The Long Way Home

January 25, 2010
At the height of America’s involvement in the Great War, nearly one in five of the 4.7 million Americans in uniform had been born overseas. Laskin (The Children’s Blizzard
) chronicles the lives of 12 of these men who immigrated from Europe. The soldiers’ loyalty and pride in serving won them and their families the status of “real” Americans. Meyer Epstein, a Russian-Jewish plumber from New York’s Lower East Side, who had been living by his wits and muscle, was eventually awarded four Bronze Stars; marching with the American army through France was not much worse than his youth hauling junk around the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement with a horse and cart. Charming and fastidious Tony Pierro, a southern Italian gardener, drove horse-drawn supply wagons to and from the front in France, bringing munitions in and carting corpses out. Andrew Christofferson, drafted from his Montana homestead, was hungrier in the trenches in France than he’d been as a poor boy in Norway. This quietly absorbing glimpse of some of the brave soldiers who helped win WWI will appeal to history buffs. 16 pages of photos.

The author recounts the personal histories of 12 immigrants, men who epitomize what a generation of pre-WWI immigrants endured, and how they changed in their journeys from immigrant to soldier to citizen. The stories of enduring ocean crossings, passing through Ellis Island, and trying to find work pull at the heartstrings. In the audio production, one finds frequent shifts among the dozen individuals who recount their memories, a structure that is difficult to follow in audio. Narrator Erik Synnestvedt is unable to make the accounts sound as if they come from 12 men rather than one. With annoying predictability, he isolates the short sentences from one other with long pauses. He does, however, speak clearly and enunciate well. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine