A Foreigner on Elizabeth Street
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A Foreigner on Elizabeth Street
In 1989 I was recruited by the head of m Dominican order to go to the Baltics to help with the re-establishing of the Dominican Order after 75 years of Soviet repression. The Dominicans began moving on the 1300s - presumably aboard Hanseatic merchant vessels - to the Baltic merchant sea ports and right into the inland Baltic river ports. So before the start of World War II there were several hundred Dominicans in a dozen city priories. When the Soviet tanks finally left in the mid-1980s there were no more than six Dominicans in all the Baltics. It was to help with this situation that I and a few others were recruited. to help. They wanted me to work in Tallinn, in Estonia, in effect as a chaplain among the diplomatic offices and with inter-religious groups. With my many years in Berkeley it did not sound all that challenging, but I knew that I really knew next to nothing about the Baltics. It did not take long to find out that the needs in non-religious Tallinn were few and already were being well address, whereas Lithuania was a large Catholic country with a Soviet-devastated church and a real need for clergy. So, still not knowing what it would involve, I made plans to move from California to Vilnius. Our church there was a badly damaged, 350-year-old national monument that had been used as a warehouse, and a large attached priory much of which was wrecked. One wing was being use,d but had only primitive running water - cold. and not drinkable.
Before I moved to Vilnius I ordered a new computer. When it came I moved it into my very severe and still battered room in our 350 year old monastery. It's previous life as a Soviet warehouse took its toll. But I went to work making it comfortable. There was an old iron bed, a small desk, and a chair. The first thing, of course, was to open the Dell computer. It went onto the desk. The printer fit nicely two-foot-deep window-sill. And the Dell's packing crate, turned upside down and covered with a linen cloth I had scrounged up somewhere, gave the impression of a sort of coffee table in the middle of the room. A similar effort turned the printer's box, on end, into a little table for the reading lamp.
But I also needed a regular connection to my own world. So a Sony transistor radio I found in in a store around the corner connected me to the BBC and to Vilnius’s classical music station. BBC's prime Baltic offering was a soap opera a la Gertrude Crumlift Sturdley’s “Lives and Loves of Linda Lovely”. Linda in this BBC variation recounted the lives and loves of Jam Shed, a randy doctor from Pakistan in a London hospital. And as the complexities of his philandering expanded I began to suspect - correctly, it turned out - that BBC had its new Sister George in the making. That gave me all I needed for a familiar home base from which I could survive the history of KGB terror I was there to explore. That combo of culture and fantasies along with the kind reception I received from the Dominican community was going to be of such help in making it possible to help me handle the visual horrors I was soon to stumble into unprepared. For right across the square was the old Czarist building that the KGB starting using as its headquarters right after the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. For fifty years it was put to the dedicated work of arresting, interrogating, sentencing, executing, and deporting mostly young opponents of the regime, most often members of the organized underground. What I saw were the boxes of photos that were all archived there. Those photos, unboxed and spread out one by one and side by side, proved to be very hard to cope with. I had to fit into their world. I could not fit them into mine and the only way I could understand their’s was to allow their faces and persons to enter not only into my mind but into my memory, the way that really interesting ideas or favorite music that I play over and again on my hi-fi. It worked, they are still there. But their presence has changed my life.
For me real changes in where I live, where I work, and the need to adapt to them end up being the spurs to real change. I can say I seek them but really I don't. Like my entrance into the KGB building I blunder into them. In some unwritten sense I probably know that in order to stay alive I have to keep moving and for some reason that means moving into the unknown. Here I want to describe an earlier change into another very demanding context. I do it not to paint pictures of interesting but difficult work. I do it to portray how my sense of reality is dependent on the contexts and their demands in which I work and live. I might pretend to control them, but it is more of a political adapting. I think of 19th century lithographs of English gentry riding in elegance through their country estates. They are intended to show all that the masters own and control. In fact it is the land and its demands that owns and controls them, its servants-for life, as stripped of choices as their indentured servants.
Editing a high-visibility, professional quarterly in a competitive and changing field, and doing it in New York where everyone is convinced they could do it better than you, was tough. It was also very exciting. It required that I leave the comfortably lower demands of the intellectual life on San Francisco Bay, where reality and the moment's revolution - like everyone else - goes away for the weekend, for New York’s lower East Side where nothing and no one ever stops. Talk about contexts changing your life.
Back in 1987 or 1988 I think it was by which time I was over fifty Peter Steinfels was invited by the New York Times to leave his post as editor of Commonweal and become the Times’s religious writer. That left Commonweal without an editor. So Margaret O’Brien Steinfels a longtime writer on Catholic social and cultural issues was named the new editor of Commonweal. Peggy Steinfels was then the editor of Church Magazine, a new and praised quarterly for professionals in church work. And out of nowhere I received a call from Phil Murnion, the publisher of Church, asking me to consider becoming the editor of Church. I had written for it, he knew of my work on family demographics for the U. S. bishops. And the clergy salary I would receive was about one-third of what Peggy had received. My New Jersey roots had prepared me well for the realities of Catholic life in New York City.
For me it was a job and the offer was welcome. I did not like the work I was doing. I really wanted out. I had fantasied about working in New York as an editor, I had written op-ed pieces for New York Newsday and some well-received articles for Commonweal and, locally, for the San Jose Mercury News. I had published three or four books by then and always edited my own texts. So the offer appeared to me as a continuation of my writing and editing but in a classier locale. In other words I didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was getting into. I learned.
I already knew about Church Magazine, by then about five or six years old. It began as an off-shoot of The Parish Project, a major, well-viewed and imaginative study of the effects of the Vatican Council in American parishes. It was initiated at Notre Dame in the 1970s by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops as a way to give a national base for all the people implementing the reforms that came from the council. That I understood, I had been involved in them. It had its roots and backers in the New York and Chicago urban and progressive wing of the church which was rich, powerful and had real clout. And it had it opponents, like Cardinal Law of Boston, who apparently found that the notion of dialogue undermined what they saw as the necessarily normative role of the hierarchy. For me as a Californian it was all a rather a distant and foreign world. It was only after I got there that I heard of the Parish Project.
Many of the eastern bishops were all for it, knew and liked Phil Murnion, a well known and classy New York priest with a solid background in sociology and research – he had earned his PhD at Columbia – so they asked him to run the new center. The study had come up with five characteristic of ‘good parishes’: things like good liturgies and intelligent preaching; strong and active parish communities; real support for lay and family life; and a real sense of parish ownership on the part of the people. Since the study had become a favorite project of the country’s leading bishops they decided to turn it into an on-going membership organization for interested dioceses. Phil was named to head it. Cardinal Cooke of New York was all for it. , Nearly all the major archdioceses and many dioceses became supporting members. And Cooke offered this new National Pastoral Life Center as it was called the use of an unused but very historic convent on Elizabeth Street in New York’s Lower East Side. It was just a block from the Bowery. By then the Bowery folks had long since shifted from alcohol to drugs.
Seventy-five years earlier there had been a parish there, the religious center for the many thousands of Sicilian immigrants pouring into the city. In effect their religious home base. But like Little Italy itself there was not that much left of it. The former school, on the corner of Bleeker and Elizabeth – the same Bleeker as in Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Saint of Bleeker Street – had long since been turned into a day-time drop-in shelter for men managing to make it on the streets. According to local legend it had been Martin Scorsese’s parish and school. But at night it was now a center of the drug trade. I guess it was crack. But whatever it was it came in little inch-long, sawed and clear sections of emptied ball-point pens. The little blue stoppers used to seal the tops of the pens now keep the dope tightly inside. Each morning when I showed up for work there were enough of those blue end-caps on the 'stoop' – it was New York - from the nights’ business that coming up to the door seemed like walking on ball bearings. So my first impression of my new world – crunch-crunch-crunch to get to the door – left me wondering what in hell I had gotten into. In case I needed a yardstick to measure the changes, I commuted by train into the city for the first few months from the family house I was minding on five wooded acres outside Morristown. There I felt at home. On the Bowery I was an outsider.
I sort of knew that local Catholic life had its own rules. And I knew that in New York these rules are tough. Equally important they didn’t envisage, even know much about, people like me. The differences are so great that describing them is not difficult. But the describing comes from an outsider. And the reason I go into it here is personal, not social or religious. The phrase “Native Realm” that Milosz used for his search for self-definition search is reportedly taken from Hegel – ‘Self-reflection is the native realm of intellect.’ I have found the idea a helpful a way to focus my writing, especially after realizing that the ‘self’ is a function of the contexts in which I have lived.
When I first visited our office on Elizabeth Street I was taken aback to realize that so much of the area was very familiar to me. Just a block away was Katz’s Delicatessen. What was so odd was that the city I frequented as a kid but as an outsider was now becoming familiar. But, despite supposedly living and working there I was really more of a tourist returning to my past. My brother like his classmates at NYU-Bellevue had become frequent visitors during the years of their medical education, and he introduced me to it. We had often came in for Italian pastries at a place farther down in Little Italy, though once there I came to prefer the more modest, neighborhood-oriented Roma Café jut a block away. And when I was younger, on sabbatical for a year and living with him in the country while I wrote my book on the Holy Land, we would occasionally head into Caruso’s on Mott Street for the best fresh produce in New York. I am convinced beyond whatever to the contrary that the cart of oranges overturned in the assassination attempt on Marlon Brando in the Godfather and sent rolling down Mott Street was modeled directly on Caruso’s.
As a kid in our little town outside New York I grew up with those summer patronal festas – San Antonio de Padua, Our Lady of Monte Carmelo - a mix of Sicilian and Calabrese pieties. And I was not an outsider to them and their piety. They were the pieties of grandparents of my friends and classmates, and their piety was genuine and moving. In retrospect I think that it was my real tie with believable Catholic religion. And they themselves were believable. I was certainly well prepared for the peasant piety in Lithuania. And in our town there was no religious party line. That was only in New York. Our numbers were nothing to compare with the crowds and life on Bleeker, Elizabeth, and Mulberry Streets but I knew that the old men and women who kept the festas going were for real. How and why I knew it I don't know. These old people were hard working, they had been disdained because of their poverty, their pieties and their customs mocked. But somehow I knew that they were honorable and merited respect.
The day I arrived, as I was looking to move in, Peggy Steinfels was in the process of moving out. She had one of the tiny convent rooms as her office. Heading out to Commonweal’s digs was not a long move. I think it may be typical of reformers and reform movements – and that is what I certainly was – that thinking right trumps plebian things like getting the promised articles in from the slow-poke writers; getting them proof read and over to the lithographers; proofing the proofs without missing any – any – slip-ups; and getting the copies to all the subscribers on time - anyone with a brain in his head and the ability to show up for work could do all that. Well, t’weren’t so. Which I learned during my first week on the job. We were having a staff meeting on fulfillment. There were some problems with fulfillment. It fell under my responsibility as editor. I had never heard of the word, let alone what it meant.
There was another daily reminder that I was an outsider to the Catholic world of New York. New York area is a city of bridges. You see them everywhere. In New York they make much of a persons connections. There may be no image of that importance than the abundance of bridges tying a great mass of physically separated areas to one another. There are bridges connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn, bridges from Manhattan to to the Bronx and to Queens, bridges from Brooklyn to Staten Island, Staten Island to New Jersey. And that doesn’t count the ones across ship channels, swampy areas and the many farther out expanding the connecting net to include hundreds of square miles. There is even on called the Triboro which seemingly connects three of the city’s five boros, though how and where apparently isn’t worth the naming. To an extent I have not experienced out here that consciously constructed unity carries over into the different religious, national, and ethnic groups in the city – and I use the word group only because I can’t think of a better one.
Because I was an outsider I was surprised by the extent of the cohesiveness that marked the people I worked with. People in Berkeley where I lived hadn’t any idea who lived next door to them, and didn’t care. Cohesiveness, and a cohesiveness strong enough that group labels did not seem fake, seemed to simply exist. People who had no personal ties of any kind were still connected. There are bases of similar experiences in the run of very important family events, religious holidays throughout the year, in the baptisms of kids, marriages, the deaths and funerals of relatives, and the large number of unwritten expectations falling on co-workers governing their reactions to situations involving any of them. It was that world I walked into every day I walked from the subway to my work in Elizabeth Street. As one of my outsider in-laws put, ‘You Catholics have more have-to’s and got-to’s than…”and I forget the comparative marker. I agreed with him, knowing that I was an outsider to the live os the people he was needling, and an an outsider to most to the lives of tha large majority of people I worked with. And not only an outsider, a foreigner. The contexts of their lives felt foreign to me. I could not look at their lives with eyes like theirs.
The reforms of Vatican II s were at the heart of our work had its supporters, including me. But how that support took shape was as different from what I knew in Berkeley, as different as a California beach town is from the Bronx. Still, that party line sense and the tight personal connections included clergy I had come to know well. They were real insiders in this Catholic organization where I was clearly an outsider. And we all knew it. No no one expected their common responses from me any more than they would have from a recent immigrant from Russia.
The people I worked with on Elizabeth Street were not only examples of the importance of these connections, their connections were clearly evident and very important to them. This was a Catholic organization, but it was also a particular kind of Catholic group. People from Catholic families, educated in parish schools, graduates of Catholic colleges, married into other Catholic families. Perhaps most important, they were city Catholics – New York, Chicago, Boston – where people’s religious identification was a reality that showed publicly.
JThey were also mostly all Irish. I had grown up in small-town America and as a small-town American. One of the first things I learned when I went to Yale was that I wasn't an American, I was an Irish Catholic. It didn't fit. And I was given a clear picture of how much I did not fit in by the chance offer of a ticket to a parade. A year or so after starting my work someone in the office said that there were a few tickets to the St. Patrick's Day Parade. I had never seen a St. Patrick's Day Parade anywhere, was not interested ion seeing one now. but one of the people in the office told me that it was a ticket to the front steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral, and it would be quite a show. It sounded intriguing, especially since I had no idea what the 'show' was about. Intriguing enough that I was willing to wear the dark suit and Roman collar which I avoided religiously ion the city, especially on the Subway.
When I got there and joined the crowd on the steps I noticed that Cardinal O'Connor looked different, even funny. Then I realized, to my astonishment actually, what he was wearing make-up. He was made-up and dressed for the cameras. And then as people like Rudy Giuliani, hands all a-wave, and Mayor Ed Koch dressed in his Irish, cable-knit, fisherman's sweater came along, they all walked over to the Cardinal for the New York politicians, smiling hand shake, waves to the crowd, and what seemed to me like a timed bit before the cameras, I realized that I was in the middle of a really big, public show that was all about New York power politics, having clout, and being Irish. And the people I worked with were all part of it, and loved it. And it went beyond these folks. The priory near Sloan-Kettering where I was living had a large hall associated with the parish school that was being used by the local firemen for their own St. Patrick's Day party. Talk about a blast. Music, fiddles, foot-stomping dancing, going on for hours. Obviously they were all having a really good time. I had never seen anything like this outside of the movies, and no movie I every saw caught the sound and excitement of this party. But that is my point here. I had never seen, or heard, anything like this. It was a very real, life-filled part of what I assume was Irish Catholic life in New York. And for me it was like a different country. I had grown up almost in the shadow of this city and yet it was all new. The Italian street festas, yes. But not this. It was totally different from my own experience.
My family was clearly Catholic. But there were no Catholic schools or education, no really overt Catholic identification, no personal or family connection to Catholic clergy or institutions, and no neighborhoods or civic or political groups where religion played a role. Most important, no sense that these closed-group characteristics which I saw to be so real were more than just Archie Bunker humor, or stories of how things in immigrant communities a hundred years ago. Ironically, my family was very involved in local and New York businesses and, in New Jersey,, elective politics and government. But none of it involved a door to this life in New York.
So I arrived on Elizabeth Street as an outsider to their world of connections and all the urban, Catholic-clergy givens that counted for so much. I was always an outsider to that world. But by then I was content to be on the outside. Because in the thirty or so years I spent wandering in and out of Berkeley, climbing up the trails at the tops of the Carson and Echo passes, and the many solo skiing and fishing trips I so enjoyed, I guess I had become a Californian, a Westerner. And that’s not hard. It’s easier to become a Californian than it is to get into the different clubs in New York where I spent time. I had the sense that there were more immigration check points between Elizabeth Street and my house in New Jersey than fromTijuana to San Francisco.
I actually liked it there. I shared many of the experiences that were at the heart of their life. It was exciting. But it was different for me because what was their life was only a sub-text in mine. And what was at the heart of my life was about as interesting to them as a national election in Costa Rica. It’s easy to share ideas. They can be contextless. But they are also like the spume above the waves rolling into the beaches that really mark life’s boundaries. Interests and even some accent similarities aside, my life there made clear that I was not a part of that urban world. I was definitely a foreigner to the world of Elizabeth Street. And on reflection now I can see that I was not an insider anywhere.
