Photo credit: Franco Vogt
Finding just the right story for a book was my New Year’s resolution in 2013. I just didn’t know where to look. But I’ve always loved writing about my neighborhood — Manhattan’s historic Lower East Side, where I grew up and still live — and so I was happy to be assigned a small magazine piece on Polish classes at St. Stanislaus, a local Roman Catholic church.
As I arrived at the parish one Sunday morning in March, a caffeinated secular Jew with a notebook in hand, the Sunday school students were singing the Polish version of "Happy Birthday" to the new head priest, Father Tadeusz Lizinczyk:
Sto lat, sto lat, Niech zyje, zyje nam...