Before I met the lady who would change into my wife, I hadn’t been to synagogue for a few years—since my bar mitzvah, probably. After I met her and commenced getting considering getting married, I sat within the synagogue again, watching the rabbi read from the scroll, the assorted men of their prayer shawls, after which some time later all of the high ceremony of the Yom Kippur liturgy. The very first thing that got here to my mind, before beginning to become familiar with the prayerbook, was how you could possibly stage a series of Mafia hits intercut with the assorted confessional sections of the Yom Kippur service, similar to the climactic sequence of “The Godfather.”
In Francis Ford Coppola’s famous film adaptation of the novel by the identical name by one other somewhat lapsed Catholic, Mario Puzo, the protagonist’s renunciation of evil at a baptismal service is famously intercut with the execution of all his enemies. Mario Puzo (as interpreted by Francis Ford Coppola) was a far more immediate source of reference for understanding the synagogue service than anything I had heard in Jewish public school or my very own bar mitzvah, which had been held at my grandfather’s synagogue in Israel 20 years before. Mario Puzo and his innate skepticism were what accompanied me into the synagogue. I needed to get past Mario to listen to the Hebrew within the prayerbook and find something alive behind the rigmarole.
When Mario Puzo visited Sicily to research The Sicilian, perhaps he saw a world where people might still pray. Minor characters, a minimum of.
In Puzo’s novel The Sicilian, there’s one transient paragraph that refers to prayer. It’s an assassin, a minor character, who stops by the road on his solution to a dangerous meeting:
It was a stupendous morning; the fields alongside the road were carpeted with flowers. He was early for his appointment so he stopped by certainly one of the roadside shrines for a cigarette after which knelt in front of the padlocked box that held the statue of Saint Rosalie. His prayer was easy and practical, a plea to the Saint to guard him from his enemies. On the approaching Sunday he would confess his sins to Father Benjamino and take Communion.
What struck me reading this paragraph was that it was the one mention I could remember in any of Puzo’s books of a sincere prayer. Michael’s American wife Kay goes to Mass at the tip of the novel and of the movie to light a candle for his immortal soul, but that’s ritual, not an off-the-cuff, almost intimate conversation of the type you see here. His novels include quite a lot of corrupt clergymen; there’s after all Michael’s insincere renunciation of quite a lot of sins as he serves as godfather to his sister Connie’s baby before assassinating her husband within the movie; and there’s his (largely innocent) brother Fredo’s recitation of a Hail Mary as a charm to catch a fish just before being shot in his boat on Michael’s orders. But there is no such thing as a every day prayer.
In The Sicilian, this assassin, in tune together with his landscape, prays quite naturally and sincerely, and expects to be cleansed of his sin when he confesses the next Sunday. This may very well be a scene out of Shakespeare. It’s the only acknowledgment of the prevailing belief of their community that’s the backdrop to Puzo and Coppola’s joint exploitation of that ritual to suggest that each one of American life is corrupt.
I don’t mean to say they’re necessarily mistaken of their observations about American life and business practices. Still, I remain struck that Puzo and Coppola were the primary to depict this complete sphere of Italian-American life on celluloid and that Coppola expressed his ambition to stand up on screen what Italian-American life was actually like, but this short paragraph of Puzo’s The Sicilian is the one acknowledgment of real spiritual life in all his pages. And it takes place in Sicily, not Brooklyn or the family’s long-sought-after promised land, Long Island.
Some 33 years after G.K. Chesterton finished his sequence of Father Brown mystery stories depicting a Catholic priest loosely based on the priest in Bradford who oversaw Chesterton’s conversion to Catholicism in 1922 (the yr Puzo’s idol, one other lapsed Catholic, James Joyce, published Ulysses), Mario Puzo seemed unable to assume a world he knew directly where people still addressed the Almighty for any reason but empty ritual. When he visited Sicily to research The Sicilian, perhaps he saw a world where people might still pray. Minor characters, a minimum of.
Perhaps Puzo feared if Don Corleone or his son Michael uttered an honest prayer they might not be considered American, or an everyman.
Puzo and Coppola shouldn’t be taken as bucking the trend on this. When Steven Spielberg first attempted to depict a non secular urge, he made “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” not a Jewish movie. But such things will not be inconceivable. Harry Kemelman published twelve Rabbi Small novels from 1964 to 1996, the primary of which, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, was considered an enormous bestseller, which is kind of an achievement for a non secular mystery novel to perform.
That book was made right into a TV movie by NBC in 1976, followed by a TV series using the rest of the books in 1977. Kemelman didn’t in any way strike the identical chord in his explorations of Conservative Judaism that Puzo did in his depiction of Italian-American Catholicism. I only draw the comparison to notice there was an audience for a criminal offense novel that accepted faith as an element of on a regular basis life in 1964 in the US, just as there had been such an audience for Chesterton in the UK until 1936.
Small’s first attempt at a mild depiction of small-town Jewish life was in truth a straight novel, The Constructing of the Temple, which he couldn’t get published. It was only when the Crown Publishers editor Arthur Fields, who knew Kemmelman’s short mystery stories, suggested he graft a detective into his book in regards to the Jews that the rabbi detective and his first murder to unravel were born. And so Rabbi Small emerged, quite like Father Brown, out of a business genre as much as commentary of non secular life. But Kemmelman was not attempting to say all American life was corrupt, and Puzo was.
Somewhere in Mario Puzo’s heart, a minimum of when he looked around him back within the old country, there remained a suspicion that somebody, even a killer, might trust anyone up there was listening.
It’s, after all, much, much easier to depict corrupt friars like Molière’s Tartuffe than to seek out a solution to dramatize an honest clergyman, though novelists like J.F. Powers, Alice McDermott, John Gregory Dunne and others have tried. Most individuals don’t watch “Romeo and Juliet” for the depiction of the quite bumbling priest, Friar Laurence, who marries them.
At the identical time, it’s value noting that while he’s most famous for his depiction of that baptism ritual as being corrupted, Puzo could also depict such a unique character—on the very least a killer who prays, just like the killers in Shakespeare—and that a minimum of outside of America, for him the world had not modified.
What he desired to say was that America was corrupt, and other people were willing to listen to that in 1969 when his novel got here in and out 1972 and 1974 when the flicks were made. Puzo was willing to make his everyman Italian. Arthur Miller’s comparable everyman in 1949 had been Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” an everyman you wouldn’t suspect in any word or motion was a Jew. Perhaps Puzo feared if Don Corleone or his son Michael uttered an honest prayer they might not be considered American, or an everyman. Michael himself tells Kay within the novel, but not the film, that he would love their children raised Episcopalian, like her, to be “more American.” So to him a minimum of, if to not Puzo, there’s something un-American about being a Catholic. But he let his killer pray in The Sicilian.
Somewhere in Mario Puzo’s heart, a minimum of when he looked around him back within the old country, there remained a suspicion that somebody, even a killer, might trust anyone up there was listening.