A Feast of Ideas
(Page 5 of 5)
November / December 2007
by J. Trout Lowen
“Very rare and very powerful,” Schroedl adds.
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Cecil Gassis, who came to the United States from Sudan in 2003 and now oversees a YWCA program for new immigrants, says Marnita’s Table offers the kind of conversation many immigrants long for. “We wish we could stop somebody in the street and say, ‘I have some questions that I would like to get answers for.’ ”
But it was her conversations with other immigrants at Marnita’s Table that have really stayed with her, she says: “At Marnita’s Table there were people who looked different [yet] that did not stop them being successful and helping other people. . . . It was very encouraging, because I always thought that I had to find a way to be, if not normal, close to normal, close to the standards here.”
Just what constitutes “normal” can often become a thorny conversation, and debate over issues like immigration sometimes get heated, but only once, say Schroedl and Goldstein, have things threatened to spiral out of control. A dinner in April 2005 organized around some visiting Iraqi religious leaders who were touring the United States with the State Department nearly turned explosive over the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Also at dinner that night were a former military adviser to Saddam Hussein, an Iraqi American academic prominent in the anti-Saddam movement, and several people who had experienced war in their home countries of Croatia, Syria, and Lebanon.
The dialogue between the academic and the general grew so heated that they separated themselves to “honor the spirit of welcome and respect” at the table, Goldstein says. Later, they took the discussion into a corner and kept at it until some kind of understanding was reached.
“By the end of the evening,” Goldstein says, “they were laughing with their arms around each other.”
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