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Issue 1348 October 23, 2011
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Isadore's Secret a Crime Book for the Ages, Featuring Sex, Murder, Religion

Bay City Tangentially Involved in Mardi Link's Non-Fiction Michigan Classic

October 16, 2011       1 Comments
By: Dave Rogers

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Only known picture of Sister Janina Mezek, from the University of Notre Dame Archives, is featured in the book "Isadore's Secret."
 

The Bay City connections pop out in the classic story of a 1906 murder of a pregnant nun in the Traverse City area.

Mardi Link has won fame, and possibly fortune, with her writing that is exemplified in "Isadore's Secret," a 2009 publication of the University of Michigan Press.

The murder of Sister Janina at the small Leelenau County community of Isadore is an isolated incident that however opens vistas of imagination into the wider dramas of the age.

Repressed sexuality of priests, pregnant nuns and farm girl housekeepers come gushing out across the pages of "Secret," betraying human emotions beyond control and above the law.

There is hardly any tale to compare to this Michigan yarn of desire, illicit sex, hatred, intrigue, mystery, horrific scandal, murder, confession, subterfuge, hideous skeletons, torture, betrayal, and, eventually, compassion.

Figures from Bay City's past come occasionally to the fore, like Bay City's Father Ladislaus Krawkowski, who travels to Manistee to berate a fellow priest who opposed his appointment to bishop, Father Andrew Bieniawski.

After Sister Janina had gone missing, the Bay City priest arrived unexpectedly by train in Manistee, obviously harboring a grudge.

"What are you going to do about the bones under your old church?" demanded Krakowski, according to the author's account. Father Andrew thought:

"How dare he make such a revolting suggestion. It was just a way to discredit him, he'd believed at the time; revenge for their differing politics, and proof in Father Andrew's mind that he'd been right all along: the man would have been a poor choice for bishop."

The author commented: "That had been Father Andrew's parting remark, and he spun around and left the depot, insulting the other priest under his breath as he went. At the time, he remembered being furious that Father Krawkowski would to to such lengths to discredit him. Now, he wondered if the wicked plot his enemy had planted more than four years ago actually had roots, in fact, and was about to bear its poisonous fruit by the bushel."

Fact or fiction it's dramatic stuff, especially when concerning the revered clerics of days gone by and the hierarchy of the church. Most alarming is the revelation (or contention) in the book that Stella, the housekeeper/murderess, confessed the murder of the nun to a priest in Milwaukee.

The sanctity of the confessional allegedly was breached when the confessor, one Father Nowak, told her to wait while he ran to consult the bishop about giving absolution. When her wish was granted, she believed the church had absolved her of the crime -- a fanciful dream.

The tangled human interactions of the book are personified when the long-suppressed crime is revealed by a young housekeeper in agony over having given birth to a child fathered by a priest. The sordid details of the murder of the pregnant nun 12 years previously spew forth in the farm and religious community like a plague of locusts. Isadore's Secret is finally loosed.

We are told the pillars of the church hierarchy -- whispering priests, bishops and sister susperiors -- after learning of the murder from Stella's confession, had conspired for years to suppress the news.

According to the author, Stella is tortured in jail by the sheriff and an evil "spy," a Polish-speaking female detective. Using Sister Janina's skeleton, laid out in an adjoining cell, candles and hooded capes in attempts to extract a confession, the pair create a gruesome scenario few horror films can approach.

Eventually, after legal machinations including appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court, Stella was sent to the Detroit House of Correction for a life term.

The heavens parted and compassion rained down as Gov. Alex Groesbeck, a Republican and prison reform advocate, paroled her in 1927 after seven years incarceration.

The indomitable Stella Lypcynska, amazingly is rehired by the forgiving Felicians and works 30 years as a cook in a Milwaukee convent. She dies in 1961 at age 92, her life of service almost miraculously fulfilled.

Several books, a Broadway play, "The Runner Stumbles," a movie of the same name and recollections of the residents of the parish are tributes to the enduring power of the tale.

The morals of the story, numerous as they are, are evoked by the concluding poignant lines of the book in which fellow Felicians, after a fierce electrical storm in 1989, take Sister Janina's long-neglected remains from Holy Rosary Cemetery in Isadore and bury her in the company of fellow sisters near the former Detroit motherhouse.

"It is satisfying to think of her finally surrounded by religious acceptance, an orphan no more, at peace with eternity," the writer concludes mournfully.



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"The BUZZ" - Read Feedback From Readers!

Fran says:       On October 18, 2011 at 01:48 PM
"Isadore's Secret" is one of the most compelling and absorbing stories I have every read. I sent the book to several friends, who, like me, could not put it down. I can only say: read it, read it, read it!
Agree? or Disagree?


Dave Rogers

Dave Rogers is a former editorial writer for the Bay City Times and a widely read,
respected journalist/writer in and around Bay City.
(Contact Dave Via Email at carraroe@aol.com)

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