Growing Up Italian in Chicago

A memoir of the first eighteen years in the life of a daughter of Italian immigrants growing up in a nurturing household in the Italian neighborhood on the near north side of Chicago through the depression years of the 1930s and into the 1940s. How the values and traditions of her family both enriched and collided with her American environment is the focus of the story. The details of her childhood include wine-making in the cellar, picnics in the cemetery, and birthdays on the tilt-a-whirl. She tells of starting kindergarten without knowing a word of English, of learning to roller-skate in the kitchen, and of discovering as a freshman in college that the community she loved was considered a slum. In the telling, her family comes to life -- her beloved Nonna Vera, who credited her with giving her a reason for living; her big and gentle father, who loved good food as much as he loved telling a good story; and her mother, who set the moral standards for the extended family, and especially for her only child. Double cousins, an American boyfriend, a troubled aunt, and a tyrant uncle round out the cast of this personal story that captures the humor and the frustrations familiar to the children of immigrants from all over the world who came to American in search of a better life.