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.