Review
" Despite the fictional media image, the real story of the Italian immigrants,is one of courage amidst hardship and prejudice." -- The Rochester Golden Times,September 5, 2001
"Growing Up Italian" is heavily illustrated with 80 family and archival pictures from the logging era, railroad memorabilia and maps. -- The Bradford(Pa.)Era, September 7, 20001
"Riveting immigrant stories,e.g., Sam Costa relates being pulled from the raging waters of the 1911 Austin dam break." -- Potter Leader-Enterprise,September 5, 2001
"Growing Up Italian" is heavily illustrated with 80 family and archival pictures from the logging era, railroad memorabilia and maps. -- The Bradford(Pa.)Era, September 7, 20001
"Riveting immigrant stories,e.g., Sam Costa relates being pulled from the raging waters of the 1911 Austin dam break." -- Potter Leader-Enterprise,September 5, 2001
Product Description
Growing Up Italian in God's Country: Stories From the Wilds of Pennsylvania details the struggles and triumphs of four generations of the author's family from 1891 when her great-grandfather Giuseppe Policastro emigrated from the middle Apennines east of Salerno to the virgin forests of North Central Pennsylvania to find work on the legendary logging railroad, the Buffalo and Susquehanna. Her great-grandmother Vittoria followed in 1895, walking 35 miles with four small children to get to the steamship in Naples. Interviews with family members including two great-aunts in their late nineties give this story an on-the-scene quality. Other family members tell their stories in their own words including the author's father, Sam Costa Sr., who relates how he was pulled from the raging waters of the 1911 Austin, PA. paper mill dam break which claimed 78 lives. There are also first hand accounts from other relatives and neighbors, some now in their eighties, who talk about growing up in the Twenties and Thirties during the Depression. The author concludes with her own memories of schooldays in the Forties, of the impact of World War II on their mountain towns, and the idyllic holidays and vacations at her maternal grandparents' home deep in the Susquehannock Forest alongside the Sinnemahoning Creek. Kerosene lamps, patchwork quilts and homemade noodles against a backdrop of dirt roads, mountain streams and a one-room schoolhouse figure in the telling as do a mangy bobcat, rattlesnakes and a railroad that wound around the mountain in what was once a booming logging town. Despite the hardships recorded, the book is laced with humor.
