Oilcloth Stories

Book excerpt: When immigrants from Central Europe arrived in America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they often came to cities like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania - cities bursting with the new energies and opportunities of industrialization, and with the challenges of assimilating dozens of cultures into what had been pastoral communities only a few decades before. For most immigrants, industrial working conditions were harsh and brutal, and living conditions were not much better. But the immigrants - Windish, Hungarians, Slovaks, and others - stayed and made lives for themselves ... lives that reached from nineteenth-century famine in Europe and the horrors of World War I to man's landing on the moon and the dawn of the computer age. It is in the stories of individual lives that this immigrant journey can be glimpsed - in everyday stories, universally human stories - stories told around a table covered in oilcloth.