The 16,000 pounds of local fresh fruit and produce, including pineapples from Manatí, Santa Isabel papayas, and Guánica green plantains, were delivered to Baldor Specialty Foods facility in Hunts Point and distributed in partnership with City Harvest, the nonprofit known for distributing food surpluses to New Yorkers in need. Seniors, low-income families, front-line responders, and community centers that serve the area will land at the top of the list to receive the goods.

The donation is an effort to show solidarity with some of the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods, many of which include large Latino, and in particular Puerto Rican, communities. The gift also represents a payback of kindness received by Puerto Ricans from New Yorkers after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, Rodríguez said.

Just before the hurricane, Rodríguez-Feliciano had met New York State Commissioner of Agriculture Richard Ball at a conference. The first email he received after the storm came from Ball. The two spent the next 20 months in a concerted effort to have New York support the island’s farmers by purchasing their produce; Puerto Ricans, in turn, purchased New York State apples.

“The state was developing fresh food markets where residents could use food stamps and they wanted to include offerings directly from Puerto Rican farmers,” he said.

Seeds of Collaboration

When Rodríguez-Feliciano was a sophomore majoring in political science and economic development at Fordham College at Rose Hill, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, was dean of the college. Father McShane mentored Rodríguez-Feliciano through the Matteo Ricci Society (now the Matteo Ricci Seminar), a group created by Father McShane as a way to encourage talented students to conduct research and pursue fellowships that support a more just society.

Rodríguez-Feliciano would go on to earn a Harry S. Truman Scholarship, which he used to examine the economy of his native Puerto Rico. He used the scholarship to get an MBA from the Yale School of Management and returned to Puerto Rico in 2002, after work experiences in economic development in the U.S.

“I wanted to study the issue of how to stir economic development in Puerto Rico, so I went back and looked at the history and options for the future,” he said.

Rodríguez-Feliciano spent five years total in the Bronx, four years at Fordham, and an additional year after he graduated living in the borough. It was then that he established the ties he maintains to this day.

Rodríguez-Feliciano said the first big immigration wave of Puerto Ricans moving to New York was caused in part by the displacement of farmers due to the development of the newly industrialized agriculture—many of the farmers settled in New York City.

“This is very much a part of my story here and Fordham encouraged me to pursue fellowships that could address those problems,” he said.

Rodríguez-Feliciano said he recognized the connection between the former farmers and their descendants in Bronx communities, which is mirrored by a recent influx of other Latin American communities immigrants fleeing economic hardship.

“Immigrants and brown communities seem invisible to the mainstream. Few have their hands on the structures of power,” he said.

As a result, underserved communities have to be resourceful and take care of one another out of necessity, he said, adding that corporations and their leadership could learn by paying attention to and nurturing communities like those in the South Bronx.

“These communities are generous, entrepreneurial, and solve their own problems by creating what they need, because no one is coming to rescue them,” he said.

He said that he expects that what he observed in Puerto Rico after Maria to play out in Latino communities amid the pandemic.

“We can look at these communities for example because they are collaborating all the time,” he said. “There are small crises in their lives all the time. They’re pooling resources all the time; they’re taking care of each other all the time.”

“My particular mission is to wander the length and breadth of the city in search of different kinds of places: Chinese, African, and Polish, the unexpected and undersold,” she said in her talk, titled “Off the Rails in Hungry City: Confessions of an Accidental Food Writer.”

She said the food she reviews could come from a restaurant, a stall, a cart, or a truck, and, more than likely, it’ll be from an outer borough. It could be a Brooklyn pizzeria with a “sideline” in Egyptian pastry, she said, or Tibetan soup served from the back of a T-Mobile store.

“These are places where you might eat standing up or sometimes there’s only one person at the stove for whom cooking is less art than urgency,” she said.

She added that the “gig isn’t glamorous.” She often spends more time on the subway than on the meal.

“Still, I won’t lie, this job is exactly as cool as everybody thinks,” she said. “What makes it cool isn’t just the food; it’s the stories I hear. When I go to these places I’m getting entrée not only to a cuisine, but to a part of the city and the world that I wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to know.”

She described a journey that began with a childhood in Hawaii drinking Tang and eating Kraft mac and cheese “gussied up with frozen peas and crispy strips of Spam—an underrated meat product.” Her father had a wartime habit of rationing for himself the treat of canned peaches and cottage cheese. Her mother, who survived the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, didn’t know how to make a pot of rice when she arrived in the U.S., which was common for an educated woman in her country. Both her parents were sitting in the front row for the lecture and nodded knowingly; also in attendance were her husband and daughter.

Mishan began her career after graduate school at an ad agency, with no thoughts of food writing. She eventually moved on to become a book synopsis writer at the New Yorker, where she didn’t get a byline. There, she asked her editor if she could write restaurant reviews, a subject that didn’t have the same cachet a decade ago than it does now. Eventually, a New York Times editor contacted her to say, simply, “I like the way you write.”

“If I have any advice to give to you, the students here who are standing at the threshold of your adult lives, it would be this: Whatever your achievements, whatever your talents, you may not yet know what you’re really good at, but whatever path you imagine lies before you … there really is no path.”

As she waxed poetic about skewered beef tenders sold beneath the Manhattan Bridge, audience members took copious notes on their event programs.

The places she reviews are often so overlooked, she said, that when she tells them they are going to be reviewed by The New York Times, they’re often in shock.

“One chef hugged me on the spot, one chef cried,” she said.

The event drew students, members of the Department of English faculty, and University alumni, who participated in a Q&A following the lecture. One student observed that a good review has the potential to change a neighborhood, and not always in the best way for locals. She asked Mishan for her thoughts on the economic opportunities her columns foster, as well as the downside of regulars no longer being able to afford increased prices. Mishan acknowledged the issue. She said she’s written about places and seen them close because of rising rents. She wondered aloud if her column created “pressure” on the market. However, she said, she tends to focus on places so far from central Manhattan that only the diehard food fans show up and that’s good for owners who aren’t making that much money.

“It’s such a benefit for people who run the restaurant to have that crowd, even though they’ve lost their regulars,” she said. “I feel that it’s in their [the owner’s]  court, they need to make people feel welcome and find a way. I don’t begrudge them the higher prices because it’s subsistence.”

Many of New York’s immigrant chefs, she said, have fled war, persecution, and famine. She noted that as many middle-class New Yorkers abandoned the city during the 1970s, they were replaced by 850,000 immigrants who called New York home. The number of sidewalk vendors doubled between 1979 and 1982, she said.

“The government was championing free trade around the globe, but New Yorkers were living it on the curb and at the corner bodega … and we still are.”

“Global migration of talented individuals is one of the most important phenomena we have in business and in economic development,” said author William Kerr, Ph.D., in a talk at the Lincoln Center campus.

“This is the way that our modern economy, the knowledge economy is being driven.”

Kerr, the D’Arbeloff Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, shared the findings of his book The Gift of Global Talent: How Migration Shapes Business, Economy & Society (Stanford University Press, 2018) at an event sponsored by the Gabelli School of Business.

He presented a picture of a system that has succeeded wildly in funneling talented people from other countries into Silicon Valley and, to a lesser extent, the medical field, but needs improving. He cautioned at the outset that although President Donald Trump has dwelled a great deal on the issue of immigration, he doesn’t appear in the book until the 10th chapter.

“A lot of the things I want to highlight here as areas of concern have been in play for two decades, three decades, or longer,” he said.

The statistics supporting immigration to the United States are undeniable. In 1975, one in every 12 patents filed in the U.S. came from an immigrant; today that number is one in every 3.5 patents, he said.

“It’s a remarkable change in the ethnic composition of the U.S. innovative workforce. It’s something that we see in other forms, like entrepreneurship and CEO leadership. This has been an enormous story for U.S. business history over the last few decades.”

In fact, he said, according to data he’d collected, from 2000 to 2010, 58% of all of the world’s migrating inventors who migrated chose the United States as their destination. In the San Francisco area, the change has been especially profound. In 1975, one in every 220 patents filed in the United States was by someone of Chinese or Indian descent living in that city; today those same groups living there account for one in every 12 patents filed in the country.

For perspective, Kerr compiled the U.S. states with the least number of patents and compared the two.

“You have to add up 28 states before you get to one out of 12 patents. Think about that for a second. You now have two ethnic groups in this one super cluster (San Francisco) that are producing more innovation than more than half of the states in America combined,” he said.

There are some real downsides to this “super cluster” phenomenon though. In the 1970s and 1980s, he said, company towns like Rochester, New York, and suburban office parks were also home to innovation; their demise has coincided with sky-rocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York.

“The consequence of global migration is that we’ve stopped and reversed, and are concentrating innovation into what are ever more hyper-talented super clusters,” he said.

The H-1B Visa, which is the primary way in which workers find their way to the United States and which received 300,000 applications for 85,000 spots last year, is due for an overhaul, he said. Even though there is a good rationale for only granting it to immigrants who have a job offer, it has ceded too much power to corporations that have abused it, he noted, such as when the Disney company used it in 2014 to replace 250 IT workers.

“We should just recognize that we have said the U.S. immigration policy for skilled immigration should be Microsoft’s or General Electric’s policy towards skilled immigration. You have to recognize that firms are going to use it in ways that you never intended,” he said.

To improve the system, Kerr recommended changing the way visas are allocated.

“Any time you have a scarce resource that is not priced, you’ve got to ask, is a lottery the best right way of doing it? Should we be favoring someone that is doing code testing at the same level that someone is doing AI research?”

He said that better pathways for students needs to be established, as U.S. universities are increasingly becoming reliant on foreign students who graduate without a clear path to a job here. The technology sector also has to do a better job showing why immigration benefits the country at large, and not just itself.

“I say to the tech industry that you give us a statistic like, 50 percent of American Ph.D.s are foreign born, if you’re living in Boston, that’s music to your ears. If you’re living in some parts of middle America, that’s actually part of the problem,” he said, he said, since there are many fewer immigrants in that part of the country.

“The overall ledger remains uneven, but as a whole, the stories [in my book]  highlight that we can make more by matching the best talent and the best people with the best opportunities and then finding ways to share in those experiences.”

Students stepped into the lives of migrants—those crossing the border both legally and illegally—at a Rose Hill workshop on March 27.

As part of a two-day forum called “Voices from the U.S./Mexico Border,” Campus Ministry hosted an interactive workshop where students could better understand how difficult it is to immigrate to the U.S.

Leading the workshop was Joanna Williams, director of education and advocacy at the Kino Border Initiative (KBI)—a faith-based organization on the U.S./Mexico border that serves deportees and asylum-seekers.

“One of the most common questions that comes up for us is, ‘Why aren’t people just coming legally? Why are people trying to cross the desert instead of just going to the consulate and getting a visa?’” Williams said. The workshop attempted to provide an answer.

In Bepler Commons, Williams simulated the crisis at the southern border with about 30 students. To the right of the room: a group of chairs labeled “U.S. consulate,” where migrants apply for U.S. visas. To the left: the “port of entry,” where migrants show their documentation to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. And finally, in an empty area between the two stations was a “third-world country”—the group of countries migrants were fleeing from.

Each student was then given a slip of paper that explained their new identity. Some of them were border patrol agents and visa interviewers. Others were migrants attempting to legally enter the U.S. But if they found no legal way in, the student “migrants” could break the law. One student, for example, successfully entered the U.S. with fake documents.

What made the simulation special was each of those characters. They were based on actual individuals—migrants who Williams and her colleagues met through the KBI or U.S. state department employees.

“In that sense, this is not a game. It’s not pretend,” Williams said. “These are real people’s lives that you’re going to be representing for half an hour.”

She urged them to think carefully about the people they were representing: “Be conscious of them. Embrace that character. And make decisions the way that you think they would have made them.”

Immersed in a Different Perspective

Christopher Shoudt, a first-year Gabelli School student, played a migrant. He was “Josué,” a coffee bean farmer from Chiapas, Mexico, who made 75 pesos a day—the equivalent of almost $4. He bartered his belongings in hopes that he’d be able to work in the U.S. and pay for his children’s education. But in the process, he lost his home in a scam.

Living Josué’s life for 30 minutes humbled Shoudt. It made him reflect on how privileged—and lucky—he is to be able to afford to attend Fordham. He also said the simulation better prepared him for an upcoming meeting with New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Congressman Jose Serrano, where he planned to advocate for a Catholic Relief Services initiative to help migrants.

“I hope I can bring [the issue]to her and show exactly what was shown to me today—to understand their situation and be able to empathize a bit more,” Shoudt said.

In an open, post-simulation reflection, students spoke about other things they experienced during the role play. Among them were pawning wedding rings to purchase legal papers and watching wealthier migrants receive aid more quickly. In a more dangerous situation, a drug cartel told a migrant that he and his family would be killed if he stopped paying them.

“At first, you try to go through some kind of a legit process, because you don’t want to stoop so low,” said one student, who simulated a single mother with three children. “And then you realize like … once you’re screwed by the system, you don’t care what you have to do in order to protect your family.”

Migrants weren’t the only ones who faced difficulty. So did those on the U.S. side of the border.

“People would come up and have these really powerful stories,” said a student who represented a U.S. consulate employee. “And you just had to deflect them and be very stonewalled.”

For her, it was a “sad” situation. But for actual migrants, it’s their life.

“As much as it feels realistic, this is still a fraction of how real it is,” said Brett Musalowicz, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior.

An Expansion of Empathy

For one student, the simulation was a close parallel to a past experience. In her junior year of high school, Gabelli School sophomore Samantha Barrett visited the Kino Border Initiative and met migrants who had recently been deported, she said. One of them was a man named Raul, a 29-year-old Mexico native who was taken to Los Angeles when he was three months old.  

“The morning I met him, he had just sprained his shoulder and dislocated his knee, falling off a cliff while trying to cross back into Arizona. He was going to try and cross again the very next day, not giving himself any time to heal or come with up a plan because he was just so desperate to get back into our country,” Barrett said. “To this day, I don’t know if he’s alive or if he’s dead.”

She said the experience has stayed with her: “Even three years later, these people are still people that I think about every single day.”

Overall, the simulation at Rose Hill was a chance for students to recognize the complexity of the U.S. immigration system and expand their empathy for migrants who, far too often in news headlines, are simply a statistic.

“We encounter people for a few moments at the border. You, in the simulation, have represented people for a few minutes. But what I ask and encourage you all to do is to continue to think about that one person you were representing,” Williams urged the students. “Pray for them. Be conscious of them—and how their story continues.”

Looking beyond the headlines, Gregory Acevedo, Ph.D., an associate professor at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service, says there is real human misery associated with immigration that we have a moral responsibility to address.

Listen here:

And in an extra track, Acevedo talks about the mental health needs of Puerto Ricans affected by Hurricane Maria who are expected to move to areas such as Florida and New York City this year.

Full transcript below:

Gregory Acevedo: U.S. social policy history’s really continuing history of reform and reaction. It really is this kind of like few steps forward, a few steps backwards. Maybe in the long rhythm of time, you’re moving forward. We have these regressive periods where we really do turn the clock back, unfortunately return to some past ways of thinking and doing. They’re never fully gone. There’s always some tinge of nativism that’s out there.

Patrick Verel: Few issues burn hotter on the worldwide stage today than immigration. In May, President Trump instituted a zero tolerance policy for anyone arriving at the southern border. Today, many immigrant children, who were taken from their parents there, have yet to be reunited. It’s rattling Europe as well. Italians recently elected a coalition government formed by two antiestablishment parties who share a common dislike of immigrants.

But beyond the headlines, Gregory Acevedo, an associate professor at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service says there is real human misery that we have a moral responsibility to address. I’m Patrick Verel and this is Fordham News.

What is the Immigrant Behavioral Health Roundtable project, and why is it so important these days?

Gregory Acevedo: The project’s being organized by the New York Immigration Coalition. They invited me because of the work that I’ve done in terms of immigrant and refugees and their mental health and social service needs. They’ve become concerned that with the Trump administration’s current policies that it’s having a negative impact on the behavioral and mental health of immigrant communities in New York City and elsewhere, of course. It involves people from government, healthcare providers, researchers, advocacy, and community based organizations, and the actual community members themselves.

The goal really is to develop long term policy recommendations for how to increase access to behavioral health for immigrants. In response to the current crisis, but also with the long term view that after this crisis is gone, trying to improve really behavorial healthcare access for immigrants period. It’s important because behavioral health is such a critical component of wellbeing for any person, non-immigrant or migrant alike. For example, behavorial health affects our physical health, our relationships, our job performance.

Migration inherently involves stress. Even a legal migrant coming with all their papers, well-resourced, there’s going to be some degree of stress. For any migrant, the context of the reception that they receive is a powerful determinant of how they’re able to cope with that stress. I think unwelcoming contexts heighten the risk of behavorial health problems occurring. We’re certainly in current context that’s pretty unwelcoming.

Patrick Verel: A key aspect of the debate happening in the country is the distinction between immigrants who come here legally and those who come here illegally. From a mental health perspective, do you see any distinction between these two?

Gregory Acevedo: Yes, insofar as illegality involves a higher level of, let’s say, risk and uncertainty. The fact that it heightens anxiety and insecurity. The fact that kind of living on the run, as it were, involves additional stressors than those that are already part of the stress involved in migration. I think there’s definitely a difference between an illegal journey and a legal journey.

I think it, for a healthcare provider or a mental healthcare provider, the issue is to be attuned to the fact that illegality brings with it, if you will, a certain level of being guarded. Clients or patients might not be as forthcoming or open about their experience, about their feelings, about their wants, their needs. I think that kind of guarded response is rational, but it may appear to somebody who isn’t taking that into account as something that’s, in the old parlance I guess, a resistance. I think you have to understand it from the point of view of someone who has an illegal status and the way that it changes their behavior really.

Patrick Verel: When it comes to your ethical responsibility to offer care, I would imagine that there is no distinction though.

Gregory Acevedo: Oh, of course, yeah. I think clearly morally I don’t find a distinction. It’s a technical issue, first of all legally. It’s an issue that’s important in terms of understanding, as I said earlier, people’s behavior. But I’m very clear about my … you’re here to serve everyone, right? So it’s the idea that you don’t make those distinctions. Clearly, from a human rights framework, which I think is very important, those aren’t distinctions that have any validity when it comes to receiving treatment.

Patrick Verel: Anti-immigrant sentiment is not a new phenomenon in this country, of course. Are there any lessons from the past that you incorporate into your work?

Gregory Acevedo: I teach courses on advocacy and policy practice. I use the example actually of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 because it really offers a great lesson on time, if you will. That act actually undid the racialized national origins quota system that we had in place since the early 1900’s in U.S. immigration policy. It took decades of political effort and social cultural change to really undo a deeply entrenched nativism that informed that national origins quota system that we had.

When I teach a course content on policy and advocacy work, I always emphasize the long view and the importance of the long view. There’s a sentiment that was expressed centuries ago by Rabbi Tarfon, I now share with my students, “It’s not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but you are not free to desist from it either.”

The idea is that you’re probably not going to see that change that you’re looking for immediately, maybe even in your lifetime, but that shouldn’t lead to cynicism, pessimism or walking away from the work. You have to stay in that work for the long term.

Patrick Verel: The thing that keeps coming up is this notion of the fear of the other. It’s something that is, like I said, it’s not new. We experienced before. It seemed like we sort of got a little over it. Now we’re right back where we started it seems like. Any idea why?

Gregory Acevedo: One of my favorite scholars in this area, when he writes about actually the history of the war on poverty. There’s this big debate, the war on poverty was a success, was it a failure, et cetera. I think he reframes it in an important way where he says, “History, U.S. social policy history is really a continuing history of reform and reaction.” It really is this like a few steps forward, a few steps backwards and maybe in the long rhythm of time, you’re moving forward. But we truly, we have these regressive periods where we really do turn the clock back and, unfortunately, return to some past ways of thinking and doing. They’re never fully gone. There’s always some tinge of nativism that’s out there.

Then global events and other events and national kinds of currents change and it sparks up and it’s back again. You can say this about almost any major policy issue in U.S. History. There’s a quote I use a lot in class. I think it was Karl Deutsch from the Harvard School, Kennedy School of Government. He talked about how U.S. social welfare policy history follows the random walk of a drunkard. They think they’re moving forward, but they’re stumbling from side to side. Sometimes they’re even moving backwards. They might fall on their face. They have to get back up again. It is, it’s one of those times when I think we’re taking a great step backwards unfortunately.

Patrick Verel: When you talk about the work that you’re doing, how much of that is discussed, this notion that, “Okay, we take two steps forward on this issue, but sometimes we take one step back”?

Gregory Acevedo: I mean, I think it’s almost natural that that topic comes up. It’s based really on a generational point of view. If you’ve been around a while, you’ve seen these things before. Many of my students are younger. They weren’t even born during the Reagan years. Yet, I see many parallels between the Trump administration and the Reagan administration. I think that is just naturally in the minds of many folks who do this kind of work. It’s that idea that we’re still working on Dr. King’s Dream. You really have to be vigilant. This work has to be ongoing ’cause it’s so easy to slip back and go back to an earlier period.

Extra Track

Patrick Verel: It’s been estimated that between 114,000 and 213,000 Puerto Ricans will move to the U.S. mainland over the next 12 months as a result of the devastation of Hurricane Maria. I would imagine many of them will move here to New York City. What should those in social services working with that population be paying close attention to?

Gregory Acevedo: I think some of the central issues are trauma, which, thankfully, these days in terms of providing particularly mental health services, has become an important aspect of how we think about how we do our work. These days, many things go under the moniker of trauma informed or practice, for example. This idea of trauma, I think social workers and mental health practitioners, many of them will have that already in their toolkit and to recognize that there is layers of trauma involved here. There is the trauma of the actual hurricane and the devastation and dislocation of that. There is the trauma of the reaction of the United States and the lack of provisioning and care and the kind of like dealing with the crisis once the hurricane happened. Then there’s the trauma involved of being uprooted, having to move perhaps when you didn’t want to, relocating to a place that you hadn’t even planned for. There’s a big thing in the literature on migration that the longer you have to plan and the better the plan and preparation you have to migrate, the more it lowers the stressor involved in migration.

Being unprepared, being dislodged, having to do it without doing it voluntarily but involuntarily, I think the level of trauma is really high for a lot of Puerto Ricans. Then there’s the continuing kind of traumatic experience of almost being shunned and ignored by your own country, which I think is shameful. I think that that’s very real to many Puerto Ricans and yet for many Americans who are not Puerto Ricans, I don’t think it’s something they fully fathom or understand.

And there’s the concrete services that are needed. Places to stay that are long-term, not just sheltered. If people want to relocate and stay for a long time, what are they doing to need? Connecting up with schools, with other services that are needed.

I really do think it’s being attuned to the fact that there’s going to be this need for these concrete services and there’s going to be this need for the mental health and behavioral aspects that are involved. I think that’s what mental health practitioners probably need to be most attuned with when it comes to working with Puerto Ricans who’ve been basically dislodged by the hurricane. It’s kind of like an exile of sorts where you’re not quite sure when you can go back, right? And so, when will Puerto Rico be up and running again? I mean, it is for some folks, right? It’s like anywhere else where if you’re probably in San Juan and some of the more urbanized areas, things are probably better off than if you’re elsewhere. Of course, those who have already had more resources and privileged are probably doing better than those who don’t. I think that’s another thing that we need to account for. There’s a certain type of Puerto Rican migrant that’s going to come to the United States, and its a lot more about issue of resourcing than anything else.

Working backward from No. 10, are our most popular posts of the year.

10. Actor Robert De Niro Tells IDHA Graduates: You Are My Heroes
(June 30) The Hollywood legend offered the commencement address to the 50th graduating class of Fordham’s International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance (IDHA).

9. Fordham Designated National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education
(April 3) The National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security have designated Fordham as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education (CAE-CDE).

8. Oscar-Nominated Moonlight Illuminates Miami Film’s Co-Producer
(February 24) Alumnus Andrew Hevia co-produced the film which took home Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

7. Rainbow Rams Represent Fordham in NYC’s Gay Pride March
(June 26) The university was represented for the first time in the annual Pride Parade by the Fordham University Alumni chapter of the Rainbow Rams.

6. Fordham Signs Pledge to Support Paris Climate Change Goals
(June 6) Fordham has joined 180 colleges and universities in signing a pledge, “We Are Still In,” to support the goals laid out by the Paris Climate Agreement.

Class of 2017 Urged to Face Unsettling Times With a Merciful Heart

5. Class of 2017: Face Unsettling Times with a Merciful Heart
(May 20) As thousands on Edwards Parade listened to commencement speaker Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, our news team posted videos of both before and after the ceremony.

4. Haunted Fordham Video
(October 30) Fordham’s Rose Hill campus is widely considered to be one of the most haunted campuses in the Northeast, if not the entire U.S. And we had the spooky stories to prove it.

3. Father McShane Announces University Support for Immigrants and Refugees
(January 29) Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, issued the following statement with regard to President Trump’s executive order on refugees and immigration.

2. Fordham featured prominently on the New York City skyline last night.
(March 28) The Empire State Building was lit in maroon to commemorate Fordham’s 175th anniversary, and the dramatic photo helped boost our 175 Things to Know About Fordham series.

1. Jeopardy! 175th Anniversary Greeting for Fordham
(January 2017) Alex Trebek asking a Final Jeopardy! question on 19-letter words, a shout-out to Fordham’s (What is a) Dodransbicentennial. The post was seen by more than 108,000 viewers.

A child survivor of the Holocaust was reluctant to share his family’s full story, until he saw a picture of himself as a 4-year-old boy at Auschwitz on a website denying the Holocaust

For years, Michael Bornstein, PHA ’62, wished he could wash away the serial number—B-1148—that was seared into his left forearm when he was just 4 years old. He’d mention Auschwitz, if asked about the tattoo, but he wouldn’t dwell on the Nazi death camp where his father, brother, and nearly 1 million other Jews were murdered during World War II. He’d seldom speak of being separated from his mother, who withstood beatings from female guards as she smuggled bread and thin gray soup to him in the children’s barracks, and who later smuggled him into the women’s barracks before she was sent to a labor camp in Austria. He wouldn’t say much about how his grandmother somehow, improbably, kept him alive long enough for them to be among the 2,819 prisoners liberated by Soviet soldiers.

His recollection of those dark days is dim—“a blessing and a curse,” he says. He seems to recall the stench of bodies burning, the smoke rising from crematoria chimneys, the quickening clack of guards’ boots. But he’s also aware of the malleable nature of memory, how the things we recall, especially from early childhood, are shaped by some inscrutable mix of perception, imagination, and the stories we’re told. And so for years he stayed mostly silent about his past, not only because it was traumatic but also because so much of it—the texture of his brother’s hair, the sound of his father’s voice—was inaccessible to him.

He preferred to look forward, with an optimism he says he inherited from his mother. Gam zeh ya’avor, she’d tell him, quoting the motto she and her husband shared during the war. This too shall pass. He can still hear the sound of his mother’s voice because she found him in Żarki, Poland, after the war. In February 1951, when he was 10, they immigrated to the United States, where he’d go on to build a career in pharmaceutical research and—with his wife, Judy—raise four children in what he calls “a life filled with soccer games, birthday parties, and bliss.”

As his kids grew up, they began pressing him for details about his past, but he’d always resist a full recounting. Now Bornstein is 77, and his children have children of their own. Several years ago, when Jake Wolf, the eldest of his 11 grandkids, started asking questions, wanting to use the information for his bar mitzvah project, Bornstein couldn’t say no. He began to open up.

Then he saw something that left him stunned and more determined than ever to tell his story: a picture of himself as a boy at Auschwitz on a website claiming that the Holocaust is a lie, that it never happened. “I slammed my computer shut in disgust. I was horrified. My hands shook with anger,” he writes in Survivors Club: The True Story of a Very Young Prisoner of Auschwitz, published last March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “But now I’m almost grateful for the sighting. It made me realize that if we survivors remain silent—if we don’t gather the resolve to share our stories—then the only voices left to hear will be those of the liars and bigots.”

Bornstein wrote the book with his daughter Debbie Bornstein Holinstat, a TV news producer who for years had urged her father to work on such a project. She helped him plumb his earliest, darkest memories, and together they searched historical records and interviewed relatives and others who knew his family in Poland. In the process, they discovered a detail that helped solve one of the biggest mysteries of his survival, and he learned much about the resolute, resourceful father he never got to know. Together, they reclaimed a family heritage, illuminating stories of loss and resilience that had been left largely untold for 70 years.

Żarki, Open Ghetto

Michael Bornstein was born on May 2, 1940, in the Nazi-occupied town of Żarki, Poland, the second son of Sophie Jonisch Bornstein and Israel Bornstein, baby brother to 4-year-old Samuel. They lived in a redbrick house on Sosnawa Street.

In some parts of Poland during the late 1930s, Jews couldn’t own land, and their business dealings were restricted. But Jewish-owned businesses thrived in Żarki, where more than half of the town’s population, approximately 3,400 residents, was Jewish. Bornstein’s father was an accountant, and his mother’s brother Sam Jonisch (one of her six siblings) ran his family’s leather tannery in town.

That changed on Friday, September 1, 1939, when German forces invaded Poland, reaching Żarki the following day with an aerial attack that torched some homes and businesses. Sophie, newly pregnant with Michael, wanted to check on her parents, who lived nearby. But Nazi storm troopers had already moved onto the streets. On Monday, when all Jewish men in Żarki were ordered to report for labor shifts, Sophie left Samuel with her mother-in-law, Dora, and set out to find her parents. As she neared the Jewish cemetery, she saw German soldiers command a family she recognized from synagogue to strip naked. As mother, father, and young daughter huddled together, the soldier fired three shots, and the family fell dead in the ditch the father had just dug. It was a scene that haunted Sophie Bornstein her entire life.

The Nazis murdered more than 1,000 Jews in Poland that day, including 100 in Żarki. Such atrocities brought out the worst in some gentile residents, Bornstein and Holinstat write. “Many Catholics had not liked living among Jews before the war. Now they blamed the town’s Jewish people for making them the target of German bombings.”

In October, as Nazi soldiers went door-to-door confiscating Jews’ money and jewelry, Israel Bornstein sought to safeguard his family’s valuables. He gathered what he could in a burlap sack—a string of pearls, a stash of banknotes, the family’s small silver kiddush cup—and buried it in the backyard.

Żarki was still an open ghetto at the time, which meant that it wasn’t surrounded by fences, but Jews couldn’t come and go as they pleased. The Nazis shut down or took over Jewish businesses, enforced a strict curfew, and made Jews wear white armbands with a blue Star of David on them. They also forced them to create a Judenrat, a council of Jewish leaders. The town elders elected Israel Bornstein to serve as president. It was not a coveted role. Many Jews in Eastern Europe came to see Judenrat members as traitors, simply doing the bidding of the Nazis, and in Żarki people viewed Israel with suspicion.

But in their research, Bornstein and Holinstat found a collection of essays and a detailed diary written in Hebrew that told of Israel Bornstein’s heroic, often successful efforts to make conditions more bearable. In Survivors Club, they describe how he collected money from fellow Judenrat members and used the funds to bribe Gestapo officers, helping to obtain 200 legal travel visas for families trying to leave Żarki, for example, and saving the life of a teenager who faced execution because he was too sick to work one day.

“Though it’s sometimes seen as a very negative position, my father used it to save people. He set up soup kitchens. He was a very good man. And it made a lot of difference to me knowing that he was a good man,” Bornstein says. “That’s one reason we called the book ‘Survivors Club,’ because my mother’s six siblings all survived, and part of it has to do with my father, who encouraged them to go into attics, basements, wherever they could go to survive.”

By October 1942, however, the call had come for Żarki to be made Judenrein, “clean of Jews.” Most of those remaining were sent by train either to labor camps or to extermination camps. The Bornsteins and approximately 120 others were allowed to stay behind as part of a cleanup crew, but eventually they too were sent away, to a labor camp in Pionki. And in July 1944, when that camp closed, they were packed onto trains bound for Auschwitz.

“Sickness Saved My Life”

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, like all families, they were split up: Israel and Samuel were assigned to the men’s side. Michael initially stayed with his mother and grandmother until guards shaved his head and tattooed his arm. He was sent to the children’s barracks, where some older kids looked out for him, warning him to hold his nose as he drank down the smelly gray soup. Other kids stole his bread. Sophie was sent to the women’s barracks with Michael’s grandma Dora. She risked her own well-being to find her son and eventually bring him into the women’s barracks, where he hid under straw, in corners, scattering at the sound of guards approaching to take roll call.

While Sophie was able to protect Michael, she was helpless to save her husband and young Samuel, who died in September from the effects of Zyklon B gas—the Nazis’ preferred method of execution at Auschwitz, where as many as 6,000 people per day were killed in gas chambers. “[My mother] later told me that her heart literally felt like it had been gouged from her chest with an ax” when she learned of their fate, Bornstein writes. Soon, however, she was sent to a labor camp in Austria, and Michael was left alone with his grandma Dora.

By January 1945, with Soviet forces closing in on Auschwitz, the Nazis started to evacuate the camp, forcing an estimated 60,000 prisoners on what came to be known as a death march to concentration camps in Germany. Many prisoners, already frail from malnutrition, died from exposure in the harsh winter. But Michael and Dora evaded the march, and Bornstein always wondered how.

Not long ago, while visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel, he discovered a document that solved the mystery. Nazi records indicate that he was in the infirmary at the time, diagnosed with either diphtheria or dystrophy (the writing is unclear). And his grandmother was with him. “The name doesn’t really matter,” he writes in Survivors Club. “That piece of paper recovered by a museum years after the war made one miracle clear. Sickness saved my life.”

On January 27, nine days after he found refuge in the infirmary, Soviet troops arrived. A couple of days after liberation, Dora carried Michael out to freedom, a scene captured on film by Soviet cameras. “Of the hundreds of thousands of children who had been delivered by train to Auschwitz, only 52 under the age of eight survived. They were the world’s best hiders,” Bornstein writes. “I was one of them.”

Postwar Dangers and the Cup of Life

Bornstein’s freedom brought with it a new set of dangers. “I would like to tell you … that all of us went home and lived happily ever after,” he writes. “But it wasn’t like that at all.” Four out of 10 Jews who survived the concentration camps died within a few weeks of the arrival of the Allied armies. Those who did survive found much of Eastern Europe unsafe for them, particularly in Poland, where anti-Jewish sentiments led to a series of murderous pogroms.

Soon after liberation, Michael and Dora returned to Żarki, where they found the family home on Sosnawa Street had been seized by a Polish family who now saw it as their home. Dora took Michael to a farm on the edge of town, where they found shelter in a chicken coop. They would periodically head into what had been the Jewish quarter, where they met relatives who were, miraculously, among the few dozen Jews (out of 3,400 six years earlier) to return to Żarki after the war. One day, as Michael and Dora walked in town, he spotted his mother, who had made her way back from Austria. “If we had both seen more horror than the world knew it could hold—then this moment was the opposite of that,” he writes. “This was the opposite of despair.”

Sophie realized that there was little opportunity left for them in Żarki. But first she tried to recover the valuables her husband had buried. “At night, even though the house was occupied, she went digging with her bare hands to try to find these things, jewels and money, and the only thing that she found was the kiddush cup, which is a cup that you make blessings with,” Bornstein says.

“And so this cup has been in our family ever since. It’s been at my wedding, at our kids’ weddings, at their bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, and so on. It’s not worth much if you buy it for the silver, but we cherish it quite a bit.”

In Munich, Waiting on Passage to America

After the war, Dora decided to remain in Poland, but Sophie determined that she and Michael would apply for visas to the United States. “She said the word ‘America’ the way a child says the word ‘candy,’” Bornstein writes. “She told me America was the most wonderful and welcoming place you can imagine.” That was not the case for them in Żarki or in Munich, where the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society assigned them to a displaced persons camp and, later, to a one-room apartment in the city.

“The German kids were bullies,” Bornstein recalls. “I had no hair on my head, I was skinny, and I didn’t speak the language, so I was bullied quite a bit.” Sophie bought flour and nylons from American soldiers and sailors in Munich, and sold the goods on the black market. It was a risky way to make a living, and Bornstein feared that she’d be arrested and he’d lose his mother again. But after nearly six years, they received their visas and set off on the USS General M. B. Stewart, arriving in New York City in February 1951.

With help from aid organizations, they eventually settled in a small apartment on 98th Street and Madison Avenue. Sophie worked as a seamstress, making $30 a week, and Michael attended P.S. 6. “I was this little kid who didn’t speak much English and had a tattoo on his arm. The teachers didn’t say anything, so I was pretty much alone and didn’t have friends,” recalls Bornstein, who soon found a job that would prove to be consequential. “I worked at Feldman’s Pharmacy, at 96th and Madison, getting 50 cents an hour,” he says. “The head pharmacist, Victor Oliver, was very good to me. He kind of took me on as a father figure and sparked my interest in science.”

Oliver even attended Bornstein’s bar mitzvah, held at Park Avenue Synagogue, after which his mother gave him a gift that she’d been saving for years to buy him: a gold watch. “You have to wind it a few times a day to make it work, but it’s great,” he says. “And on the back, it has a gimel and a zayin, which are the Hebrew letters for gam zeh ya’avor, ‘This too shall pass.’”

“A Can-Do, Get-It-Done Type of Guy”

Bornstein’s mother also instilled in him a deep appreciation for the value of education. Like faith, she’d tell him, education can’t be taken away. In 1958, he enrolled at Fordham’s College of Pharmacy, just as she embarked on a new chapter in her life. “My mother remarried and moved to Cuba because her sister was there,” he says. She would later return to the States and settle in South Florida, but at the time, Bornstein says, “I was pretty much homeless, and Fordham didn’t have any room in the dormitories, so they put me up in the infirmary.” It was the second time in his life that an infirmary saved him, he says. “I would probably have skipped college if it weren’t for that.”

In addition to providing Bornstein with room and board, Fordham gave him a partial scholarship. He spent summers working in the Catskills to help pay any remaining tuition costs. “I was a chamber maid, then a busboy, then a waiter, and finally a head waiter,” he recalls. “The salary was only about twelve dollars a month, but the tips made it.” On campus, he found a niche on the fencing team.

One of his former Fordham classmates, William Stavropoulos, PHA ’61, recalls Bornstein as a “nice, friendly guy.” He says he and his friends in G House at Martyrs’ Court never would have suspected the horrors Bornstein had been through. “I remember distinctly sitting around one day and a guy asked Mike about his tattoo. He mentioned the camp and said his mother used to hide him here and there, keep him out of sight of the guards, but he didn’t say much else. He was always upbeat.”

After graduation, Bornstein enrolled at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Ph.D. in pharmaceutics and analytical chemistry. But he says his greatest achievement there was meeting an undergraduate named Judy Cohan. “We obviously hit it off. He had the same interests I did, and he was persistent,” recalls Judy, who was studying special education. They attended movies and plays, and he accompanied her on visits to the children’s ward at local hospitals. “He was very caring of the children, and that was important to me.”

They were married nearly 50 years ago, on July 9, 1967, after Bornstein began his career at Dow Chemical in Zionsville, Indiana. While there, he reconnected with Stavropoulos, who had earned a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry at the University of Washington and would go on to become chairman and CEO of Dow. The two, both newlyweds at the time, would see each other socially, and Stavropoulos even helped the Bornsteins move into their new apartment. But they lost touch over the years. “He went to work for Eli Lilly, and I stayed at Dow,” Stavropoulos recalls. In the late 1980s, Bornstein and his family moved to New Jersey, where he worked as a research manager for Johnson & Johnson, eventually rising to director of technical operations, a position that took him to Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, France, and elsewhere.

“He was a streetwise guy, and I always knew he was going to be a success,” Stavropoulos says. “When I think of Mike, I think of a positive, can-do, get-it-done type of guy. At Dow he was that way, and at Fordham too. It’s an incredible story. He’s obviously a courageous man.”

Fighting Intolerance with Compassion

Holinstat says her dad’s courage was especially evident during the process of writing the book. “My father is such a positive man, and he’s gone out of his way his entire life to show his kids and his grandkids nothing but positivity, so for him to dig deep and be willing to open up and talk to me about the deepest, darkest places in his memory was difficult for him, and it was hard for me because I knew how hard it was for him.” But the process has been well worth it, she says, explaining that they wrote Survivors Club with readers as young as 10 years old in mind.

“For my dad, a big piece of this was making sure that his grandkids understood the atrocities of the Holocaust. So it was really important to us to write something that the kids could grasp at this stage in their lives, and that they could share with their peers, because this next generation, most of them will grow up not having met a Holocaust survivor.”

In March, shortly after the book was published, it became a New York Times best-seller. The paper’s reviewer noted that the book combines the “emotional resolve of a memoir with the rhythm of a novel,” and that, although the book is marketed for young readers, “the equal measures of hope and hardship in its pages lend appeal to an audience of all ages.”

Holinstat waited decades for the opportunity to help her father tell his story, but she feels the timing of the book’s publication could not be more poignant or pointed, coming amid a recent surge in anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiments in the U.S. “I truly believe that this story is being released now for a reason, to remind people what happens when bigotry goes unanswered,” she says.

The core moral lesson of the Holocaust, she and her father believe, is the ease with which any group of people can be dehumanized. “The world can never forget what happens when discrimination is ignored,” Bornstein said last April at Congregation Beth-El Zedeck in Indianapolis. “And it’s not just discrimination against Jewish people but against all minorities, and that includes Muslims, Mexicans, and African Americans. It’s time for compassion; it’s time for empathy.”

Bornstein plans to return to Poland this year with Judy, their children, and other family members. Holinstat has been communicating with people in Poland about establishing a Holocaust memorial in Żarki, and the family will be going to Auschwitz, which Bornstein visited in 2001 with Judy and in 2010 with his son, Scott.

In the meantime, Jake Wolf, the grandson who persuaded Bornstein to share his story, is preparing for his freshman year at Syracuse University, where he intends to major in both communications and business. “In our family,” he says, “it’s so important to know how difficult it was for my grandpa. He never had any hate toward the world for what he was put through. And that inspires all of us. If he could get through that with a smile on his face, we can do anything.”

A “Survivors Club” Reunion in the Suburbs

Since the publication of the book, Bornstein has heard from many people who have thanked him for telling his story, including some who understand all too well what he and his family endured. Sarah Ludwig was the 4-year-old girl standing next to Bornstein in the iconic photo from Auschwitz. Tova Friedman, then 6, stood just behind Ludwig as the children showed their tattoos to Soviet soldiers. The three survivors recently learned that they live just miles from each other in suburban New Jersey.

On Sunday, June 4, they gathered with kids, grandkids, and other relatives for a reunion brunch at Holinstat’s home that included prayers of remembrance and celebration, and the use of one precious silver cup. For Holinstat, it was a remarkable coda to the experience of helping her father tell his story after all these years.

“The last time they saw each other, they were kids wearing prisoners’ stripes,” she says. “Now they’re surrounded by family.”

—Ryan Stellabotte is the editor of this magazine.

Watch NBC Nightly News‘ coverage of the reunion.

“I was told that my great-grandfather cobbled the shoes of the Jesuits there,” says Quinn, who earned a master’s degree in Irish history at Fordham in 1975.

Four years later, he left academia to become a speechwriter for New York governors—first for Hugh Carey until 1982, and then for Mario Cuomo. Quinn was a key contributor to several of Cuomo’s most memorable speeches, including his July 1984 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention—widely regarded as one of the most powerful of the past four decades.

Quinn left the governor’s office in 1985 to become the chief speechwriter for Time Warner—a transition he made while working on Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York, which won a 1995 American Book Award.

He followed that with a collection of essays, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (2007), and a series of historical novels—Hour of the Cat (2005), The Man Who Never Returned (2010), and Dry Bones (2013)—all featuring private detective Fintan Dunne.

Quinn and his wife, Kathleen, have two adult children, both of whom are Fordham graduates. He recently met with FORDHAM magazine to discuss his family history, his writing, and more.

How much did you know about your ancestors when you were growing up? Did your parents talk much about them?
No. I mean, I heard anecdotes and I always knew I was Irish—our Catholicism was our Irishness. But I think my parents’ generation felt, “We’re moving into America. That is the past. There’s no need to have it beyond St. Patrick’s Day.” You’re very proud of being Irish, but the particulars of it were not of interest. I think in my parents’ case, and their parents’, they pushed their children ahead, you know, and made sure that they went to college. I only knew one grandparent, and they never talked about Ireland. Never. And I think they loved cities—you know, the whole Irish farming experience hadn’t been too great.

Your great-grandfather Michael Manning, how much do you know about what brought him to America?
It was the famine that would have brought him. He would have been one of the 2 million Irish who left in 10 years.

When did you really delve into that history and learn more about what the immigrant experience must’ve been like for him?
Well, that’s how I wound up writing a novel. I was studying for a Ph.D. in Irish history with Maurice O’Connell at Fordham. Then I left the academic world to go into politics, and I used to go to the state library to research speeches. I found this housing report for 1855 that was like a description of Dickensian London. I recognized that this is where my great-grandparents lived, and I had never heard anything about it. So then I began to look into that, the conditions in New York in the 1840s and ’50s. It had an infant mortality rate like the third world. It didn’t have a sewer system. So I realized, in a sense, why they didn’t tell us all this growing up. What was the use in knowing that?

Do you think there is a tendency to romanticize the immigrant experience generations later, and do you see a danger in that?
Oh, yeah, it’s a human tendency. It becomes part of a sentimental path rather than a reliving of the brutal reality that so many people go through.

And I think the danger is that you can lose sympathy with people in poverty and difficult circumstances now, thinking, “We were more noble the way we did it.” You forget the people who didn’t survive, who were victims of a lack of opportunity, poverty. We tidy it up. I always say America loves immigrants, but they have to be here two or three generations before anybody loves them.

People lose sight of the kind of labels and stereotypes that have been attached to new immigrant groups. The Irish, their disease was cholera. People thought they carried it with them. It came from tainted water, but people didn’t want to live around the Irish because they thought it was their disease, and they were judged to be mentally inferior to Anglo-Saxons. It’s like IQ tests, when they were first used at Ellis Island: They felt that Italians and Jews would bring down the national IQ. So you just see these things, and I don’t know how you cure it.

I think if you’re Irish and if you understand your history, if it doesn’t leave you with sympathy for the underdog, I don’t know what would.

You’ve written—both in Banished Children of Eve and in Looking for Jimmy—about the pivotal role Archbishop John Hughes, Fordham’s founder, played in galvanizing “the Irish-American process of reorganization” in the mid-19th century. How would you sum up his contributions?
I always say he was as much an Irish chieftain as a Catholic churchman. He’s the stem of the whole flower, the central figure, or however you want to describe it. He was here when a million Irish came out of Ireland from the famine, essentially skill-less, impoverished, and he was the mainspring of their reorganization. I always say that the Irish experience in America was about reorganizing. They were a mob when they came here. They had no financial resources. They had no education. They had no skills.

The engines of reorganization were the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party (which called itself the “Organization”), and the labor movement. The thing was to know the community was there, and it held together. Things cohered.

How did you go from grad school at Fordham to political speechwriting?
I wrote an article for America magazine in 1979 called “An American Irish St. Patrick’s Day.” I submitted it because, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was fascinated by this Irish-American experience that seemed to me to be going away without having been examined. We never looked at ourselves. Now we were moving to the suburbs. We were losing that thing I was talking about; the coherent thing was falling apart. But where was the record of it? Supposedly the Irish are great writers, but I couldn’t find any novels about the Irish-American experience. One, Elizabeth Cullinan, she wrote a beautiful novel, House of Gold, about the Bronx parish that I grew up in. But I remember everybody was horrified that she wrote it. She was putting out the family laundry. My mother was like, “How could she do that?”

So I wrote the article about this, and a Fordham alumnus read it and gave it to [New York Governor] Hugh Carey, who knew my father and was looking for a speechwriter. Out of the blue, they asked me to write the Fordham Law School commencement speech for him. I’d never written a speech. But I was looking for a job, and I didn’t want to be underemployed, so I wrote the speech. They really liked it and eventually offered me a job. I said I’ll do it for a year and then go back to academics. That was almost 40 years ago.

What did you learn from your experience in Albany?
To work in politics behind the scenes, you learn so much about the dynamics of human interrelationships, how much is based on personal relationships. Merit and hard work are no match for it. You know what was the great motto of the Albany machine? Honesty is no substitute for experience.

At what point did an academic career recede in your rearview mirror?
It receded when I got my second raise. I was making about twice what I’d been making. And then I got married. My wife is from the Bronx. We knew each other 14 years before we got married. That’s what’s known in the west of Ireland as a “whirlwind courtship.” She had moved to Albany for graduate school. She was a rehabilitation counselor. We reunited and got married. Finishing the doctorate would have been taking a big step backward. And some part of me always wanted to be a writer. It was an ambition.

Tell me about the genesis of Banished Children of Eve. I understand you initially thought you were going to write a history of the Irish in New York. Is that right?
I was an ex-academic. I still have a big interest in history. I used to send away for remaindered books. As I began to think about the experience of the famine Irish coming into New York, I realized there was really no central history written of it, this big event. I got one book on the Draft Riots, The Armies of the Streets [by Adrian Cook]. This historian did what no historian had done before. He went down and got the records from the morgue. They used to say a thousand people died in the riots. He could identify a hundred and something people. One of the names was Peter Quinn. My Quinn ancestors weren’t here yet. They didn’t come until 1870, but I was like, “Whoa, who is he?”

The personalization of history struck me. There were no diaries, no records. Nobody wrote. There’s not a scrap of paper in my family of anybody’s experience. So I wanted to write a history, but I began to realize the voices I wanted were not recorded. Then I found out that this songwriter, Stephen Foster, was in New York at the time of the Draft Riots. I went down—I think he committed suicide in the New England Hotel on the Bowery, and I stood in front of it. Every novelist is part psychotic; we hear voices. And standing there, I kind of felt I knew who he was. I had never written fiction, not a lick of it. But I said the only way I reach those voices is in novels.

How conscious were you of the fact that as a novelist you were drawing from your work experiences—for example, from the time you worked as a court officer in the Bronx?
At some points I was, absolutely. Dealing with a city, I felt like it was in extremis [as it was during the Civil War]. Being in the South Bronx in the ’70s in a uniform and sitting in a courtroom with 150 people and saying, “Well, you know, these people look poor and strange to me. And this is what my ancestors looked like to the people who were wearing the uniforms at that time.”

I figured it wasn’t just an Irish story I was telling at that point because once you stepped off those boats, you’re no longer Irish. You’re still Irish, but you’re becoming something else. And part of that experience is you have to interact with people you never had to interact with before. You might hate them. But you have to live with them, and some part of you is going to rub off on each other. That dynamic hasn’t changed.

Since 2005, you’ve published a trilogy of historical-mystery novels featuring the Irish-American detective Fintan Dunne. Do you see those books as part of a continuum that began with Banished Children of Eve?
Yes, Fintan Dunne is a descendant of Jimmy Dunne [in Banished Children of Eve], but I don’t know how. He’s a cousin somehow. The idea was that they would be three books that would stand alone, but in a way tell the history of New York from the First World War to the Cold War. And the thread would be this Irish-Catholic guy, Fintan Dunne.

I love Raymond Chandler. I always felt his character Philip Marlowe, he’s really Irish American with his hard-edged blend of cynicism and idealism, and he belongs in New York. So that was the inspiration for Fintan Dunne. I knew people that lived in that New York, and the thing about New York is, you never have to look for a story to tell. It’s right there in front of you.

How do you go about conducting research for your novels? When do you know enough’s enough?
I love doing research. Every writer wants excuses not to write, and research is the best excuse to have because you’re still working on the book. What I would try to do is immerse myself to the point where I would feel that I have some sense of that world. Then I would start to write, and if I had to look for other pieces, I would.

When I was researching Banished Children, my wife and daughter were away for the summer at Shelter Island. I would go out on weekends, but every night after work, I’d go to the newspaper division of the New York Public Library. I read all of the newspapers from the Civil War. I remember sitting there, and the air conditioner wasn’t working. It was August. I said, well, now I’ll read all of Harper’s Weekly. Then I realized I can either write this or research it for the rest of my life because the research is quicksand; it’s so interesting.

Did it get harder to stop researching for the Fintan Dunne books because it’s just so much easier to find things these days?
Oh, yeah, it’s unbelievable. I used to keep a list at my desk. I’d write down things to look up. Then at lunch hour—I was working at the Time-Life building—I’d run to the library. Now you just go online. It’s so much easier but not as much fun. It was so much more like detective work before. You were like Fintan Dunne. You were a gumshoe tracking stuff down.

What does it mean to you to be an American of Irish ancestry born in New York? What kind of cultural inheritance do those three things imply?
My father once said to me that the legacy of being Irish is having a sense of humor and rooting for the underdog. And if you’re going to live in New York City, those are two necessary things!

And I think the great thing about being Irish and Catholic in New York is you don’t have to be. Everybody can choose what they want to be. It’s not an identity imposed on you. Tomorrow, I could be an American Buddhist. To me, that makes it so much more valuable, you know, that freedom to be what you want to be that New York confers, I think, as much or more than any place in the world. I can be this. Then I can admit other people’s rights to their choices.

You’ve talked about storytelling as a noble occupation, something that unites us all. Would you elaborate on that?
You grow up, and you think there are serious jobs—accountant, lawyer, business CEO—and then you realize, the most important thing human beings have, the thing that makes us human, are stories. The first thing we did after we sat around campfires was to tell each other stories. It is essentially what it is to be human.

In every human society, one of the most important persons has been the storyteller, the seanachie in Irish. Before the Bible was written, it was spoken. Every religion is organized around a story. Every nation is organized around a story. Every family has its own myth.

Now I think there are bad stories. There are stories that are written or told badly, and then there are stories that are bad, like eugenics. That was a bad story. It was essentially a story that was used against other people to commit mass murder. Stories are very powerful.

One of the things I learned in writing speeches was that a good speech is a good story. And [Ronald] Reagan, one of his powers as president was, he had a story. He had the story of the frontiersman and the lone pioneer. One of the reasons why Cuomo is remembered is he had a story too—family, mom and pop. That’s what people listen to.

Do you ever itch to be back where you were—
To be young with hair? Sure, everybody does.

I mean, as a political speechwriter, having the opportunity to help tell a story in that way?
No. I’m really glad I did it. It was a defining experience. It helped me be a writer in ways I can’t describe. But I would never, ever want to do it again. For five minutes, I wouldn’t want to do it again. And I do think you have to be young to do it. It’s physically taxing. And it’s an exercise in anonymity.

Next month, you’ll be participating in a Fordham conference on “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination.” How would you define that term, and do you think of yourself as a Catholic writer?
When I’m writing, I never think about being Catholic. It’s just who I am. I’m not advancing any dogmas.

I have an essay in Looking for Jimmy where I said there are three elements to the Catholic imagination: sin, grace, and mercy. I wrote that years ago, and Pope Francis, the word he uses all the time now is mercy. We don’t want justice. We want justice for other people. We want mercy for ourselves. In politics, there’s not much mercy. It’s always been an in-demand commodity in the world, and it always will be, because it’s such a leap. Mercy is not deserved. It’s freely given, and there’s no rationale for it.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Ryan Stellabotte.

Watch Peter Quinn’s New York, a five-minute video in which Quinn talks about his noir-tinged Fintan Dunne series and the city as muse. “For me,” he begins, “New York City isn’t so much a setting as it is a character. It destroys some people, elevates others. But one thing New York won’t do is leave you alone. It’s always changing.”

Members of the University community gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral—the final resting place of that founder, Archbishop John Hughes, the first Catholic archbishop of New York—for a Mass that formally launched Fordham’s 175^th anniversary year, or Dodransbicentennial.

With the founding of Fordham, first known as St. John’s College, “the great story of Catholic higher education in the Northeast began,” said Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham, who celebrated the Mass. “The cathedral is one of the other gifts that John Hughes gave to the church, the city, and the country, and it is fitting therefore that we gather here, near his tomb, to celebrate what he did for us.”

The anniversary year will feature special events, exhibits, and programs that highlight Fordham’s history and impact. Also celebrated will be the 100^th anniversary of three Fordham graduate schools—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Education, and the Graduate School of Social Service—and the 170^th anniversary of Fordham becoming a Jesuit institution of higher learning.

“In this year, as we celebrate our storied past, we will also focus on the promise of our next 175 years,” said Maura Mast, PhD, dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, in remarks following the service. “Our story is the story of generations of students, educators, and alumni who believed in the power of a Fordham education to transform lives, and who gave heart and voice to our guiding principle, wisdom and learning in the service of others.”

Fordham’s Origin

The Fordham story began with Archbishop Hughes’ dream of helping immigrants and Irish Catholics who faced poverty and prejudice in both Ireland and America, as Msgr. Thomas J. Shelley, GSAS ’66, explained in his homily at the Mass.

“He considered education the indispensable means for the members of his immigrant flock to break loose from the cycle of poverty that ensnared them, and to take part in what today we would call the American dream,” said Msgr. Shelley, professor emeritus of theology and author of Fordham, A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 (Fordham University Press, 2016).

He described Archbishop Hughes’ “begging” in New York and Europe to pay for the college’s original 106 acres and for the building renovations that were needed. The struggles continued after the college opened its doors on June 24, 1841, at Rose Hill Manor, in what was then Westchester County. The diocesan clergy members running the college were repeatedly called away, and the college had four presidents in five years before the Society of Jesus took over in 1846.

Archbishop Hughes also had to face down the prejudices of his time. In 1844, he showed his “tough and feisty” side when he told the nativist mayor of New York City that he would turn the city into “a second Moscow”—destroyed by Russians during Napoleon’s 1812 invasion—if a nativist mob attacked the city’s Catholic community (as it had recently attacked Philadelphia’s). The nativists backed down.

After the homily, Father McShane noted that Archbishop Hughes distributed muskets to area Catholic churches and schools for protection. Two sat in the Fordham president’s office for many years until one president gave them to a friend, he said.

Honoring Archbishop Hughes’ Message

Msgr. Shelley also cited Archbishop Hughes’ words: “‘I have always preached that every denomination, Jews, Christians, Catholics, Protestants—of every shade and sex—were all entitled to entire freedom of conscience’” without hindrance. The words, Msgr. Shelley said, were effectively endorsed by the Second Vatican Council in the following century.

“I do not think that the influence of John Hughes on Fordham University is limited to the past,” he said.

After the service, Father McShane spoke of “all that we have to live up to.”

“We have to live up to the fact that [Archbishop Hughes] left us an institution that from the very start was precarious—founded on faith, sustained by love, aimed at transmitting wisdom and learning so that people would serve others and do the world a world of good; that is to say, set the world on fire and transform other hearts.”

Fordham University Board of Trustees Chairman Bob Daleo, GABELLI ’72, noted the progression of Fordham from “six students and two buildings” to the University it is today, with three campuses, an academic center in London, about 15,000 students, and academic partnerships worldwide.

“Today we do honor the achievements of the past, but we truly celebrate the opportunities of Fordham’s future,” he said. “In doing so, we rededicate ourselves to sustaining Fordham not simply as an institution but as a way of life.”

Visit our 175^th timeline. 

To Melissa Aziz, a junior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, it’s a potent symbol of her family’s 2,500-mile journey from Guyana to New York City.

Aziz’ grandfather brought it with him when he moved to South Ozone Park, Queens in the 1980s. When she was asked to share the story of one object related to her family’s immigration for the class Race and Ethnic Politics, she decided to learn more about it.

“I didn’t realize the significance of the coconut palm tree before this assignment,” said Aziz, a political science major. “My dad went into how the entire tree is used not just for a broom, but also for the oil, and how they never ever threw away any part of the tree.”

Aziz and 33 fellow students each submitted a picture of an object and short write-up to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The museum published the works on its website as part of its “Your Story, Our Stories” archive.

Christina Greer, PhD, associate professor of political science, said the collaborative project allows students to share something about themselves and, in doing so, to challenge their assumptions about one another. The items submitted were varied—a tomato from one student whose grandfather moved from Mexico; a wooden chair that had been carried on a covered wagon from Virginia to Missouri in the 1860s by a student’s great-great-grandfather.

“From this point on, you know a little bit more about your classmates through their great-grandparents, their grandparents, or their parents,” Greer said. “You now know if someone sitting you next to you for the last few weeks in class is actually a first-generation American—and you thought they were just some regular guy from Queens.”

Annie Polland, PhD, vice president of programs and education at the museum, said the website, which currently has about 600 stories, is a way to share the stories of artifacts that are not confined to the physical space of the museum. By opening the site up to anyone, it’s easy to see the common threads that run through the experiences of all immigrants. It’s possible, for instance, to search the archive for all entries about religious objects.

“When you read the stories that people submitted, you see how these religious objects served a similar function in the families, whether it’s comfort because they’ve been separated from their family or a help to get them get beyond the stresses of the day,” she said.

Polland said sewing machines are the most commonly submitted object. She attributes this to the large number of immigrants who worked in the garment industry. Dictionaries are numerous as well.

“These were submitted by students who came over as young children or were born here, but who had young immigrant parents who were trying to learn the language while they were working and raising kids,” Polland said. “They remember [their parents]carrying around dictionaries to go to interviews or interact with the world.”

For Hunter Blas, a junior majoring in political science and English, choosing an item was a more sentimental exercise than a story of immigration. The native of Guam is not an immigrant because the island is a U.S. territory and members of her family still reside there, having moved between the mainland and the island.

She opted to share a photo of the altar her Roman Catholic grandmother used to maintain, paying homage to family members, including her father’s service in the U.S. Navy.

But she said she really enjoyed hearing her classmates’ stories of migration, especially one classmate’s story about a grandfather that emigrated from China to Mexico and whose grandchildren are now Americans.

“It just shows there’s way more under the surface than I ever would have thought about,” said Blas. “It makes Fordham feel a little more diverse than it seems to be at face value.”