Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Kniffel, Leonard

Title A Polish son in the motherland : an American's journey home / Leonard Kniffel
Edition 1st ed
Published College Station : Texas A & M University Press, 2005

Copies

Description 1 online resource (ix, 236 pages)
Contents Back in the old country -- Her father's child -- After the first people in the world -- The four corners of Sugajno -- The sign of the cross -- Mothers and sons -- Like Grandma in the back seat -- Last train -- Chiseled in stone -- Castles in the air -- Pieces of change -- The land they love -- To market -- Holy days -- Followed by water -- The best days begin in ordinary ways -- Property -- The priest and the ledger -- Temporary blindness -- All those good-byes -- The body of Christ -- At night by the river -- Dinner with Madame and her son -- In the dark without the son -- The underside of a mushroom -- The hunt for hidden treasure -- Women dancing in their slips -- To Grandmother's house we go -- What used to be Polish -- Little mysteries unraveling -- What took you so long? -- A young man and his needlepoint -- Pilgrims -- The Nowe Miasto hillbillies -- The other side of the family -- A father and his daughter -- Waiting -- The vigil -- Whether or not it's time -- The last act -- Epilogue
Summary "Searching for the remnants of his family, Leonard Kniffel left Chicago in 2000 to live in Poland. A Polish Son in the Motherland is the story of a search for roots and for the reasons why one family's ties were severed more than fifty years ago. Along the way, we see what half a century of communism did to Poland and how the residue of World War II lingers." "Kniffel's search for a connection to Poland is propelled by memories of the stories his grandmother told him about her emigration to Michigan in 1913. While his family eludes him, the adventure becomes an investigation into the relationship between mothers and the legacy they give their sons." "Poles who emigrated to America, the author concludes, must have been particularly good at assimilating into American culture. Less than fifty years after his maternal grandparents arrived in the United States, barely a trace of their Polishness existed in their grandchildren. Through his grandparents' struggles, their children became American and created a new world for themselves and their descendants." "In returning to Poland himself, Kniffel sought and found a bridge to the "Great Migration" that changed the lives of so many millions - and millions yet to come."--Jacket
Notes Includes index
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
English
Print version record
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Kniffel, Leonard -- Travel -- Poland
SUBJECT Kniffel, Leonard fast
Subject TRAVEL -- Europe -- Eastern.
Travel
SUBJECT Poland -- Description and travel. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85103992
Subject Poland
Nowe Miasto Lubawskie (woj. warmińsko-mazurskie ; okręg) -- od 1989 r.
Polska -- socjologia -- od 1989 r.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2004016545
ISBN 9781603446006
1603446001
1299053521
9781299053526