BOOK REVIEW: Bloomfield Avenue-A Jewish-Catholic Jersey Girl's Spiritual Journey

Bloomfield Avenue in Newark in the 1950s is the starting point for the nearly eternal search for happily ever after. Linda Mercadante gets an idea in her head of what she wants and goes after it. Whether it’s a crucifix or a husband, it never turns out to be what it seemed it would be. That includes her quest to find God through religion and to find a nice man with whom to live happily.

Well, you probably can guess the rest, but many surprises await you in this Jersey girl’s spiritual journey. A Italian father who’s a non-practicing Catholic and a Brooklyn mother who’s a non-practicing Jew leads to the author’s confused childhood.

In all Mercadante brings the wonder of living at a special time, North Newark in the 1950s and early 60s when so much change occurred in family and city living.

You can almost taste the Italian pastries prepared in her family's bakery, what she calls the “church of pastry.” Those were the very same pastries she disdained. It was a part of growing up, as much as the flour dust that settled on everything, a part of growing away from her parents.

Mercadante’s parents made her wedding cake (they made my sister’s wedding cake, too) for her first wedding. She attended Prospect Hill Country Day School in Newark, later attending Glen Ridge High School.

The author was smart enough and always held her own, but she was mostly treated as someone from the other side of the tracks who would never fit in among the children of the doctors, lawyers and other important people who sent their children to the best schools.

At Glen Ridge high, she recalls being told, “And you couldn’t become a member of our country club. It doesn’t take Italians or Catholics.”

She never bothered telling them she was half-Jewish.

Mercadante reasons that “Being from Newark was starting to look like the strike against me that was worse than being either Italian-Catholic or Jewish.”

As a child she longed for a crucifix. She blasted her record player. She played on Bloomfield Avenue – one of the busiest streets in north Newark. When she received Holy Communion, it nearly caused World War Three in her house. In hindsight, nearly everything she did seemed to erupt into a loud or unspoken battle over religion and will.

Mercadante lived through all the conflict and changes first-hand. That's not an exaggeration. She was sort of a female Forrest Gump in a generation of change.

She later states, “without planning it, I had become an atheist.”

The award-winning newspaper reporter keeps the story moving. There are times you find yourself yelling, “don’t do that!” but she does and it leads to more tribulations. The author has pluck. No matter how many times she gets knocked down, figuratively and literally, she gets back up and goes for her goals.

She was an airline stewardess for the glamour. That was in the days of short skirts when stewardesses lost their job if they got married or gained too much weight. She married a guy with a kid. She was spared the mother role for a while.

She saw the definition of ‘feminine’ change before her eyes. Every woman under 30 should read this book to understand how far women have come in the past few decades. It's almost unbelievable to read how things were then. Think of it as Jim Crow for women. Mercadante captures well, each wince and woe.

The longing for a crucifix in childhood was just the beginning of her religious search. Mercadante was baptized twice when she chose a religion and then changed denominations. Then she was told she needed to be baptized a third time in her new denomination because those two didn't count.

She did a lot of things wrong, she admits now. But someone was watching over her … as the naive divorcee hitchhiking across Europe; as the young mother beaten by her husband – long before spouse abuse was recognized as a problem. As the woman who wanted to be a minister when that concept was laughable.

Mercadante toughed it out when lesser women would have thrown in the towel. What she found was that she had the brains and talent to do whatever she set out to do. And, she set out to do a lot of things, even if they required learning a new language – German (and later, Hebrew) – in no time at all.

On her way to Italy, she stopped in at a religious commune in Switzerland for a short visit and spent a year. Mercadante sometimes finds the answers to what she’s looking for. Other times she finds more questions and they lead her on to her next adventure, whether that’s a new husband, marital trials, or an adopted child, or dealing with her parents who seem to come from another planet in light of the vast changes the author sees first hand in the world.

Though she was told that women would never be admitted to theology school, or ever become ministers, or, heaven forefend, teach theology, Mercadante pulled herself up by her bootstraps, applied her brains and fulfilled her dream.

What good is living happily ever after if you didn’t have to work and struggle through trials and tribulations to appreciate what you’ve got.

Currently a professor, Mercadante tells the story that begins on Bloomfield Avenue in Newark, N.J., in a straight forward way, and only occasionally lapses into professor-ese. She writes of “an inchoate desire” and “overt praise seemed to be anathema to these restrained Protestants.”

But she’s equally dead-on in her casual observations, “I noted that this Protestant woman did not know how to prepare spaghetti, using a puree of vegetables on top, instead of tomato ‘gravy’”

In setting out to write this book, a fall put her in an easy position to drop the book idea and simply carry on with every day life. But that’s not her style. She has a serious and important story to tell here. It is about a split between religious cultures and the sexes and the changes our country has seen in the past few decades. But it is a story everyone should know and Mercadante tells it well.

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Bloomfield Avenue: A Jewish-Catholic Jersey Girl's Spiritual Journey by Linda Mercadante

Linda Mercadante

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