Stories of The Immigrant Journey

In Journeys: An American Story, seventy-three contributors from across the American spectrum share the story of their immigrant ancestors, demonstrating the greatness of America's roots in diversity.

The stories are grouped into categories:

The Changers, including Marlo Thomas, Gabrielle Giffords, Cory Booker, and Linda Hills the great-granddaughter of Andrew Carnegie.

The Lovers, including Alan Alda, Deborah Norville, and US Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao.

The Originals with an essay by Ray Halbritter representing the Oneida Indian Nation.

The Rescuers, including Marine Corps officer Zach Iscol and retired police officer Matt Tomasic.

The Seekers, including Dr Mehmet Oz, Rhodes Scholar Ahmed Ahmed, Governor of Rhode Island Gina Raimondo, and US Senator Barbara Boxer.

The Strivers, including Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Professor Joseph Bower of Harvard Business School, US Senator Tim Scott, and Hemings family descendant Ben Freeman..

The Survivors, including oncology nurse Nataliya Denchenko, Prof. Jorge Dominguez of Harvard, KIND founder Daniel Lubetzky, and Florida congresswoman Stephanie Murphy.

The Trailblazers, including Tony Bennett, Nancy Pelosi, author Lisa Birnbach, first Mainland China trustee of an Ivy League university Prof. Mao Ye, and investment banker and financial historian Eugene Dattel.

The Undocumented, including Dr. Richard Uscher Levine, Harvard student Erick Meza, and garment worker Helen Polychronopoulos.

The Institutions, including the American Ballet Theater, Monticello, and UJA/Catholic Charities.

The authors contend that the image of the American 'melting pot' should be replaced by the concept of a mosaic, "tiles of different colors and shapes indistinguishable from afar but quite distinctive the closer you get. A mosaic is only as good as its grout...used to bind and fit between the distinct stones...and hold it in place."

40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by  immigrants or their children, including AT&T, Procter & Gamble, US Steel, DuPont, Craft, International Paper, Nordstrom, and more recently Goggle, eBay, GE, IBM, McDonald's, and Apple.

The stories are inspirational and uplifting, and will make readers consider their own immigrant roots and the social, political, and economic factors that inspired them to leave their homeland.

All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the New-York Historical Society and the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation.

People are invited to share their family journey at www.journeysamericanstory.com

I found this book interesting on several levels: as a composite of American experience, a political statement, and, as a family genealogy researcher, as family history.

My own immigrant family history includes stories of fleeing persecution, seeking religious freedom, and hoping for a better life.

My Gochenour Swiss Brethren ancestors sought religious freedom, moving across Europe before settling in the Shenandoah Valley by 1742. My Becker ancestors were Baptist German Russians who fled increasing hostility against German nationalists in Russia--and to avoid being recalled into the Czar's army. My Ramer ancestor was a Palatine German who fled the continual warfare that decimated their homeland, settling in Pennsylvania, and then fought in the Revolutionary War. And my Greenwood great-grandparents left Britain a hundred years ago, my great-grandfather wanting a better life than working in a mine or the cotton mills of Lancashire.

What is your family journey?

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Journeys: An American Story
by Andrew Tisch, Mary Skafidas
Publication Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 9781948122016, 1948122014
Hardcover $27.99 USD

from the publisher:

Every family has a story of how they arrived in America, whether it was only a few months, years, decades, or centuries ago. Journeys: An American Story celebrates the vastness and variety of immigration tales in America, featuring seventy-three essays about the different ways we got here. This is a collection of family lore, some that has been passed down through generations, and some that is being created right now.

Journeys: An American Story captures the quintessential idea of the American dream. The individuals in this book are only a part of the brilliant mosaic of people who came to this country and made it what it is today. Read about a Governor’s grandfathers who dug ditches and cleaned sewers, laying the groundwork for a budding nation; how a future cabinet secretary crossed the ocean at age eleven on a cargo ship; about a young boy who fled violence in Budapest to become one of the most celebrated players of American football; the girl who escaped persecution to become the first Vietnamese American woman ever elected to the US congress; or the limo driver whose family took a seventy-year detour before finally arriving at his original destination, along with many other fascinating tales of extraordinary and everyday Americans.

In association with the New-York Historical Society, Andrew Tisch and Mary Skafidas have reached out to a variety of notable figures to contribute an enlightening and unique account of their family’s immigration story. All profits will be donated to the New-York Historical Society and the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation.

Featuring Essays by:
Alan Alda
Arlene Alda
Tony Bennett
Cory Booker
Michael Bloomberg
Barbara Boxer
Elaine Chao
Andrew Cuomo
Ray Halbritter
Jon Huntsman
Wes Moore
Stephanie Murphy
Deborah Norville
Dr. Oz
Nancy Pelosi
Gina Raimondo
Tim Scott
Jane Swift
Marlo Thomas
And many more!

Vintage Get Well Greeting Cards

My husband is recovering from knee replacement surgery. He was in and out the same day. It got him to thinking about the marvels of modern medicine, grateful that he will be able to walk again without pain.

Get Well Cards were once a mainstay of the greeting card industry. Illnesses and operations and even childbirth had higher risks. I don't remember when I last sent a Get Well card!

Here are some 1930s era greeting cards from my collection. Most are humorous cards.

 This amazing card references President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

 The patient is happy sexualizing his nurse.

 A 'hillbilly' farmer stereotype offers little solace.

 This card is filled with stories and jokes to entertain the patient.

 The images of African Americans are negative stereotypes.

I have some flowery card in my collection, too.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

"From beginning to end, she thought, she'd done everything wrong."-Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

Second chances, do-overs, reinventing oneself, rebirth, awakenings--are they wish-fulfillment fantasies? Can we change our lives? Or are we wound up by childhood experiences and genetics and parental models to whirl across the stage of a life we have no control over?

This is the essence of Anne Tyler's novel Clock Dance, the story of Willa, a woman who comes at life slant, passive and bending.

The story follows the life of Willa from her childhood in 1967 and through marriage and motherhood, the loss of her spouse and remarriage. She has never asserted her own needs, doing what is expected or what keeps others happy.

A phone call from a stranger informs that her son's ex-girlfriend has been shot and the neighbor is tired of caring for the girlfriend's child, Cheryl. The neighbor thinks Willa is the girl's grandmother. Willa has longed for grandchildren and decides to leave Arizona for Baltimore to care for the child. Her husband disapproves.

What happens in Baltimore changes Willa's life.

I read the novel in a day, enchanted by the characters and Willa's journey of discovery.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through First To Read in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Clock Dance
by Anne Tyler
Knopf Publishing Group
Publication July 10, 2018
ISBN: 13 9780525521228

SPOILER ALERT VERSION
After a Goodreads friend complained I told too much, I excised the following from my review.

The story begins in 1967 when Willa and her younger sister are children. Their mother is temperamental and unreliable, their father long-suffering and depressed. Willa picks up the pieces when her mother disappears for days at a time.

Ten years later finds Willa surprised to be the love interest of the older Derek, a jock and BMOC, "rescued from handsomeness" by freckles. He pushes her into leaving school to marry him, and pregnancy soon derails her plans to finish her degree. Derek's fatal flaw of angry impatience with others brings an early and tragic death, leaving Willa with two children to raise.

"Now she settled into the dailiness of grief-not that first piercing stab but the steady, persistent ache of it, the absence that feels like a presence."

2017 finds Willa remarried to Peter, an older, childless man, a successful and handsome lawyer who, though retired, still puts his business first. Peter is condescending and self-centered. Willa's children are grown and her sister is emotionally and physically distant. Willa is struggling to find meaning and purpose in her life.

A phone call from a stranger informs that her son's ex-girlfriend has been shot and the neighbor is tired of caring for the girlfriend's child. The neighbor thinks Willa is the girl's grandmother. Willa has longed for grandchildren and decides to leave Arizona for Baltimore to care for the child. Peter thinks she is crazy.

Nine-year-old Cheryl is no poster-child with her round tummy and pudgy cheeks. She loves baking and the Space Junk cartoon series. Cheryl is also wise and grounded. And looking for a grandmother in her life.

As Willa becomes enmeshed in Cheryl's world and neighborhood, she defies Peter's demands, until she must decide how she will spend the last of her life.

We Are Gathered by Jamie Weisman

If you think We Are Gathered by Jamie Weisman is a soppy or romanticized novel about the perfect wedding you are wrong. No, Jamie Weisman's amazing novel is about the people who have been invited to the wedding, friends of the bride or the bride's family. Their stories are told one by one, each darker and more soul-wrenching than the previous, until I was almost fearful to read the last entry. But that was the story of True Love--not the bride and groom's true love story, but that of a haunted elderly lady and the broken man who saves her.

The bride's father is a ruthless man. "Every man wanted Ida, but I was the one who got her," he thinks about his wife; "A man is judged by the woman with him, and Ida's beauty made me more powerful." A stroke leaves him unable to communicate as he watches his business crumble and his daughter marry a non-Jew. He sees life as a "brutal and exhausting gallop through a desert populated by predators and parasites."

A mother's life work is to care for her son who was born with Muscular Dystrophy. He once spent a week at a camp where the bride was a counselor.

A woman wears her birthmark proudly although she resents not having been born beautiful. "There is no justice in this world," she begins, despairing at the bride's beauty. "What am I without my birthmark?" she questions, dismissing the makeup that can make her look perfect.

A college roommate of the bride's father has drifted in and out of addiction. Drafted during Vietnam, he "didn't love my life enough to make it worth avoiding" the war. "People who go to war are different from everyone else," he thinks.

A man who once got the bride drunk and didn't take advantage of her, but also did not protect her from the other frats, was going to be a heart surgeon before he had a breakdown. The bride disdains him. He wanders from the ceremony.

An elderly lady survived the Holocaust but can't forget the loved ones who did not. She married a kind man and had a decent life, but is still haunted by the past.

Weisman has written so many sentences and pages that I fell in love with and which I wanted to read out loud to anyone in earshot.

I loved the mother of the bride's musings on a life given to her family.

"My friend Rita once said that your children come to you perfect, and the best you can hope for is not to allow too much damage, from yourself first and foremost, and then from the world."

I shuddered at that line. It rang true. I had the same thought when our son was a preschooler, an awareness of all the scars life would lay on his unblemished soul and skin moving me to tears. The mother thinks, there are limitations and childhood wounds which we parents bring with us, inadequacies, and actions that result in regrets.

"They intend to have it all, careers, families, creativity, at least for the lucky few who can afford it," she thinks. The bride appears to be one of those lucky ones.

I am grateful to have won the book on #FridayFreebie on The Quivering Pen blog by author David Abrams.

from the publisher:

One afternoon in Atlanta, Georgia. Two people heading to the altar. One hundred fifty guests. The bride, Elizabeth Gottlieb, proud graduate of the University of Virginia and of Emory University School of Law, member of Atlanta’s wealthy Jewish elite. The groom, Hank Jackson, not a member. Not a Jew. The couple of the hour, however, is beside the point, because We Are Gathered belongs to the guests. 

Among them, Carla, Elizabeth’s quick-witted, ugly duckling childhood best friend turned Hollywood film scout, whose jaundiced view of the drama that is an American wedding provides a lens of humor and its corollary, deep compassion for the supporting actors who steal the show; Elizabeth’s great-aunt Rachel, a Holocaust survivor from Germany who is still navigating a no-man’s-land between cultures and identities decades after escaping from the forests of Europe; Elizabeth’s wheelchair-bound grandfather Albert, who considers his legacy as a man, both in the boardroom and the bedroom; and Annette, the mother of the bride herself, reminded now of her youthful indiscretions in love and motherhood. 

 Balancing razor-sharp humor with a blunt vision of the fragility of our mortal bonds, Jamie Weisman skillfully constructs a world—and family—that pulls you in and carries you along with its refreshing, jagged beauty

Landscaping Is Done! And a New Quilt Project

The landscaping project was done today! We have a crab apple tree, hydrangea bushes, and various flowering ground covers including roses, a kind of Coneflower, and a kind of geranium. The gutter at the end of the house now runs underground with the water dispersing into the garden and yard.

Our exterior work is done for now. We still want to replace a 40-year-old fence in the backyard...another year.

My weekly quilt group decided to have a group challenge using a fabric. Joanne and I went to find a fabric for the challenge and decided on this multicolored print.

The pattern on the fabric looked like mushrooms to me. I decided I wanted to do an applique with pixies painting mushrooms.

I looked around for vintage illustrations of fairies or pixies painting mushrooms and found just what I wanted. This illustration is by the British artist Margaret W. Tarrant (1888 to 1959) who popularized fairy illustrations.

I adopted the illustration to make my applique center. I used hand applique, fusible applique, and created details and shading with fabric markers, Pigma pen, and oil color pencils.

I will use the challenge fabric in a pieced border. I have until October to figure the rest of the quilt out!

I am glad I have lots of blog posts scheduled and have been reading ahead because my husband just underwent knee replacement surgery. I will be a busy gal for a few weeks! I have to water that new garden twice a day.

First, my hubby made bread for the freezer! He is our bread maker.

The Red Thread by Ann Hood

The Red Thread in Ann Hood's novel title refers to a Chinese saying that an invisible red thread links people who are destined to be connected.

The novel is about a group of American couples who hope to adopt a Chinese child, as well as the stories of how those children came to be relinquished by their mothers.

After Hood lost her own child she and her husband adopted a Chinese child. The novel was inspired by the experience.

I first read Hood when the publisher sent me her memoir Morningstar: Growing Up with Books, which I devoured in one sitting. 

Hood creates amazingly realistic characters. I thought about a couple I know who went through years trying everything to get pregnant before adopting two children, one from Korea.

Maya runs an adoption agency to connect American parents with Chinese orphans. Beneath her professional and competent veneer she hides a painful past that won't allow her to move on, a guilt so deep she can't share it with her closest friends.

Chapters explore the couples who have come to her, each with their personal needs and fears, with strong or fragile relationships. Some have step-children and natural children who are disappointments. Their lives become emotional roller coasters of expectation, second thoughts, and marital stress.

Poignant stories of the Chinese children imagine mothers unwilling to give up their girl children; they are heart-breaking. China's law allowing families to have one child became relaxed to two children. It still meant that families could only afford to have one girl child.

Knitting figures into the stories; Maya knits as therapy, expectant mothers knit for their imagined children.

The Red Thread would make a wonderful book club pick.

I purchased a book at my local bookstore.

The Red Thread
by Ann Hood
W. W. Norton
$14.95 paperback
ISBN: 978-0-393-33976-5

A Boy in His Winter by Norman Lock

In the year 2077 Huck Finn reflects back on his life, beginning in 1835 when he and the escaped slave Jim began their raft journey down the Mississippi River. Somehow they became time travelers until Hurricane Katrina shipwrecked Huck back into passing time.

Along the way, they saw America caught in wars, the marvel of electric lighting, and how racism kept its grip on society.

Jim got off the raft in 1960, finding a lynch mob waiting for him. In 2005 Huck meets James, who tries to keep him from harm. As an adult, Huck falls in love with Jameson, who becomes his wife. She writes a novel, The Boy In His Winter. Like Jim, James and Jameson are African American.

What Huck realizes from his vantage point of 85 years is how badly he treated Jim, how he accepted his society's values unthinking, diminishing Jim as a person and as a friend.

"I was bothered that I had come to hate him, bothered even more that I had loved him. I'm not sure that I regarded him then as a man. Not entirely. That broad view of humanity was alien to a mind that had been formed haphazardly, like a shack put together out of old lumber, warped and ill-used.(...)We'd wasted much time when we might have understood what was happening on the raft while we were close in on the river's end, which as not to be the journey's end, as I learned later." Huck Finn, A Boy in His Winter

At the end of his life, Huck returns to his hometown to play act Mark Twain, telling his own life stories. Huck calls his story a comedy, having seen enough for 'three or four lifetimes."

"Haven't you learned by now how fantastic a business it is to be alive?"-Huck Finn, A Boy in His Winter

The novel is episodic, meandering as the Mississippi River, but I was charmed by Huck's narrative, although there is nothing of innocence to be found. Huck is deformed by societal values, pursuing wealth and conspicuous consumption as an adult as thoughtlessly as he accepted slavery in his youth. With a broad overview of American history distilled into one lifetime, and grappling with memory and how the past is altered with our storytelling of it, Huck's tale shows the darkness behind what we remember as Twain's story of boyish freedom.

I received a book from the publisher as part of a LibraryThing giveaway.

The Boy in His Winter
Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press
$14.95
ISBN: 978-1-934137-76-5