The Dwelling Place of Wonder. Harry L. Serio
Many who had endured the turmoil of previous periods of persecution or depression felt they could weather whatever storm might appear. They would be terribly wrong.
So in 1910 Natalie left her father and mother and her ten brothers and sisters and made the journey down the Volga to the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic.
Lucas and Natalie were married and bought a house on Bremen Street in a German-speaking section of Newark, New Jersey. The two-story, four-room dwelling was one of hundreds built in the 1880s in the “Down Neck” area of the city, later to be called “the Ironbound” because it was surrounded by rail lines. The houses all looked the same, like a lineup of houses on a Monopoly board. In these four small rooms—kitchen, front parlor, and two bedrooms—Lucas and Natalie raised their son and three daughters.
After the death of my grandfather in 1954 and my parents’ divorce, my mother, my two brothers, and I moved into 89½ Marne Street. It was during this time that I heard the stories of life in Imperial Russia.
Natalie had a picture of the imperial family—Nicholas and Alexandra, and their children, Marie, Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia, and Alexei. She would bring it out and grieve over their deaths at Ekaterinburg. What a handsome man, she would say of Nicholas, and such beautiful children. I found myself falling in love with Grand Duchess Tatiana and wondering what it would have been like to live in St. Petersburg.
Dreams have a way of distorting reality. They often leave out the dark side, the unpleasantness that mars one’s reverie. St. Petersburg native, Svetlana Boym, refers to nostalgia as a “hypochondria of the heart.” It is a yearning for a time that never was, a false memory that becomes a reality of our own design because we choose not to face the truth.
Natalie had a yearning for her homeland and the family she left behind. She would not speak about the misery of the Russian peasants, virtual slaves of the aristocracy, and the horrors of their menial existence. The massacres of the Jews in the many pogroms that occurred were not part of her consciousness, nor did she speak of the great famine of 1891 that affected the area of the Volga where she lived when she was six years old.
Natalie was upper middle class, a privileged element of Russian society that would lose everything in the coming revolution. She was fluent in seven languages: German, Russian, Ukranian, Polish, Dutch, English, and Farsi. I asked her why she spoke Farsi. “We had Persian servants,” she said. “We had to tell them what to do, and they would teach us their language.”
Her father not only made luggage, but crafted fine footwear. He made ballet slippers for one of the tsar’s daughters and leather boots for the imperial household. She recalled going with her father one day to make a delivery and encountering a strange looking man emerging from the palace. It was none other than the mad monk, Grigori Novykh, known to history as Rasputin.
Natalie said that he was frightening to behold, and she backed away so fast that she nearly stumbled. He stared at her briefly with penetrating eyes that she never forgot. It was a peculiar brush with history. Rasputin had bewitched the tzarina, who had hoped that he might affect a cure for her hemophiliac son, Alexei, but Rasputin simply used the imperial connections to influence Alexandra who ruled in Nicholas’ absence while he was administering the military forces in the Great War.
There are those who regard Rasputin as a mystic and saint, a holy man, a “starets” who put aside the things of this world to concentrate on praying for the salvation of those souls who still lived here.
He was far from a devout servant of Christ. He lived a life of excess and debauchery, engaging in the wildest of carnal delights, using the rationale that salvation can only come through repentance, but before one can repent one must first sin. Even Martin Luther, whose confessor advised him to “sin boldly,” knew that one “must believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.” Rasputin bestowed his blessings upon those aristocratic noblewomen who acceded to his spiritual distortions, without offering the blessing that comes from the life of faithful devotion to Christ.
Rasputin was reputed to be a psychic, not only in his ability to heal by therapeutic touch, but he was also a seer who predicted his own death. He once said that if he should die at the hands of a Romanov, the entire dynasty would crumble within two years. When he was poisoned, shot, and drowned by Prince Felix Yussoupov, the murder of the imperial family occurred within two months.
Natalie would never forget how close she came to this personification of evil and always referred to him as the one responsible for the fall of Imperial Russia.
Evil has many disguises, but is most dangerous when it comes in the form of one who pretends to be holy. While I have known a few fallen servants of God, those who deliberately cloak themselves in the cloth of the religious to carry out their nefarious aims are the most despicable.
It seemed that Natalie’s encounter with the mad monk had left a very deep impression. It also taught me to be wary of latter day “messiahs” who use religion to attain power, wealth, and influence and often misdirect it for their own personal and political gain.
AMONG THE GLADIATORS
My father was a fighter. A lean, scrappy kid with a hair-trigger temper who moved up the ladder from street brawls to the boxing ring. Danny Ardito taught him how to control his powder-keg nature and wait for the right opportunity to ignite and direct the explosive wrath of a frustrated childhood.
When my grandfather’s first wife died after bearing two children, Luigi married her sister. My father was her first-born. His older brother and sister were also cousins. Seven other siblings were to follow to comprise a family of twelve. For an immigrant from Italy this was enough to fertilize the new soil of the American dream and roots took hold.
Dad bought into that dream, but he didn’t want to wait. He had to reach the pinnacle as quickly as possible and break out of the Italian ghetto. As the asphalt basketball courts in today’s urban playgrounds fuel the hopes of young African-Americans, so the boxing ring became the arena of my father’s dreams.
Harry Serio was regarded as a tough fighter who never backed away from an opponent. One writer said that he combined the art of boxing with his great speed and power punching. He won the Golden Gloves as a welterweight in 1940 and retired with a record of 38–5. In 1987 he was inducted into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame, one of his proudest moments.
My earliest memories of travels with Dad were to the run-down gymnasiums and converted warehouses where punching bags were hung from rafters, canvas was stretched over springless mattresses, and ropes were tied to two-by-fours embedded in buckets of sand at the corners.
Two-Ton Tony Galento, the heavyweight contender and the only man to knock Joe Louis down before losing the bout, made a guest appearance at the Rivoli Theater. He had a minor role in the classic Marlon Brando film, “On the Waterfront.” He was waiting for a cab after the crowds had left. I had heard that he had sparred with my father, but it was more likely Tony threw a punch at him in some bar. Dad was fortunate Tony didn’t connect. I asked Tony if he remembered my father.
“Yeah, kid, I remember him. Good fighter. Knows how to take a punch. How’s he doing?”
Before I could answer, he got into the taxi and was off, and I was left wondering, “Could I have been a contender if I had taken seriously my father’s encouragement and urging?”
My father wanted me to follow in his footsteps as a boxer, but I could never master the footwork. He thought that exposure to the gyms and boxing arenas, the smell of sweat and blood, would somehow entice me into the glamorous world of mayhem and that I would find fulfillment in inflicting pain on others. He expected me to learn the fine art of strategic assault and battery, breaking down an opponent’s defenses and knocking him to the canvas before he could do the same to me. The Golden Rule of the ring was “do unto your opponent before he has a chance to do unto you.”
The hardwood floors, the smell of sweat and blood, the sound of leather against leather, and sometimes bone, are vivid. By the age of seven I had seen all I wanted of open wounds and broken teeth and bruised eyes.
One Sunday afternoon at