink Panther Theme. Ah, that translates. That’s all I got left; I never even liked the Pink Panther.

That and this picture.

There I am, front and center. So, okay, I remember the wine.

See? You can imagine the wedding scene from the Godfather. Not the shady business shit or the subsequent violence — we weren’t them kinda folk — but the rest of it. The Che La Luna and all that. Shit was real. I can feel it, hear it, see it, and sometimes still touch it.

Memories are long; life is longer. I’m going to go downstairs and eat a Mamoul and a biscotti, dunk both in an orange blossom water-tinged coffee, and try to remember and honor the people who led me here. Maybe I’ll even order a pizza. My culture might be fading, but I’m just getting warmed up. If I can’t have kids; I’m going to enjoy this all to myself while I still can.

Epilogue

Super Bowl weekend, my sister and her bf rolled into town around 9 p.m., and she was hungry. I told her, “don’t worry, I gotcha.”

I whipped out a pot and a pan, put some water on, and busted out some spaghetti, some tomato puree, some butter beans, and a few other choice ingredients.

My boo mixed her a negroni, and I made the four of us some sauce right there in 45 minutes or less.

My sister looked at my partner and said, “this is such an Italian thing to do, cook dinner at all hours of the night. This is what we used to do.”

The salt, lemon, tomato, honey, starch, and oregano whooshed across my face. At that moment, I was warm and at home. And I smiled.

Fwiw, It was delicious, too. Everyone enjoyed it and there was plenty left over for the morning and the morning after that.

All is not yet lost; I hope I never lose it; and I can’t tell you how much I miss what’s already gone.

Find me on Instagram or LinkedIn, or you can become a Medium member.

Oh, and here’s that pasta sauce recipe, minus the beans: