Mr. Cucuzza

Mr. Cucuzza, an Italian night watchman and Joey Cucuzza’s father, is assigned to live downstairs from the Roth family under the Good Neighbor Project. First introduced through his offer of a spare pistol, he later intervenes when violence erupts inside the Roths’ home and helps protect both households. His practical neighborliness cuts across the political and religious divisions that shape the families’ lives, without making those divisions disappear.

Identity and Arrival

The Cucuzzas’ move is part of a government-directed effort to place non-Jewish families in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. The family—Mr. Cucuzza, his wife, their son Joey, and an elderly grandmother—comes from a cold-water flat in the First Ward. The move is not simply a private choice: the Good Neighbor Project offers a rent discount, paid by the Department of the Interior, as an inducement to families assigned new homes. Its stated purpose is to increase the neighborhood’s Americanness; Jewish residents, including the Roth family, suspect that the policy is also meant to weaken their communal solidarity and electoral influence.

Herman Roth already knows the newcomers from his years canvassing the First Ward to collect insurance premiums, many from Italian customers. On the morning after Mr. Cucuzza has brought the family’s possessions to their new home, Herman visits the downstairs flat. He hopes the grandmother will recognize him as the insurance agent who sold her husband the policy that helped pay for his burial. This small act of recognition links the new tenants to relationships Herman had established through work, rather than leaving them as strangers produced by a government plan.

Mr. Cucuzza works nights as a watchman. On the evening he visits the Roths with Joey, his uniform and equipment make a powerful impression on Philip Roth: keys, handcuffs, a watchman’s clock, a flashlight, and a pistol are gathered around his belt. Joey brings a cake from his mother for Bess Roth. His father brings something more consequential: a spare pistol, offered to Herman in case the family needs protection. The contrast between the cake and the weapon gives the visit its peculiar mixture of ordinary hospitality and apprehension.

The Offer of Protection

Herman initially declines the pistol, explaining that he does not know how to shoot. Mr. Cucuzza answers by demonstrating the basic actions of aiming and firing, then asks how Herman would protect his family if danger came around. His manner is direct and practical, not political. The offer suggests that he sees the threat as real enough to prepare for, even though he does not presume to decide what the Roths should do.

That concern becomes more urgent after Walter Winchell’s assassination. Herman returns home rather than remain at work, and the family gathers by the radio, waiting for news. Mr. Cucuzza and Joey come up the back stairs to visit, but pause outside the door until Herman confirms who is there. In a moment when the Roths are listening for information about events beyond their home, the neighboring family’s presence makes security immediate and personal. Mr. Cucuzza has already offered the means of defense; the visit also establishes a human connection across the threshold.

Intervention in the Roths’ Home

Later, when a violent confrontation between Herman and Alvin Roth brings danger into the apartment, Mr. Cucuzza rushes in from his own flat, dressed in a nightshirt and cap and carrying his pistol. He does not yet know who is fighting. Sandy Roth calls out that the man is Alvin, but Mr. Cucuzza acts before he can sort out the identities: he restrains Herman’s assailant while keeping the pistol trained on him. The intervention stops the immediate danger. It also reveals the watchman’s governing habit—respond first to a threat, then establish exactly what has happened.

His role does not end with that interruption. As the family leaves its damaged apartment to shelter in the Cucuzzas’ old flat, Mr. Cucuzza offers the weapon again, and this time Herman accepts it. Despite his own injuries, Herman studies the pistol while Bess keeps close to her sons. Mr. Cucuzza moves through the darkened flat, checking the windows and looking for signs of a threat. His professional vigilance, previously visible in the equipment of his uniform, becomes a form of shared protection for the Roth family.

The households’ proximity now matters in a way that the government’s relocation scheme could not prescribe. The Roths depend on their new neighbors for shelter and watchfulness; Mr. Cucuzza takes responsibility for their safety without requiring them to belong to his family or community. His protection is concrete and immediate, offered through a door opened at a moment of fear.

The Shootout and Narrative Significance

Mr. Cucuzza later ventures out as a scout toward the cordoned-off area near Chancellor Avenue. He returns with information that changes the family’s understanding of the night: the gun battle was between the city police and the Jewish police of Newark, not between police and anti-Semites. Three Jewish men were killed, but the fighting was connected to a conflict over policing and the new mayor’s effort to remove dangerous figures from the streets; it was not the pogrom the frightened residents had feared. His willingness to go out and find out what happened provides the family with facts amid rumor and alarm.

The distinction between the absence of a pogrom and the presence of terror remains central. Mr. Cucuzza’s report does not restore ordinary life. The episode has left the Roth family frightened enough that Herman phones Shepsie Tirschwell in Winnipeg to acknowledge how difficult it has become for Jews to live normally in the city. Mr. Cucuzza is not responsible for the political crisis, and his practical care cannot resolve it. Yet his actions offer a counterpoint to the suspicion surrounding the Good Neighbor Project: a family moved by government order can still become a neighbor in the fullest sense. Through the child narrator’s attention to Mr. Cucuzza’s pistol, his decisive intervention, and his later scouting, he emerges as a figure of unsentimental courage whose loyalties are expressed through protection rather than political argument.