For 28 years, Morristown resident Stacey Schlosser has been making summer pilgrimages to the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York to savor its many cultural offerings in a relaxed, communal atmosphere.
It’s the last place she expected to witness an assassination attempt.
Schlosser was walking to her seat on Friday morning, about 125 feet from the Chautauqua amphitheater stage, when Salman Rushdie, 75, was stabbed multiple times by a 24-year-old man as the Indian-born author was about to participate in a moderated talk.
Hadi Matar, of Fairview, N.J., has been charged with attempted murder. Rushdie, who has lived with an Iranian bounty on his head since he published The Satanic Verses in 1989, underwent surgery and was on a ventilator after sustaining damage to his liver, arm and en eye, according to his agent.
The Institution’s director was only a couple of sentences into his audience welcome on Friday when the attack occurred, Schlosser recounted on Saturday.
“And then, you know, kind of like in the corner of my eye, I saw motion on the stage where there wasn’t supposed to be …and as soon as the guy leapt on the stage, the motion happened seemingly all at once… I think he stabbed (Rushdie) like six to eight times.”
Before this, the only violence she ever witnessed was a girl getting beaten up in middle school.
“So I mean, it was just like I was like a deer in the headlights,” said Schlosser, 59, who owns Glassworks Studio in Morristown.
Shaken, she found a seat. The calmness around her was strangely disturbing; everyone seemed in shock, she said.
And then, after perhaps a couple of minutes, while commotion continued onstage, the audience started clapping. Someone told her Rushdie was walking off the stage.
“But I think it was the police escorting the perpetrator off stage. (Rushdie) was on the floor being cared for physically.”
At that point, Schlosser said, authorities made everyone clear out.
‘IT’S WHERE YOU FEEL SAFE’
Chautauqua was founded in 1874 as a training center for Methodist Sunday school teachers; Methodist communities in Mt. Tabor and Ocean Grove were New Jersey offshoots, Schlosser said.
The center in upstate New York, about an hour from Buffalo, evolved into a summer retreat that focuses on religion, art, education, recreation and “porches,” for community, she said.
“Until yesterday, this place was just a bubble, away from the natural world. You don’t lock your door. You don’t lock up your bike. Little children hang out by themselves. Nobody’s watching them, and yet everybody’s concerned for them if somebody falls down. Everybody’s there for them. You just know that you’re safe, and that you know your own community.”
Last week’s theme at Chautauqua was “home.”
“Home, you know, it’s where you feel safe. Home is where people embrace you and allow you to speak your mind, as opposed to a physical space being home,” Schlosser said.
And so, Rushdie was on the dais with the head of City of Asylum, a Pittsburgh program for writers who are threatened because of their work. (He was treated for minor injuries.)
Like countless others, Schlosser is struggling to grasp what happened.
“It’s just so weird that this guy in New Jersey wasn’t even born when (Rushdie) wrote (The Satanic Verses). And nobody talks about that book anymore. Like, what kind of community did he grow up in, 35 minutes from where you’re sitting right now, that would cause him to hate him so much, that he would drive six hours, and know that there was no way for him to escape?” Schlosser said.
“How did he grow up with that much hatred, to sacrifice his own life one way or another, for something that a man wrote before he was even born? I don’t understand that,” she said.
Schlosser was among eyewitnesses interviewed by an NBC affiliate and the Associated Press. Her comments were picked up by Al Jazeera, the state-owned media operation of Qatar.
“That was unexpected, to say the least,” said the former president of Morristown’s Temple B’nai Or.
This is Schlosser’s first full summer in her family’s Chautauqua apartment, a happy getaway place for years. She plans to keep coming back, despite Friday’s horror.
She hopes the incident won’t turn Chautauqua into a fortress. She remembers how airports made everyone remove their shoes after the shoe bomber attack years ago. That’s the world she tries to escape in upstate New York.
“I know a lot of people are heavy on blaming the Institution for security yesterday. But in 148 years, nothing remotely like this has ever happened. And Salman Rushdie himself, who chose to come out of hiding and decided to live his life, he’s been in New York City without a security detail,” Schlosser said.
“So everybody wants to rush and blame everybody. But you know what, the crazies are out there. And they’re gonna find a way.”