Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  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?

  4 – Ethnic Enclaves

  The course I’d mentioned to Professor Del Presto that I was teaching was one on Jewish-American Literature. In addition to my administrative work, I often picked up a class in the English department as a way to keep my finger on the pulse of the college, and so I could continue to experience those moments of transitory academic delight like the one I’d shared in the sociology professor’s office.

  In the past I’d taught freshman comp, technical writing and mystery fiction. Lucas Roosevelt, the chair of the English department, had been very good to me when I returned to Bucks County from prison, giving me my first paid job as an adjunct, so I owed him a bunch of favors. He had called me in the late spring to ask me if I could teach the Jewish-American literature course that fall. It hadn’t been offered in a while because there was no one on the full-time faculty interested in teaching it, and he was worried that it would fall out of the catalogue if too much time passed.

  I’d taken the course myself as an Eastern undergraduate, so I agreed. I’d been worrying that all the reading and preparation for discussion would be difficult to carry out while running Friar Lake as my full-time job, but so far I’d been enjoying it. That night, as Lili and I relaxed on the couch after dinner, I reviewed my notes on the materials I’d given the students to read in advance of our second meeting the next day.

  I’d pulled a couple of excerpts from Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story that epitomized the desire of immigrants to succeed in the New World. I was surprised to note that I’d selected a section in which David distinguishes himself as a scholar of the Talmud while still in Russia, and how that mental rigor presaged his success in business later in life.

  “Do you think I should join Rabbi Goldberg’s Talmud study group?” I asked Lili. I explained what I’d read in the Cahan excerpt.

  “Do you need more mental rigor in your life?” she asked. “Or will studying Talmud make you more successful, like David Levinsky?”

  “I think seeing so much death around me and Rochester has made me more conscious of my spiritual side,” I said. “And you living with you has reminded me of how much we both remember of those Bible stories we’d learned as kids.”

  “If you’re interested, then follow up. It’s not like a gym membership—you won’t be locked in for a year.”

  I said I’d consider it and went back to my reading. Given my concerns with what Joel Goldberg had been worried about, I was surprised that so much of the material I’d selected for the course was connected to what he’d been worrying about. But then, so much of the early works of Jewish American literature had been about those very issues.

  The other section I’d chosen from the Cahan novel was about Levinsky’s ability to exploit his workers and steal from his competition. I wanted the students to see the darker side of the immigrant experience as well—the way that a former Talmudic scholar could go against his principles in a desperate desire to succeed, even if it left him with “a brooding sense of emptiness and insignificance.”

  That connected to the prejudice that Joey’s grandfather had experienced, that I was sure many immigrants confronted. Sometimes their countrymen were the first to exploit their naiveté and desperation.

  All four of my grandparents had come to the United States from Russia soon after the turn of the century. My mother’s family had landed in Trenton, and they’d lived in a small neighborhood called Jewtown near the river, a warren of narrow streets and alleys and buildings jammed together. Yiddish was the lingua franca, and it wasn’t until urban renewal in the sixties destroyed the area that the Jews had been forced to move out and integrate with the rest of the city.

  My grandparents had been moderately successful. My mother’s father had his own business delivering baked goods to stores and restaurants, and my father had grown up on a family farm in Connecticut, where they had taken in summer boarders who wanted to escape the city heat.

  Had they been forced to make the kind of difficult decisions David Levinsky had in order to achieve that success? I was sure of that. They had struggled to put their children through college and establish them in professional careers. They had kept up their religious traditions, from Passover Seders to bar mitzvahs where their sons proclaimed their connection to the generations that had come before them.

  Eventually I went back to the course materials, and spent some time reviewing Leo Rosten’s The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, which I’d read as a teenager and still loved. By the time of my class on Tuesday afternoon, I was even more immersed in questions of immigration. I was eager to hear what contemporary students thought about the adult English class Rosten described, and wondered if any of them knew friends or family members who’d taken what we were now calling English as a Second Language, or at the college level, English for Academic Purposes.

  We met in a small seminar room on the third floor of Blair Hall, which housed the English and Humanities departments. Tall, gothic-arched windows along one side let in the light and gave students the chance to look outside in case I bored them. Fluorescent lights hung on pendants around the room, and a rich wooden wainscoting ran around the perimeter of the room, a legacy of Eastern’s long history of deep-pocket alumni.

  I had a dozen students, a mix of men and women. From their names, I guessed that most had some Jewish heritage, but I didn’t want to make a big deal of that. Literature was literature, after all. You didn’t have to be a woman to read Jane Austen, African-American to appreciate Toni Morrison. All of them were English majors looking for an additional credit toward their requirement, and that was fine with me. I was no scholar of the field and didn’t want the students to know more than I did.

  They filed in to the classroom in twos and threes, chattering and laughing as they settled into their wooden chairs, assembled seminar-style in a semi-circle around me.

  “Let’s talk about immigration,” I said, once I had taken roll. “Since science has established that humanity originated in Africa, we’re all immigrants to this continent, and to what eventually became this country. So the immigrant experience—leaving behind home, family, even language is a common one in American literature. What did you find in reading the excerpts I gave you? Any commonality? Differences?”

  A young woman raised her hand. “I was interested in the idea of the ghetto. How in Russia and Poland and places like that Jews were forced to live in specific communities, and then when they came to the United States they did that voluntarily.”

  Her name was Jessica Sharpstein, and if you’d put her in an apron, with a kerchief on her head, she could have been an extra in a production of Fiddler on the Roof.

  I nodded. “My grandparents were drawn to places where they had landsmen – people from the same home town. My mother’s family ended up in Trenton that way.”

  “Mine, too,” a boy said. His name was Noah Plotnick, a Jewish name if there ever was one. “But the places where they lived were all torn down before I was born.”

  We talked about ethnic enclaves for a while, how people probably felt safer in them. “No one would criticize you for speaking with an accent,” a young woman named Rosita said. “Sometimes in Philadelphia when I’m out with my mother, who’s from the Dominican Republic, people complain that it’s hard to understand her.”

  A young black man with a single dreadlock hanging down his back said, “Or walk across the street to avoid you.”

  A heavyset blonde in a man’s button-down shirt over slacks said, “Or yell things at you and tell you to go back where you come from.” She had a strong Eastern European accent, and in our intro
ductions the previous week she said she was from Poland.

  “I hope that Eastern is that kind of enclave for all of you,” I said. “That you all feel safe from discrimination here because of how you look, how you speak, or where your family comes from.”

  There was a general murmur of agreement. “I was surprised by the mix of ethnic groups in the adult education class in Rosten’s book,” Rosita said. “That these groups would mingle so much. Where I live in North Philly, the groups are still very separate.”

  I nodded. “There are still ethnic enclaves, aren’t there? Any big city will have a Little India, a Chinatown, a Little Havana. And yet it’s hard to stay in one of those areas for most people, isn’t it? Rosita, you mentioned people complaining about your mother’s accent. Outside your neighborhood?”

  She nodded. “I feel like maybe if people mixed more they would get along better.”

  “This kind of discrimination isn’t new.” I told them about Professor Del Presto’s work looking at the history of prejudice, and its prevalence in social media.

  The syllabus moved into more contemporary work, and I asked them to read Philip Roth’s novella “Goodbye Columbus” from the collection under the same title before the next class. “Pay particular attention to the themes of assimilation and class distinction,” I said. “That’s going to be the next step in the immigrant experience.”

  As I walked back to my car, I thought about Joel Goldberg and his concerns about the Holocaust. Was that kind of obsession symptomatic of schizophrenia? I realized that I knew little about the illness beyond what I’d seen on TV and read in novels. So I detoured past the psychology department, where I was lucky to find Professor Bill Conwell at his office.

  I had gotten to know Bill a few months before when he offered a program about combatting dementia at Friar Lake. I’d taken some of his advice myself, like eating foods shown to remove toxins that contributed to Alzheimer’s, and I’d gone back to doing the crossword puzzle regularly. And of course, Rochester gave me lots of opportunities for exercise.