NEWCOMERS: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York, or "Why I ❤NY"

NEWCOMERS: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York
ALAN MIKHAIL
Liveright / W.w. Norton (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.45 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The exceptional tale of an unorthodox, seventeenth–century married couple whose rags-to-riches story fundamentally rewrites our knowledge of American history at its very beginnings.

A man thought to be Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid are hardly the image we have of America’s founders. In Newcomers, Alan Mikhail upends the traditional story of American beginnings through the tale of Anthony “the Turk” and Grietje Reyniers.

Married in Amsterdam, they arrived in 1630s Dutch New Amsterdam, hoping to forge a new life. Always outsiders in the young colony, they battled Dutch authorities, brawled with neighbors, and seized land from Native Americans. In this revisionist portrait of the early American family, we learn of anti-Muslim sentiment through Anthony and of female defiance through Grietje.

Eventually banished from Manhattan to Long Island, Anthony and Grietje farmed, prospered, and raised a family whose descendants included the Vanderbilts and President Harding. Promising “to change the way we understand Colonial Gotham’s formative first years” (Susanah Shaw Romney), Alan Mikhail’s Newcomers provides revelatory insights into the seventeenth-century origins of New York.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The New World was always a frontier where European countries saw the utility of sending its misfits, its non-conforming people, its "undesirables" to make their own way. It was better that way, really...these were the people who gave someone powerful some kind of uncomfortable trouble, and as we're all quite clear even unto today that is simply not to be borne. By them. By you? Troublesome peasant, it is your fault and you must pay the price of being obstreperous and too difficult for {whoever}'s comfort by leaving everything you've ever known or owned to begin again in an utterly alien place. Survive or not, it's up to you.

Anthony and Grietje Jansen van Salee were the survivor types. They stood up for themselves, mixed-race man of ambition and drive and mouthy broad with a gift for invective that they were. Quintessential New Yorkers, in fact; though there was no such identity in the late seventeenth century. They left a restrictive, stifling life of economic precarity and social exclusion for the possibilities of the edge of the map, as it was then. I'm glad Dr. Mikhail introduced me to Anthony and Grietje because I think they're my (spiritual) ancestors. They set the pattern for people like me who don't think or act the way our peers and neighbors do because we don't like their ways and see no reason to pretend otherwise, who find our home here in New York.

The legal records that Dr. Mikhail draws from, and they're extensive (as well as footnoted to a fare-thee-well), show that Anthony and Grietje totally never stopped being difficult. Their neighbors in Dutch colonial Manhattan didn't much like having a "Turk" (mixed-race Anthony, always suspected of being Muslim despite no evidence existing to support that idea) and a mouthy whore (grit-loaded survivor Grietje) in their midst. Off to the wilds of Brooklyn with you, aggressive and non-conformist folk that you are! Even non-conforming people don't like non-conformists.

Is this ringing any bells, Islamophobic sex-negative leftist political types who apply purity tests to each other? Who exile their leaders for not being "perfect" and thus lose elections but win at the Pure Ideology game?

Anthony and Grietje prospered in their next exile as much as in their first. Their energy was tremendous so when it could be directed mostly at their real goals...prosperity for themselves...it was a great benefit for the colonials as well as themselves. The people it cost the most were not their colonist neighbors but the Native Americans the entire settler-colonial enterprise harmed the most. Anthony and Grietje left marks there as well, so truly set the pattern for all us New Yorkers to come by their darker, less benign actions as well as their courageous, trailblazing ones.

I felt very seen in reading this very well-presented story. It's true that Anthony, after Grietje's death, returned to Manhattan...the quintessential Manhattanite, move to Long Island to raise the kids and come home when they're grown! these two are perfect twenty-first century stereotypes!...it's also true that Anthony did things that look terrible to our eyes like have Native slaves-in-fact if not name to work lands he stole from them, but were part of the entire settler-colonial enterprise that white people like me are the beneficiaries of. There are few black-and-white actions in this our life.

Dr. Mikhail is very clear that people are not pure, that actions in context look different as the context changes over time, and that this partial and compromised record of two ordinary peoples' extraordinary choices and actions can never be considered complete or definitive. Defining people long-dead by the records they leave behind is always an act of interpretation. That does not mean it is not also an act of truth-telling, only that the truths so told must be viewed as contingent.

Maps and illustrations completed my happy journey through the lives of two remarkable spiritual ancestors I'm glad I got to know.