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Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression Paperback – April 29, 2008

4.4 out of 5 stars 920

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I tell of a time, a place, and a way of life long gone. For many years I have had the urge to describe that treasure trove, lest it vanish forever. So, partly in response to the basic human instinct to share feelings and experiences, and partly for the sheer joy and excitement of it all, I report on my early life. It was quite a romp.

So begins Mildred Kalish’s story of growing up on her grandparents’ Iowa farm during the depths of the Great Depression. With her father banished from the household for mysterious transgressions, five-year-old Mildred and her family could easily have been overwhelmed by the challenge of simply trying to survive. This, however, is not a tale of suffering.

Kalish counts herself among the lucky of that era. She had caring grandparents who possessed—and valiantly tried to impose—all the pioneer virtues of their forebears, teachers who inspired and befriended her, and a barnyard full of animals ready to be tamed and loved. She and her siblings and their cousins from the farm across the way played as hard as they worked, running barefoot through the fields, as free and wild as they dared.

Filled with recipes and how-tos for everything from catching and skinning a rabbit to preparing homemade skin and hair beautifiers, apple cream pie, and the world’s best head cheese (start by scrubbing the head of the pig until it is pink and clean), Little Heathens portrays a world of hardship and hard work tempered by simple rewards. There was the unsurpassed flavor of tender new dandelion greens harvested as soon as the snow melted; the taste of crystal clear marble-sized balls of honey robbed from a bumblebee nest; the sweet smell from the body of a lamb sleeping on sun-warmed grass; and the magical quality of oat shocking under the light of a full harvest moon.

Little Heathens offers a loving but realistic portrait of a “hearty-handshake Methodist” family that gave its members a remarkable legacy of kinship, kindness, and remembered pleasures. Recounted in a luminous narrative filled with tenderness and humor, Kalish’s memoir of her childhood shows how the right stuff can make even the bleakest of times seem like “quite a romp.”

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“This lovely book, so unaffected and so generous, opens the door to a past I knew as a child in Iowa, and I wept with joy and recognition as I read it. It deserves a distinguished place next to Hamlin Garland’s Son of the Middle Border but, with its deep humility, it would also fit, without a single word of protest, next to the Betty Crocker Cookbook.”—Ted Kooser, U. S. poet laureate, 2004-2006

Little Heathens is an enchanting but thoroughly unsentimental look at rural life in the Great Depression.  In clear clean prose we are offered the grit, struggle, and also the joy of hard work on a farm.  I cherish this book for its quite naked honesty and quiet lyricism about a time which makes our current problems nearly childish.  This is a fine book.”—Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall

“Now that cell phones are a way of life, you won’t find a better way to participate in the Good Old Days. Whether you are of farm origins or not,
Little Heathens is a bit of history begging to be borrowed. Like a neighborly cup of sugar, it will sweeten your modern-day life.”—MaryJane Butters, author of MaryJane’s Ideabook, Cookbook, Lifebook for the Farmgirl In All Of Us

“Using this book alone, one could reconstruct, with glorious exactness, a lost time and place.  Mildred Kalish has a novelist's eye for detail and a beautiful understanding of what the gestures of daily life mean.  A lovely, wise, transporting memoir.”—Joan Silber, author of
Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories

"Not only trustworthy and useful, but also polished by real, rare happiness. It is a very good book, indeed. In fact, it's averyveryverygoodbook."—New York Times Book Review

"Unpretentious yet deeply intelligent ... [
Little Heathens] radiates the joy of a vanished way of life.... In prose that never yields to mawkish sentimentality, Kalish details the roles of family, religion, thrift, and education in her upbringing."–Booklist

"Not only trustworthy and useful, but also polished by real, rare happiness. It is a very good book, indeed. In fact, it's averyveryverygoodbook."—Elizabeth Gilbert, The New York Times Book Review

"
Little Heathens made me ache for my own Depression-era Grandma, with her hand-cranked clothes wringer and her North Dakotan speech tut-tutting.... This is a book to awaken your family's own half-remembered stories - or better, to send you back to your elders to scour up your own.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

About the Author

Mildred Kalish, the author of Little Heathens, was a retired professor of English who grew up in Garrison, Iowa, and taught at several colleges, including the University of Iowa, Adelphi University, and Suffolk Community College. She was awarded Best Emerging Author at the Iowa Authors Award and received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from her alma mater, the University of Iowa. Mildred Kalish died in 2023.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bantam; Reprint edition (April 29, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 292 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0553384244
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553384246
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.47 x 0.68 x 8.21 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 out of 5 stars 920

About the author

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Mildred Armstrong Kalish
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I was born on a farm near Garrison, Iowa, in Benton County on St. Patrick's Day in 1922.

My growing up was influenced by The Great Depression, by the self-reliance and work ethic of my mother's parents- themselves descendants of pioneers- who never quite made it into the 20th Century and by the remarkable challenges and the inestimable rewards of living a rural life where we children were expected to accept responsibilities beyond the ordinary.

From early on, I was eager to be self-supporting and independent.The summer I became thirteen I became the companion , cook and caretaker of a retired missionary; I served as a hired girl on two local farms; I earned an Elementary Teacher's Certificate from Iowa Stte Teacher's College at Cedar Falls.

I accepted the position as Governess in Yonkers, N.Y.

Joining the The United States Coast Guard Women's Reserve, I was sent for Radio Training to Miami University at Oxford, Ohio and on graduation I served at the Headquarters of the 5th Naval District in Norfolk, Virginia where I met and married fellow radio operator Harry Kalish.

Thanks to the G.I. Bill, we both furthered our education at the State University of Iowa.

We have 2 sons, 2 daughters-in-law (par excellence) amd 4 grandchildren.

I am an Emeritus Professor of English retired from Suffolk County Community College on Long Island. I have taught at the State University of Iowa at Iowa City, The State University of Missouri at Columbia, and at Adelphi in Garden City, NY.

My husband and I are residents of a retirement community in Cupertino, California.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
920 global ratings
book review
5 Stars
book review
Little Heathens offers a loving but realistic portrait of a "hearty-handshake Methodist" family that gave its members a remarkable legacy of kinship, kindness, and remembered pleasures. Recounted in a luminous narrative filled with tenderness and humor, Kalish's memoir of her childhood shows how the right stuff can make even the bleakest of times seem like "quite a romp."
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2021
There are a variety of tales and anecdotes about life during the Great Depression, yet many who survived don’t want to talk about it. The experiences of those in the cities were quite different from those living in the country. Regardless of location, however, all but the very wealthy suffered and their lives and perspectives were formed or altered by their experiences.

In Little Heathens, Mildred Armstrong Kalish shares what life was like for herself and her extended family. It is somewhat difficult to distinguish between the normal trials of endless farm work and the efforts needed to reuse and repurpose items because of deprivation of money and resources. “Thrown away” was a foreign concept during this time and thrift was the champion of the day. Kalish shares the many saving and “make-do” tricks that were common during the Depression and some that were uncommon. Many of those have fallen out of use, but are still handy to know and good examples of the resourcefulness of our predecessors.

Kalish lays her memories out forthrightly, not concealing or varnishing the stories. Many are humorous and several are gasp-worth. Children worked alongside adults learning by example and experience. Farm life required the whole family to pitch in. Chores were divided by age and gender, but not strictly. For example, Monday Wash Day was a very physical, all-day task for which preparations began on Sunday night. Children and adults wore the same set of clothes all week, and everyone participated in wash day. The need for everyone to work together is apparent in the book over and over again.

Kalish addresses the many aspects of life at that time as seen through the eyes of a child who was an active participant. She has an incredible memory for detail right down to how to catch, kill, and prepare a snapping turtle for consumption. She also discusses the social aspects of community inside and outside the family unit. Her life was unique in that she lived in town during the winter and on a farm during the growing season because of her family situation. Her life was very different in each place, but the expectations of a good work ethic and attitude never changed.

The author viewed the hardships of her childhood as instrumental in her many achievements later in life. From success as a “hired girl” to working her way through college to her happy marriage and career as a professor, Kalish gives credit to her family, especially her mother: “Mama’s ability to meet challenges head-on and with a positive attitude created in us kids a sense of confidence that there was a way to solve every problem—just find it.” Although her life was hard, it was not unhappy and she prizes the memories of her past. I enjoyed her writing style, learned from the information she shared, and relived some of my past as I have memories of my Depression-era parents handing down wise sayings and thrifty values. Well done, Mildred Armstrong Kalish!
3 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2008
As can be quickly discerned from the book's subtitle and from many of the Amazon reviews, LITTLE HEATHENS is about life on a farm in Iowa during the 1930s. The principal reason I bought and read the book was because my late father also lived on a farm in Iowa in the 1930s, although he was a few years older than the author, Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Because my father and I never talked much about his youth, I had a personal interest in Kalish's book -- namely, to get a better sense of the circumstances in which my father grew up. And from that perspective, this book certainly delivers; it is chock-full of information about life in rural America in the 1930s -- at least those portions of rural America that were almost exclusively white and where most of the farmers were able to avoid bankruptcy and keep their farms going.

But truth be told, LITTLE HEATHENS is not a great book. In saying that I don't believe I demean the book. For one thing, I don't believe the author intended it to be "great". Kalish comes across as a smart, industrious, and very decent woman, and her book is a detailed, readable, and relatively well-written (although at times somewhat cliched and over-written) account of what was a rather commonplace farm-based childhood in the 1930s. But that's not the stuff of greatness.

What is interesting to me is all the acclaim the book has received, as evidenced by preceding Amazon reviews and the fact that the New York Times saw fit to name it one of its notable non-fiction books of 2007. I can't help but think that for many readers the book strikes a chord of nostalgia and evokes a yearning (perhaps unconscious) for a simple and self-sufficient life. But the Iowa farmlife of Kalish's childhood entailed hard work and cooperation, and I doubt that many contemporary American families, except perhaps the few remaining farming/ranching families, are willing or able to work as hard as the families -- both adults and children -- did then. It also required a faith in the moral rectitude of one's lifestyle, and that that lifestyle secured one a favored place in God's universe, that is much less prevalent today than it was 75 years ago. Further, it was not very accommodating of those who did not share the same race, northern European heritage, or Protestant religion, or those who did not conform to a certain standard of behavior (witness the author's father who was permanently expelled from the family and cut off from his wife and children by the author's grandfather for reasons the author never learned). The brute fact of the matter is that the independent and insular world that Kalish describes was swept away by fascism, militarism, and World War II, and the following tides of history and technology and the sheer numbers of humans populating the planet. And, as was the title of another product of the Thirties, "You Can't Go Home Again."

I sense that Kalish is well aware of that point. But I also sense that many of her readers are not.
3 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2024
Don’t be put off by the title! I can’t understand why the publisher chose this title for such a charming book. (When you read it you’ll see that the title came from a reference that was made to the author and her siblings by a prudish older relative). The author shares her memoirs of family life on a small town farm at a time when rural Americans were mostly self-sufficient. She weaves many delightful memories with detailed descriptions of the resourcefulness employed in times before indoor plumbing and other conveniences we take for granted today. The result is a lovely book! I purchased this copy from a seller at a reduced price and was pleasantly surprised to receive a copy in like new condition.

Top reviews from other countries

Glenn Langley
5.0 out of 5 stars Such beautiful memories
Reviewed in Australia on October 22, 2018
As I fast approach 60 I find myself looking back to my younger years and although not nearly as exciting as these, your memories helped to jog & jar my own fond ones loose of my grandparents dairy farm. Thank you so much for telling your story
Teacher22
2.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointed in this book after the reviews
Reviewed in Canada on February 4, 2015
Very disappointed in this book after the reviews. The premise and history were entertaining, but the writing style and quality were not. Almost as if it couldn't make up its mind whether it was meant to be a story -- it had too many "telling" and not enough "showing" passages, and it didn't flow well. E.g. first sentence of Chapter 6: "For us children, building character, developing a sense of responsibility, and above all, improving one's mind constituted the essential focus of our lives." Zzzzzzzz. Bought to give as a Christmas gift, but changed my mind after reading.
2 people found this helpful
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e.majorie smith
1.0 out of 5 stars One Star
Reviewed in Canada on October 17, 2014
wonderful, brought me back to my childhood.
AnnG
2.0 out of 5 stars Two Stars
Reviewed in Canada on June 1, 2018
..........couldn't get into the book....didn't finish it.