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Monday morning, with Rochester by my side, I drove up the River Road from Stewart’s Crossing to Friar Lake. Oaks and maples lined the winding road up the hill to the original stone buildings, and they were beginning to turn the reds, oranges and golds of fall.
As I pulled into the parking lot in front of the original slate-roofed gatehouse, which now served as my office, I looked around, as I often did, and marveled that I had been able to nurture the conversion of a run-down collection of buildings into a modern facility with meeting rooms, a dormitory and a kitchen, as well as acres of walking trails peppered by some older as yet unused outbuildings.
I had been stunned when Eastern’s president offered me the job of converting, and then running the property, because I was a guy with an MA in English and little management experience as well as a convicted felon, still on parole.
He’d taken a big chance on me, and I was determined to prove I could do a good job. I’d worked my butt off during the renovation, and created a kick-ass series of programs. But every day I had to justify that faith by keeping the center going, continuing to engage faculty, alumni and students. It was a pressure I put on myself; though the president was a demanding boss, he’d never criticized my commitment or my work.
I settled down in my office, which had a big picture window looking out on the property. Rochester plopped on his side next to my desk, and as I looked up Professor Andrea del Presto’s information I heard him begin to snore gently.
I emailed her and was pleased that she responded quickly, agreeing to an appointment that afternoon to talk about a possible program at Friar Lake. I was still worried about the comment Joel Goldberg had made the day before, so I did some searching online for German survivors of the Holocaust. Perhaps there was a way to tie that into the program as well. The current administration had made a priority of denying admission to immigrants with criminal records, so there was definite connection to the prosecution of Nazi-era villains.
I found a website that listed nearly three dozen Germans and Poles on a list of those slated for possible prosecution for war crimes, including radio operators, medics and camp guards, as well as many listed as simply “participated in the murder of...” or “accessory to the murder of.”
It was chilling. But many were believed to have died before prosecution, and the youngest listed was 91. Did Joel Goldberg suspect that someone on that list was living in Stewart’s Crossing?
Or was his interest simply a manifestation of his schizophrenia? There was certainly a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment in the air around us, and it was possible that he’d internalized that and connected it to whatever he’d learned from his grandparents about the Holocaust.
After a while I couldn’t read anymore. One of the reasons I’d taken the job was that Rochester could come with me, and he loved the chance to romp around the property and through the adjacent woods in search of interesting smells and squirrels and field mice to chase. So I took him out for a long walk in the fresh air. We ended up sitting at a picnic table beneath a majestic maple, sharing the roast beef sandwich I’d prepared for myself for lunch.
After we finished eating I sought out Joey Capodilupo, the facility manager at Friar Lake. He had a golden retriever too, though his was white, barely out of puppyhood, and a real handful. He often brought Brody with him to Friar Lake, hoping that Rochester would keep him in line, but the opposite was true. My big goofy golden usually followed his white partner in crime into mischief. However, I was very comfortable leaving Rochester with Joey when I had to head down to campus.
“What are you working on these days?” Joey asked as he scratched Rochester behind the ears. “Anything interesting?”
I told him about the immigration program. “My grandfather came here after World War II,” he said. “He got a lot of blowback from other Italians who were worried that he’d been a Fascist, that he’d fought for Mussolini, all that stuff.”
“And was he? Did he?”
“Not that he’d ever tell me. He was just a kid then, anyway. It really killed him that it was other Italians that harassed him. He said he expected it from Americans—when he got here he could speak only a few words of English, he had a heavy accent, all he knew how to do was farm work. He expected his connazionali, his people, to accept him.”
I thought about what Joey had said as I drove down the hill from Friar Lake. Why would other Italians have shunned Joey’s grandfather? Was it a case of “close the door behind you?” Were they worried that newcomers would damage the foothold they’d established in the US?
The Eastern campus sprawled over a few dozen acres of hilltop in Leighville, a small town on a crest overlooking the Delaware River. When I’d first seen it as an incoming freshman, I’d been intimidated by the hundred-year-old stone buildings, the broad lawns where students played Frisbee or practiced with nunchucks. How could I ever fit in there?
It had to be what Joey’s grandfather, and other immigrants including those in my own family, had faced when they showed up on American shores. I had to learn a new language in order to fit in. Terms like empirical, post-modern and context. Sometimes when my professors spoke I’d lose the thread of meaning when I couldn’t immediately define hegemony or dichotomy.
Since then I’d mastered the language enough to become a professor myself. Now those stone buildings were warm and welcoming, holding memories of intellectually challenging seminars and undergraduate antics. It was an interesting metaphor for the immigrant experience and I made a note to include it in planning for the seminar.
I found Professor Del Presto’s office in the building where I’d taken my sociology and political science classes years before. She was younger than I’d expected, with long brown hair in a center part over a heart-shaped face. I introduced myself and told her what I’d already come up with in terms of programming.
She said she was eager to help me, because as a grad student she’d done some work with the continuing education department, and enjoyed the different viewpoints adult learners brought.
“One of my academic interests is in social media, and I’ve been compiling data from Twitter and Facebook posts about immigration and using it to make comparisons with earlier attitudes. Looking at hashtags like #immigration, #uslatino and #noamnesty tell me what people on social media are thinking.”
I remembered what Joey had told me about his grandfather’s experience. “How do you compare that to what people were saying in the past, before there was Twitter and Facebook?”
“People have been socializing and sharing information and ideas since man developed spoken language,” she said. “For my purposes I’ve been looking at trends in the mass media, particularly when I can find those ‘man-in-the-street’ reports and interviews. Colonial broadsides, yellow journalism and early iterations of scandal sheets all have given me insight into how people felt at different times about immigrants.”
“I’ve just been rereading Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, ‘The New Colossus,’ for the Jewish American Lit course I’m teaching,” I said. “It’s probably one of the most quotable works within that canon, and I remember reading it in elementary school when we studied immigration.”
“That’s an interesting piece, because it represents an ideal of immigration – Lady Liberty welcoming the huddled masses – that was unrealized then, and even now. Going back as far as the American Revolution, we experienced prejudices against new immigrants from England and Scotland. Americans couldn’t believe we’d embrace newcomers from the country we had just battled to leave behind. And then, during the time of the two world wars, people were very suspicious of German, and then Japanese, immigrants.”
“And Italian,” I said. I told her about Joey’s grandfather’s experience.
“One of the less appealing attributes of the American experience is the desire to shut the door on anyone coming in behind you.”
“And you’re finding that expressed today in social media?”
“What we think of as a fairly new phenomenon has its roots in the early computer networks of the 1970s,” she said. “As soon as the use of networked computers moved from purely military and government uses, people began using them to share information and ideas. Bulletin board systems, CompuServe, and AOL began to gain traction in the 1980s.”
“I was there,” I said. “I got my first computer, a Commodore 64, when I was sixteen, and I played around with bigger systems when I was an undergraduate here at Eastern in the late 1980s.”
“Then you know how much easier it is to say things when you’re shielded by the anonymity of an avatar or a screen name.”
I knew from experience the hubris that came from the assumption that what you were doing online couldn’t be tracked back to you. It was, after all, the reason I’d been bold enough to hack into Mary’s credit reports—I’d thought no one could track the actions back to me.
Wrong.
We talked for a few more minutes about how Professor Del Presto could shape a program, what kinds of materials she could provide and so on. Once again I was reminded of the excitement of learning something new, of living the life of the mind in an academic environment.
As I drove back to campus, I was at a four-way stop sign behind a pickup truck on high wheels with decal on the back window with some writing squeezed into the shape of North America. I leaned forward and read “Fuck off we are full.”
Wow. That was the same sentiment that had sent Lily's parents to Havana and prevented so many other Jews from immigrating to the US. What would Emma Lazarus make of our contemporary attitude toward that “wretched refuse?” Would she still idolize Lady Liberty, lifting her lamp beside the golden door? Would she tell the Old World to keep the huddled masses unless they had the skills necessary for an H-1 B visa or a half million dollars to pour into our tired economy?
