"Poor You!"
Including gabagool
I finished bingeing the Sopranos last night. All six seasons. It might have been the third time for me.
I know everyone has two questions. The first is, what the hell is gabagool? It’s a cold cut, properly known as capicola. Apparently gabagool is New Jersey/Italian slang. I don’t think I’ve ever had any. My Italian cold cut of choice is prosciutto.
The other burning question is what is sfogliatelle? It looks pretty good, though my dieting precludes pastry in morning.
Both of these things hold their own, but they don’t beat pastrami or a good cheese danish.
The familiarity of the show for me is in the geography. I’m from North Jersey and people say we have an accent. (Actually it’s everybody else who talks funny.) I spent years driving around the area in a different life, especially the highway to NYC on the Pulaski Skyway. I used to call it the Pulaski Smellway. For a while I lived in Newark and then Belleville (one of its suburbs) in the Anthony Imperiale years. On the other hand, even though I grew up in northern New Jersey with Italians, I never knew anybody like the characters in the show.
These characters are mostly despicable people. What is their attraction? Perhaps because the acting and writing are so good, the characters strike a convincing blend of good and evil. A few of the women are not so bad, especially the psychiatrist, Tony’s wife, and his daughter. The others all lie to each other and steal from each other. Almost nobody who comes into contact with the ‘Family’ escapes unscathed. If they smell money on you, you’re screwed.
The Russian gangsters and molls in the show have the virtue of honesty. So too the Jewish gangsters. You always know where you stand with them. I keep thinking of the plot hole about the Russian marked for execution who escapes from Paulie and Christopher in the snows of the Pine Barrens in South Jersey. He and his mates should have been itching for revenge, but they disappear from the story. I raised this question in a Facebook group devoted to the show and got driven out like a heretic.
The quote in the title of this post recurs throughout the series, the first time from Tony’s spooky, conniving mother Livia, played by Nancy Marchand in an epic performance. It really embodies the core of the series, a self-pitying contempt for the cares of others on the part of assorted characters.
I don’t get Tony’s appeal to women. Christopher makes more sense. Tony seems to be able to seduce just about any women he fancies. Why? He reminds me of me, before I lost 50 pounds. Also, I still have hair.
My favorite word from the show is “googootz,” which Tony applies to his good-for-nothing idiot son. It’s more Italian slang, this one for zucchini.
My other recent TV diversion via Amazon was a documentary about the Soviet resistance to the German invasion in World War II. Two seasons, about twenty episodes. A fair amount of obvious reenactment and animated sequences, but also plenty of newsreel/documentary footage too. The story is amazing and fascinating, the narration not much polluted by Russian propaganda.
My abiding impression: the U.S. and FDR, through some combination of lassitude, political constraints, and poor preparation, sat back while for three years (1941-1944) the Nazis kicked hell out of Russia and murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, etc. The motivation of the U.S., to favor Germany and the USSR debilitating each other while Jews were massacred, has been well-documented.
D-Day wasn’t until 1944 in June, by which time the Soviets had turned the tide and threatened to engulf Europe. Greatest generation, my ass. It doesn’t justify what Putin has been up to in Ukraine, but it does explain it to some extent.
I hadn’t realize how weaselly the “neutral” Swedes were, shipping iron ore to Hitler and harrassing the Russian navy. Finland was even worse. I suppose there wasn’t much else they could have done. They could have fought more like Norway and gotten pummeled for their trouble. Finland had been attacked by the Soviets.
Dad brought home a Russian hat with a red star on it and an automatic pistol with a working firing pin but no magazine. The hat has long since been lost. I held onto the pistol but eventually threw it away, out of fear of being caught with it during my lawless years.
A fellow New Jersey born leftie. Cool. I knew there was a hidden reason I've been reading you since the golden days of the blogosphere. My folks hail from around Newark. And you and I both moved to the South(???). I remember all the Italian slang from when I was a kid, as my father was full eye-talian. Keep kickin', Max, ya old Yippie.
Finland was … complicated. The alliance with Nazi Germany was real enough for Jewish Finnish officers to be awarded the Iron Cross by the Nazis. (They all rejected it.) But the Finns turned on the Nazis as soon as it was safe. Their president had personally assured the Nazis that the alliance would be maintained. But the assurance was only personal, and the president duly resigned at the proper time.