Bensonhurst and Auschwitz
Hausknecht, Murray
Notebook Last year, at about the time a young black man was killed on the streets of Bensonhurst, Cardinal Glemp, the Roman Catholic primate of Poland, abrogated an agreement to relocate a...
...Auschwitz is another physical space that cannot be thought of apart from its social and cultural significance...
...Now, however, as Poland emerges from Communist dominance, the Polish church will experience pressures of a different kind...
...That is, from this perspective Auschwitz, as a site perceived as "belonging" to the Jews, has the same significance to the Polish nation as those areas of Poland that were once conquered and held by such historic enemies as Germany and Russia: Auschwitz is an area that must be recovered...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...A black man on the streets of Bensonhurst is the archetypal stranger...
...A stranger crossing the borders of a neighborhood, particularly an ethnic or racial one, is almost entering a family's home—the borders mark the limits of territorial and social space...
...The more Poland comes to resemble liberal democratic societies, religion in Poland will experience the same external and internal challenges Catholicism is experiencing in the West...
...It is this meaning of Auschwitz that is clearly important to Cardinal Glemp, who said: The Carmelite sisters living next to the camp at Oswiecism wanted and want to be a sign of the solidarity among people that embraces both the living and the dead...
...those who demonstrated at the site offended not Catholic feelings but "the feelings of all Poles...
...It is not surprising, then, that the immediate cause of the assault on Yusuf Hawkkiinnss was the belief that he was the new boyfriend of one of the local young women...
...In Bensonhurst about half the residents are recent immigrants from Sicily and southern Italy, and the rest are mainly third- or fourth-generation Italian Americans...
...a transgressor of its home grounds and, as the presumed boyfriend of one of its women, a violator of the inner precincts of the group's life...
...They share a perspective characteristic of the dark, ethnocentric side of nationalism and ethnicity...
...Still, it is not simply "feelings" that are at issue, since the demonstration also offended "our sovereignty, which has been achieved with such difficulty...
...But those who hold to this perspective in Poland and Bensonhurst are under pressure from larger social and cultural forces...
...some are problematic...
...For example, the identification of nationality with religion, which served the church and dissident groups so well before the triumph of Solidarity, will probably begin to dissolve—"Pole" will no longer be the automatic equivalent of "Catholic...
...In our society the black man is the most "unfriendly" of strangers...
...The agreement to relocate the convent was negotiated with the aid of French and Belgian cardinals along with a Polish cardinal...
...At the same time there remains a strong attachment to the familiar and, in many ways, still satisfactory way of life...
...He is seen as a threat to material selfinterest, images of masculinity, and the social integrity of the group...
...In the conflict with the regime the church became an opposition rallying point, and the struggle submerged the internal conflicts characteristic of Catholicism since Vatican II...
...This common concern unites two seeming disparate events and helps us makes sense of them...
...Brooklyn streets are far from the site of an extermination camp, but they become somewhat similar places when ancient biases are used to cope with problems of social and political change...
...When Yusuf Hawkins entered Bensonhurst, to look at a used car, he was, in the eyes of the group...
...In such communities marriage as a matter of individual choice is not as firmly established as in conventional middle-class communities...
...Like other ethnic groups in the same circumstances, they are deeply suspicious of "outsiders," that is, those who are not of their group...
...For pious, conservative Catholics the continued existence of the Jewish faith can be seen as an implicit questioning of the church's claim to be a universal, all-inclusive religion...
...It will also become increasingly vulnerable to the "liberal" ideas that have affected the conservative forces within other Catholic churches...
...Groups are located in physical spaces, and these spatial territories become social and cultural symbols— Harlem, Park Avenue, the other side of the tracks—both for others and for the groups who live there...
...A young woman who brings an outsider home is easily seen as flouting tradition and defying the authority of the family...
...In Bensonhurst these forces are education, visions of social mobility, the mass media, and the lures of the culture of consumerism...
...Cardinal Glemp and others in his church may be experiencing an ambivalence like that of the working-class Italian Americans of Bensonhurst...
...Do you, esteemed Jews, not see that your pronouncements against the nuns offend the feelings of all Poles, and our sovereignty, which has been achieved with such difficulty...
...Auschwitz also has a religious meaning to this conservative cardinal...
...Indeed, his actions may have been a response to just this sense of a change in the political and social climate of Poland and a sense that it had to be guarded against...
...For Cardinal Glemp to say "Pole" is to say "Catholic...
...They are also an "insular" group attempting to maintain a way of life strongly emphasizing family and local social relationships...
...10017 (212) 5953084...
...leading members of the American episcopate publicly expressed disagreement with his views...
...By the same token, Auschwitz, as a symbolically Jewish place, can be taken as continual reminder of a "denial" of the church's claim...
...Among the latter are those who are brought into the neighborhood by high school students and young adults beginning their work careers...
...Especially for the young, they are assimilative social and cultural forces...
...At work and in school strangers can become friends —sometimes boyfriends and girlfriends who are invited into the neighborhood and the home...
...It celebrates the traditional, resists new ideas, and divides the world into "us" and hostile strangers to be treated warily and with suspicion...
...Thus, locating a convent there and erecting a twenty-three-foot cross whose shadow falls on the site serves to reclaim it both for the church and for the nation...
...For more information, phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...Aside from being manifestations of ancient prejudices, the two events are tied by a common focus on the control of a place or, more accurately, control of the meaning of a territorial area...
...Cardinal Glemp, of course, is not representative of the Roman Catholic church...
...Some are more visible than others...
...In ethnic groups where the old traditions are still strong, people are particularly alert to the friendships young women form...
...WINTER • 1990 • 101 Notebook Cardinal Glemp surely welcomes the new freedom, but it is not hard to imagine that the new political structure and its inevitable social changes arouse anxiety about their possible impact on the church...
...Place" means not only territory but also social location...
...His renunciation of the agreement to remove the convent from the site of Auschwitz may be understood as a response aimed at maintaining the existing powerful position of the Polish church and fighting against newly emerging forces that challenge present policies and perspectives...
...What distinguishes Cardinal Glemp is a cast of mind that resembles in some crucial respects that of people in Bensonhurst...
...Unlike a family's home, however, a group's neighborhood is highly permeable...
...To repel the stranger from the precincts of neighborhood and home is one way of resolving ambivalence...
...Auschwitz is a synecdoche for the Holocaust...
...Notebook Last year, at about the time a young black man was killed on the streets of Bensonhurst, Cardinal Glemp, the Roman Catholic primate of Poland, abrogated an agreement to relocate a convent from the site of Auschwitz...
...One way to combat this perceived challenge is to establish, if only symbolically, Catholic hegemony over the site and thus wrest it from its Jewish "ownership...
...New economic forces and the free circulation of once suppressed political and cultural ideologies will make the church, as a religious institution, more vulnerable to the challenges of secularism...
...a Jewish space...
...and, finally, the Pope himself forced Cardinal Glemp to retreat...
...They are mostly blue-collar workers, and conventional social science wisdom, probably correct in this instance, stresses that they see themselves as competing for jobs with black workers in a local economy offering increasingly fewer opportunities for workers without skills...
...some can be safely ignored...
...The Roman Catholic church of Poland has been under the pressure of a Communist regime since the end of World War II...
...A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...Neighborhood boundaries separate "us" from "them...
...In short, within the bounds of one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities there is a group whose traditionalistic culture and social organization locate it toward the margins of the city and the society as a whole...
...It is an easy response to fall into because it draws upon the traditional hostility to all strangers now reinforced by the easily acquired, deep-seated prejudices of our society...
...100 • DISSENT Notebook Thus, within the national boundaries of Poland there exists a place that in the eyes of the world "belongs" to the great stranger of European history...
...q 102 • DISSENT...
...strangers who can be barred from a house or apartment constantly move along a neighborhood's streets and avenues...
...it is impossible to see him as a member of the group...
...The cardinal is speaking here not only as a Catholic prelate but also as a Polish nationalist...
...he is not only an economic competitor for many but, given the mythology of American racism, a powerful sexual competitor...
...although many others, including non-Jewish Poles, were murdered there, it has become, through one of history's more morbid paradoxes...
Vol. 37 • January 1990 • No. 1
