***Combustion

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combustion, fire, wildfire

The King Fire; photo: US Forest Service Region 5, creative commons license

By Martin J. Smith – I guess it’s some kind of progress to see the growth in the number of crime novels and television series that give hardworking male police detectives a woman boss. And, perhaps it reflects even more progress that these female supervisors are allowed to have flaws, unlike the ever-understanding “Ma’am” in the Inspector Lewis shows.

In Martin J. Smith’s new police procedural, Detective Ron Starke works for the police department in the city of Los Colmas, in giant San Bernardino County, California’s Inland Empire. His new chief—grabbing a job he expected would be his—is Donna Kerrigan, recently divorced from a rich husband and an inveterate micromanager, who Starke thinks has “the people skills of a rattlesnake.”

Starke is a likeable detective, diligently trying to unravel what befell wealthy property developer Paul Dwyer. Dwyer’s body was found at the bottom of a rapidly evaporating pond adjacent to his most recent upscale housing development. He had a bullet in his brain and evidence suggested he’d been tortured. Starke has a history with the widowed Mrs. Dwyer, the magnate’s second wife, that goes back to high school and a brief romance.

When he interviews Shelby Dwyer and her daughter Chloe in their magnificent home, it’s quite a contrast to his down-market residence above the Suds-Your-Duds laundromat. Any number of people turn up as serviceable murder suspects. In fact, there may be too large a stack of possibilities, because the motives of them all can’t be developed to the extent that would make them truly credible.

There’s even a whiff of DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) concern about money-laundering for the Sinaloa drug cartel. This possibility prompted a couple of authorial essays about how the cartels work—interesting stuff that you might want to know about, but not necessary to the plot of this book, especially since that line of inquiry soon evaporates like the water in Dwyer’s containment pond.

Because this is a multiple point-of-view novel, you know things Starke does not. You know Shelby has sought relief from her unhappy marriage online, establishing a chatroom relationship with someone who calls himself LoveSick—ever supportive, ever kind, ever romantic. But who is he, really? Shelby has every urgent 21st century reason for wanting to know. I especially enjoyed Smith’s descriptions of the computer geeks Starke eventually deals with, as he tracks down Shelby’s missing hard drive. Those guys were entertainingly totally on their own wavelength—broadband, of course.

The blind forces of nature help bring matters to a head. A massive wildfire, driven by the Santa Ana winds, is bearing down on Los Colmas and the Dwyer development. In the middle of that fiery maelstrom, Smith’s protagonists face their ultimate challenges.

The fire proves unequivocally that, no matter how “in control” you think you are, some things are beyond you. I wish the author hadn’t overstuffed the narrative with tantalizing suspects and a couple of brief, early scenes with Starke’s ailing father, in care because of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He was an interesting character and that was a relationship worth developing. Sequels?

****Mary McGrory: The First Queen of Journalism

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The old Washington Star building; photo: wikimedia

By John Norris – You think women in journalism have a long way to go when you consider how being young, glamorous, blonde of hair and white of tooth seem to be hiring criteria, and when you learn how sexual harassment of them is more common than seems possible in 2016 (for organizations that make their living exposing secrets, after all). But then you read Mary McGrory’s compelling life story, written by John Norris—a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress—and realize the distance traveled is pretty far after all.

McGrory was from Boston, the first person in her Irish Catholic family to finish college, and she began her newspaper career at the bottom of a very tall ladder. She worked for a time in Boston, as an assistant to the Herald Traveler’s literary editor, but the quality of her writing propelled her to a position as assistant book critic at the Washington Star. The nation’s capital in 1947 was a boomtown, full of change, openness, mobility.

Six years later, Mary’s badgering of Star editor Newby Noyes led him to assign her to write a series of political profiles, and Mary began spending time with the men she’d be writing about for the next half-century, including new Senate minority leader Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The positive reception the profiles received garnered her a plum assignment: covering the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. From there she covered the Eisenhower-Stevenson campaign of 1956, becoming one of the nation’s most respected reporters and colorful commentators on the political scene.

After the Washington Star folded in 1981, the Washington Post snatched her up. She wrote for that paper for twenty-two more years, though the Star was always her first love. She covered multiple Presidential campaigns, the Kennedy presidency was a miracle for Mary, pushing all her loyalty buttons—Boston, her faith, and her admiration of the family.

The fates of those brothers were intimately, personally felt. By contrast, she loathed Richard Nixon: “If he were a horse, I would not buy him.” Her name appeared on his infamous “enemies list.” Regarding the Gore-Bush campaign of 2000, she said the race was a “battle between the unlikeable and the unprepared.”

Although well known for her scorching prose, Mary’s life off the page is also fascinating. It seems she had one or more affairs with prominent politicians and journalists, and LBJ once propositioned her. She was a great party-goer and -giver. Her entire time in Washington, she regularly volunteered at St. Ann’s Infant and Maternity Home—a refuge for young unmarried women—and arranged with Ethel Kennedy for the children to have swimming parties at Hickory Hill, the Robert Kennedy family home in Virginia. She persuaded Hillary Clinton to visit at Christmas in 1995, the year journalist Tim Russert played Santa Claus. These children were the stand-ins for the children Mary, never married, didn’t have.

Indefatigable Mary McGrory, pioneer woman in journalism, astute and opinionated, winner of a Four Freedoms Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, mentor to women journalists, had a stroke at her desk in 2003 and her health—and worse, her powers of speech—never recovered. Her simple tombstone in Antrim, Mass., reads exactly the way she wanted it to:  name, dates, and the inscription “Newspaper Woman and Volunteer.”

“Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become.”–Mary McGrory

Certain Women

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certain-women, Lily Gladstone

Lily Gladstone in Certain Women

You know from the movie previews and the rumblings from the multiplex’s adjacent theater that today’s movies are heavily weighted toward “action films.” Writer-director-editor Kelly Reichardt could singlehandedly reverse that trend with Certain Women (trailer), which can most succinctly be described as an “inaction film.”

It’s kind of hard to get used to Reichardt’s pace, so you might watch this and think “Wha—?” Here, the drama is at the deep inside the characters, hidden from all views except the closest. And that’s what it gets from Reichardt—“a poet of silences and open spaces,” says A.O. Scott in the New York Times. Based on short stories by Maile Meloy, the film is set in and around Livingston, Montana, and the views of the lonely snowswept plains are breathtaking.

The story is presented in three separate vignettes that barely intersect. In the first, Laura Dern plays Laura Wells, a lawyer trying to convince her persistent client (Jared Harris) that he can’t sue his former employer for on-the-job injuries because he already accepted a settlement. The client doesn’t believe it until a male lawyer tells him the same thing. She’s disappointed at many levels—with her clients, her career, her love life.

The middle vignette involves Gina (Michelle Williams), a married woman with a disaffected teenage daughter. She and her husband are building a new house, and she hopes to convince a slightly addled, elderly neighbor (Rene Auberjonois) to sell them a pile of unused sandstone blocks in his front yard. Behind Gina’s bright smile, you can feel her irritation that the neighbor focuses his attention not on her request but on her husband, eliding the decision, and finally the husband sells her out. Even within the bosom of her family, it’s clear, she’s alone.

The dreamiest and most poignant sequence follows the young woman Jamie—beautifully underplayed by Lily Gladstone—on her daily routine, feeding and caring for a group of horses on a remote ranch. The repetitiveness of her tasks in the snowy, mountains in the distance, is mesmerizing. Her routine and her equilibrium are disturbed by a chance acquaintance with Beth, a harried young lawyer played by Kristen Stewart, overwhelmed by her own, very different grind. The extent of Jamie’s disturbance is painfully revealed in her quiet face, upon which “silent passion surges like an underground stream,” Scott says.

The acting is subtle and true, and Reichardt closely follows the dictum, “show, don’t tell.” Her characters don’t scream and rail and tell you what their issues are. You see it laid bare in front of you.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 91%; audiences 51%, a discrepancy that’s no surprise.

Mystery Short Stories: Ellery Queen & Betty Fedora

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photo: Greg Myers, creative commons license

The September/October 2016 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine is the one picked to be the 75th anniversary issue in the year-long celebration of the publication’s staying power and popularity. The precise date of the first issue in 1941 is unknown, but it was fall, in a rather bleak time in history, with World War II raging and uncertainty everywhere. Three-quarters of a century later, EQMM still challenges and entertains!

Betty Fedora, by contrast, is a new mystery/crime publication, dubbed “kickass women in crime fiction.” Issue 3 arrived recently and contains a story of mine, “Breadcrumbs,” with the kickass woman in question a Michigan state trooper hoping to protect a young woman hiding from her abusive husband. She fears he’s tracked her down.

Here are some of my favorite stories from these two magazines—writers I hope to read more from:

  • reading, beach

    photo: El Coleccionista de Instantes Fotografía & Video, creative commons license

    Linda Barnes’s EQMM story, “The Way They Do It in Boston” has great energy and atmosphere. She’s the author of 17 novels and has collected numerous award nominations.

  • “The Specialty of the House” by Stanley Ellin—his first published story—is reprinted from the 1948 issue of EQMM. Ellin was a novelist whose books were adapted for the screen, big and small. He was foremost a master of the short story, and this is “one of the most famous crime stories ever published.”
  • In this issue, perennial EQMM reader favorite (mine, too!) Dave Zeltserman’s a.i. assistant Archie helps not his detective Julius Katz this time, but Katz’s sister Julia elude a determined assassin.
  • Preston Lang’s Betty Fedora story, “The Sign,” is a tale of double-double-crosses, launched by a decades-old sign in a seedy Manhattan bar that reads “Hardtack Coghlan doesn’t pay for a drink.” Has the real Hardtack finally walked in?
  • Office speculation runs high about the true identity of dishy Rudy in the Louisa Barnes story, “Her Colours.” Rudy, she says, had “a gift for insubstantiality.” While the women fixated on him, was there really a spy in their midst?
  • Colleen Quinn’s story poses Betty Fedora readers an intriguing problem. In “The Game of Six Brothers,” when the groomsmen at a wedding discover one of the bridesmaids is a private investigator, they challenge her to figure out which of them is a murderer. And she can ask each of them only one very important question.

Read and enjoy!

*****The Lesser Bohemians

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photo: Andy Roberts, creative commons license

By Eimear McBride — You’ll have trouble with this book. I did. About page 40, I wondered, “is she ever going to write in complete sentences?” About page 90, I thought, “is it ever going to be about anything but sex?” The answer to both these questions was “almost never.” But The Lesser Bohemians is much more than a literary 50 Shades. And I’m glad I didn’t give up on it.

Ireland native McBride won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize and many, many other accolades for her 2013 book, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and when I saw she’d written another one, I jumped at the chance to read it.

In Bohemians, released last month, an 18-year-old Irish girl—a drama student in London—meets  meets an older man, a handsome actor near 40. She isn’t a virgin much longer. There’s a lot of sex, a lot of cigarettes, a lot of alcohol. We don’t even learn these characters’ names until very far along. He’s Stephen, he calls her Eily. Her full name, her real name, Eílís, is used only once, two pages from the end, when their identity is finally clear to each other and themselves, perhaps. Their urgent and scouring intimacy is McBride’s way of flaying any falseness from the characters and laying them (literally) bare.

The story approaches somewhat closer to a conventional first-person narrative (sentences!) in the second half, in a long section in which Stephen tells her about his past, a true heart-breaker there. Most of it is written in almost a stream-of-consciousness way, and McBride is often compared to James Joyce for that reason. Conversations are presented in long paragraphs, uninterrupted by such reader-aids as quotation marks, but once I got into it, I didn’t have much trouble following.

Emphasizing the difficulty of it risks underpraising how mesmerizing it is. McBride’s approach forces you to slow down and really absorb what’s being said, as she fractures the rules of punctuation and grammar. As NPR reviewer Annalisa Quinn said, “By sacrificing grammatical precision she gets emotional and psychological sense—even as those things are in themselves impossibly and inherently imprecise, like light or color.” Or love, I’d add.  A sample:

On that said Saturday, she (Eily’s friend) helps me move into the (friend’s ex-boyfriend’s) flat. Tired white walls. No curtains or blinds. But perfect. Landlady free. The I hope you’re proud of yourself, ringing in my ears and lug my stuff from the Safeway’s trolley I nicked and pushed down to Patshull Road. I think I’ll blank him, she decides. Fair enough, I say, blu-tacking Betty Blue up. I pity you, he’s such an–. Keep it down, I live here now. I bet he shags you before the term is out. I wouldn’t.

Conventionally, this would be handled something like this:

On that said Saturday, she helps me move into the flat. Tired white walls. No curtains or blinds. But perfect. Landlady free. The “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” ringing in my ears and lug my stuff from the Safeway’s trolley I nicked and pushed down to Patshull Road.
“I think I’ll blank him,” she decides.
“Fair enough,” I say, blu-tacking Betty Blue up.
“I pity you, he’s such an–.”
“Keep it down, I live here now.”
“I bet he shags you before the term is out.”
“I wouldn’t.”

The Lesser Bohemians is an unforgettable book about two characters I came to really care about. I can picture their lives and prospects and I appreciate an author who doesn’t believe she has to make my job as a reader too easy.

***American Quartet

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photo: Aaron Vowels

By Warren Adler, narrated by Julie Griffin – You can’t help but enjoy the clever criminal lurking behind the scenes in this 1982 classic. Set in Washington, DC, around 1980 (it was a presidential election year, so thereabouts), a time when I lived in the Nation’s Capital, this police procedural includes many reminders of that place and time.

The novel’s protagonist, Fiona Fitzgerald, has abandoned the path expected of her as the daughter of a US Senator and serves as a Sergeant in the DC Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide division—a white woman in what was then a black male bastion. (This is one place where 35 years has made a profound difference. Today, DC’s mayor is a woman, its just-retiring police commissioner is a white woman, and the department is trending white.)

Fitzgerald and her partner face a baffling set of murders, but the reader/listener knows something the police do not: the perpetrator is recreating, to the extent practicable, the assassinations of past U.S. presidents on their anniversary dates. After the first two “copycat crimes” (James Garfield and William McKinley), you anticipate the perpetrator’s inevitable further recreations (John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln)—with a growing sense of dread. Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy, Lincoln: the American quartet.

I found it hard to believe no one in the police, the media, or the local citizenry—full of  history and political buffs—tumbled to the similarities between current and past events, especially after the two deaths on November 22, the anniversary of JFK’s murder. Adler makes the point that Americans are oblivious about their history, and I’ll give him that. But, thanks to television, the Kennedy killing is seared into the national memory, especially in Washington DC. In 1980, it was only 17 years in the past. About how long ago Y2K is now.

Fitzgerald (sharing a name with the martyred president) may be distracted by her love life. Her politician boyfriend faces a tough reelection battle in Queens. His congressional district’s demographics have moved away from him, and he needs cash (some new ideas also would help). What might save him is the financial support of failed Senatorial candidate Thaddeus Remington, a wealthy player in the Washington party circuit. I liked all the politics and, if there were some aspects of the story that seemed far-fetched, the time-capsule attributes were strong.

Listening to a book is a different experience than reading it. Most of the principal characters in this book are men, and Julie Griffin does a good job with them. Yet, I kept checking my iPod to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently clicked a 1.5 reading speed. Also, I wonder that there’s no one (the equivalent of an editor) to correct startling mis-readings. The point isn’t to ding the narrator on the kind of mistake any of us might make from time to time, but to emphasize that such persistent errors—like egregious typographical errors—take the listener out of the story.

Mama’s Boy

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Mama's Boy, Michael Goldsmith, Betsy Aidem

Michael Goldsmith & Betsy Aidem, photo: T. Charles Erickson

First up in the George Street Playhouse (New Brunswick, N.J.) 2016-17 season is Mama’s Boy, by Rob Urbinati. It’s a family drama about a very particular family—that of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the period leading up to and after the events of November 1963. Directed by David Saint, the play runs from October 18 through November 6.

The assassination of President Kennedy continues its dark fascination. Already this year I’ve read two thrillers that riff on the case, and Hulu televised a terrific 11.22.63 (starring James Franco, Chris Cooper, and Sarah Gadon), based on the even-better Stephen King time-travel book, 11/22/63.

Mama’s Boy probes the assassination from the viewpoint of Oswald’s monomaniacal mother, Marguerite. In real life, she did try to put herself at the center of the story, and Urbinati capitalizes on her obsession to great dramatic effect. Marguerite (played beautifully by Betsy Aidem) is convinced—or claims to be—that Lee’s defection to Russia, his U.S. return 32 months later, and the plot to kill Kennedy, were orchestrated by the State Department or FBI, for whom he was working as an agent.

Oswald himself (Michael Goldsmith) doesn’t give her theories the time of day. He is preoccupied with finding a “clean” job to support his baby daughter June and wife Marina (Laurel Casillo) and, subsequently, getting to Cuba. He refuses help from his mother—not an easy job, that—but older brother Robert (Miles G. Jackson) provides some support.

Marguerite says Lee is the only one of her boys who ever loved her. (They shared a bed until he was 12.) She is manipulative and distrusting, overbearing and intrusive, wildly jealous of Marina, and believes the “little people” will never receive any help or support from the government, the media, or other social institution. She rails at the fact that Jackie Kennedy is escorted to and from Parkland Hospital, where the President died, whereas she—equally deserving, she thinks—gets nothing. Her domestic drama plays out as tragedy writ both small and large, at the level of the living room and on the world stage.

Urbinati’s vision of warped mother-love is as powerful as that of Gypsy’s Mama Rose, and Aidem has called Marguerite “the role of a lifetime,” and the skewed vision thrust upon Oswald (who was barely 24 at the time of the assassination) may make you think somewhat differently about him.

Mama’s Boy premiered in Portland, Maine, in October 2015, with Aidem and Casillo in their current roles. It’s clear they inhabit these characters totally. The men, newcomers to the play, are fine. Also in the cast is multiple Tony-award-winner Boyd Gaines, who plays one of Marguerite’s interviewers in voiceover.

Saint and the production staff have made the most of George Street’s capacity, using projections in combination with the revolving stage platform. Admirable use of technology!

For tickets, call the box office at 732-246-7717 or visit the box office online. The theater is an easy 10-minute walk from New Jersey Transit’s New Brunswick station.

Disgraced

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disgraced, Caroline Kaplan & Maboud Ebrahimzadeh

Caroline Kaplan & Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, photo: T. Charles Erickson

McCarter Theatre Center, Princeton, N.J., is presenting Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Disgraced, through October 30. The production, directed by Marcela Lorca, tells the story of four Manhattan friends with diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds. They are a successful, congenial group until a dinner party devolves into a series of confrontations that painfully reveal the schisms beneath the surface. It is a blistering commentary on identity politics and the nation’s most-produced play in the 2015-2016 season.

The characters are lawyer Amir (played by Maboud Ebrahimzadeh), who has masked his Pakistani and Muslim heritage, “passing” as Indian. Amir is pressured by his wife and nephew, Hussein (Adit Dileep)—who has changed his name to the more American Abe Jensen—to look in on legal proceedings against a controversial imam accused of terrorism. Amir initially resists, fearing his act may be misinterpreted by his firm’s Jewish senior partners.

His beautiful wife Emily (Caroline Kaplan), Caucasian and apparently Christian, is a painter and in her own work is entranced with the artistic language of Islam. In turn, she entrances their Jewish friend and Whitney curator Isaac (Kevin Isola), who wants to include her paintings in a high-profile exhibit. Isaac met Emily through Jory (Austene Van), his African-American wife and another associate in Amir’s law firm.

These convoluted relationships could go wrong in many ways, and do at the ill-fated dinner party. The social landscape under their feet crumbles. By the play’s end, all of them are disgraced, one way or another, publicly or not.

It is director Lorca’s aim that the audience empathize with each of the characters. She says, “A play like Disgraced has the power to hold mirrors to us, invite us to embrace complexities, ponder our contradictions, widen our view of others, and invite us to practice empathy, one character at a time.” Her success in achieving this is evidenced by the dead silence in the theater for many seconds after the play ended and the standing ovation the cast received.

The play raises important questions about identity and self-identity, passive observer and activist, and religious and secular choices in a fragmented American society, as well as the persistent and entangling prejudices (in the original, pre-judging sense, emphasis on “judging”) that lurk inside each of us. “Who is an American?” it asks, and “Who gets to decide?” It’s a 90-minute production that rapidly moves into the quicksand of what the playwright calls our “degraded social discourse.”

McCarter has prepared a show website rich with information, including an essay on Islamic art and a Velázquez painting that provide an important symbolic backdrop in the story. Call the box office at 609-258-2787 or visit http://www.mccarter.org.

“Killer Women” and “Sisters in Crime”

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photo: Nick Kenrick, creative commons license

Don’t for a minute think the only books women want to read—or write—are chick lit and romances. London’s first crime-writing festival, organized by the all-female writing collective Killer Women, was held recently at London’s Shoreditch Town Hall. This creepy Victorian building was picked for a reason: it’s where the inquest for Mary Kelly was held—you know, Mary Kelly, Jack the Ripper’s last victim.

Killer Women (whose tagline is “criminally good writing”) was started a few years ago for many of the same reasons women writers in the US launched Sisters in Crime in 1987. SinC’s mission is to “promote the ongoing advancement, recognition and professional development of women crime writers.”

As the festival report points out, “women dominate crime fiction.” Women buy 80 percent of the 21 billion crime books sold annually. They outnumber both male writers and readers in the genre. So, what’s the problem? Why are groups like these needed?

Are Women Good Crime Writers?

Writers are attracted to the genre, one Killer Women founder says, because it “allows you to say almost anything and explore emotions that—particularly as a woman—are not acceptable to explore . . . and it allows you to give the bad guys their comeuppance.”

Scottish crime writer Val McDermid has said that women writers may actually be better at scaring us, because “since childhood we have learned to imagine this”—the possibility for violence in our lives. We’re the ones careful when walking at night, watching the shadows, lying in bed listening for the squeaking stair tread. We read about violence as a way of processing that fear and, perhaps, preparing ourselves for the worst, as well as that satisfying bit of revenge (need some fMRI studies here!). Like the line from the Chicago’s “Cell Block Tango,” “if you’d have been there, if you’d have seen it, I betcha you would have done the same.”

Three-Dimensional Characters

Women writers are in a good position to create more believable female characters too. It’s a long-standing concern that too many women in crime fiction (and film/tv) are present only for titillation—as one Shoreditch participant put it, “running around in their panties, chased by a serial killer.” Their only role is become the victim of a grisly crime or to have (always steamy) sex with the male protagonist or both. Killer Woman member D.E. Meredith calls this sexualization of murder “morally dodgy.” And boring, I say.

Women as calculating protagonists—actors, not victims—has become a standout trend with the growth in popularity of the “domestic thriller.” The success of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Megan Abbott’s recent You Will Know Me, and numerous variations on the theme have opened new territory.

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Feats of True Grit

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photo adapted from Roger Wagner, creative commons license

In this political season, when so much airtime has been expelled on the issue of immigration and the negative characterization of immigrants, I’m reminded of what a rich vein of stories the immigration experience has provided us and continues to do so.

Immigration Stories in Literature

Shawna Yang Ryan has written a beautiful meditation on recent immigration. Her mother immigrated from Taiwan when she married Ryan’s father and worked for a time as an “Avon lady”—a desperate choice that daily forced her to confront strangers at their own front doors and in their language, to face rejection. “To displace one’s self in adulthood, to uproot, to leave behind ways of speaking, moving, being that are second nature is a feat of true grit,” Ryan says.

The immigrant’s persistent sense of dislocation and not-belonging has nourished many great stories. We think of Cólm Toibín’s Brooklyn. We think of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, of Sandra Cisneros and her culture-straddling kin, never feeling fully at home anywhere, of Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You. We may even think of The Godfather and his literary family.

And In Your Own Back Yard

These stories, separate and unique, yet all similar and at a fundamental level, shared, are the sometimes uneasy bedrock of America, “a rich array of experiences: loss, longing, duality, triumph and contradiction,” as revealed by the immigration stories of Latinos who work for National Public radio.

Members of my mother’s family came to America as early as 1634, but on my father’s side, I know little. I’ve researched and developed a speculative jigsaw puzzle of these grandparents’ separate experiences. Hungary was all my dad knew, and the rough time period, 1900-1910.

The treaty of Trianon at the end of World War I changed their origin story forever. My grandfather, to the best I can determine, came from a part of Hungary that is now Romania (Transylvania, to be exact), and my grandmother, about whom I know even less, from a Hungarian region ceded to Czechoslovakia, now the Slovak Republic.

Share your family’s immigration experience at MyImmigrationStory.com, whose message is a nice counterpoint to the political debate: “Statistics do not tell the story of immigration. People do.”