num_pages: 251
description: Growing Up Italian in God's Country: Stories From the Wilds of Pennsylvania details the struggles and triumphs of four generations of the author's family from 1891 when her great-grandfather Giuseppe Policastro emigrated from the middle Apennines east of Salerno to the virgin forests of North Central Pennsylvania to find work on the legendary logging railroad, the Buffalo and Susquehanna. Her great-grandmother Vittoria followed in 1895, walking 35 miles with four small children to get to the steamship in Naples. Interviews with family members including two great-aunts in their late nineties give this story an on-the-scene quality. Other family members tell their stories in their own words including the author's father, Sam Costa Sr., who relates how he was pulled from the raging waters of the 1911 Austin, PA. paper mill dam break which claimed 78 lives. There are also first hand accounts from other relatives and neighbors, some now in their eighties, who talk about growing up in the Twenties and Thirties during the Depression. The author concludes with her own memories of schooldays in the Forties, of the impact of World War II on their mountain towns, and the idyllic holidays and vacations at her maternal grandparents' home deep in the Susquehannock Forest alongside the Sinnemahoning Creek. Kerosene lamps, patchwork quilts and homemade noodles against a backdrop of dirt roads, mountain streams and a one-room schoolhouse figure in the telling as do a mangy bobcat, rattlesnakes and a railroad that wound around the mountain in what was once a booming logging town. Despite the hardships recorded, the book is laced with humor.
language: English
title: Growing Up Italian in God's Country
titlecomplete: Growing Up Italian in God's Country
genres: Nonfiction
ratings_count: 17
publisher: Stone Pine Books