As I Recall and So It Was

Rating:
Summary: The Italian Angela's Ashes - Great quick read! An Upper!
Review: For those who are intrigued with the first hand account of immigrants and their experiences during the Great Depression; there is a new publication of note which should not be overlooked simply because it has been published in the untraditional format of an e book.

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of early childhood memories, captured from the mind of a girl just coming aware of herself in a family traveling from prosperity to poverty to (in her adult years) prosperity again.

Centering around the story of her Calabrian father; the author, Rose Thomas, tells of his life after he has emigrated to the United States in the beginning of the last century, established a flourishing business, married a bride from the "old country," and together started a family. Trusting that this would be the promised land for them and their children, the ugly reality of how the fleeting American dream really played out in the courts could never have been imagined by these good, real people.

Before finally capturing and recording her family of origin's story in As I Recall - And So It Was, Rose Thomas' dozen true tales of her Italian grocer father's family joys and struggles during her girlhood were often the dinner table delight of friends and family members too young to have been there themselves. Joined by a few memories of her own young family's struggles and then the blessings of her grandchildren, Thomas' stories manage to make the reader of this short memoir fully sense the descriptions of her life centered around the family's store: from the aromas of the roasting coffees and aging cheeses, to the sound of her father singing out the jingles with which he would charm his customers, to the nausea of a first stolen smoke. Traveling back through her memories of the people and places of her childhood, the reader of this firsthand account of one of our nation's most difficult times, the Great Depression, is given an insight only one of it's survivors could offer: it is in the very ordinariness of the cycles of our families' struggles to support and celebrate our lives that history is made.