Peter Franzese

Nettie: Tales of a Brooklyn Nana Peter Franzese

In September of 1989, Peter M. Franzese chose to write the life story of his Brooklyn Nana, Nettie Boniface, for a sixth grade English class assignment. While he sat with a spiral notebook and pen in hand over the course of a month, Nana reflected on and shared the events that shaped the woman she was. Born at the onset of World War I, she told him the stories of her life during both world wars and the Great Depression, leading right up to the end of the 1980s. Over a pot of tomato sauce simmering on the stove, Nana, a Brooklyn born daughter of Italian immigrants, shared the joys and sorrows of her life and her Italian American family during the twentieth century in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. Fifteen years later, through vivid storytelling of his own, Peter M. Franzese brings us for a visit to the kitchen of his Nana's Brooklyn railroad flat, where the aromas of the delectable meals that wafted into her hallway were as captivating as the tales she told.