Reading Louis Adamic (An Introduction)

I've just started reading Louis Adamic's Laughing in the Jungle, published in 1932. It's subtitled The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America.


It was Adamic's second book. His first, Dynamite: A History of Class Violence in America, 1830-1930 came out the previous year. Both books were well-received. But it was Adamic's next book, The Native's Return(1934) that established his reputation as a social critic and chronicler of the immigrant experience. It became a best seller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It sold 70,000 copies in the first two weeks of publication! I read The Native's Return three years ago. Until recently, that was the extent of my exposure to Adamic's writing.

Louis Adamic was prolific: A dozen books, plus a large number of articles and essays in his twenty year writing career. It ended too soon, with his mysterious death in 1951. A suicide or a political murder, depending on who you believe. But more on that later.

Except for Dynamite, which has just been re-issued, Adamic's books are out of print. There are lots of vintage copies floating around on the Internet, usually at modest cost. Except for Laughing in the Jungle, which seems to be pretty scarce. I paid about $45 for my copy.

I've just been reading about Adamic's school days at a gymnasium in Ljubljana, now the capitol of Slovenia. He writes that his mother used to visit him at his student boarding house every couple of months. It wasn't such an easy trek from their peasant village of Blato ("mud.") She would bring him fruit and potica. "Carniolan cake," Adamic called it, using one of the old names for Slovenia.

Potica. That makes me smile. It's the one bit of our Slovenian heritage my family never lost. We make potica every Christmas and ration it out like gold. But I found a little bit in the freezer, left over from last year. So I've been defrosting a slice now and then.

I thought potica out of season might function like Proust's madeleine. At the very least, I figured it might help put me in the mood for my new writing project. Potica is very rich, with all that butter and honey, so it does keep well. But this particular batch was definitely the worse for wear after a year in the freezer.

Time for a new batch. Here's a nice potica link.

Plymouth Rock or Ellis Island?

Like so many Americans, my roots in this country don't go back very far. My family was part of that great wave of immigration that peaked in the early part of the twentieth century.

No Mayflower or D.A.R. for us. It was Ellis Island rather than Plymouth Rock, in the words of the Slovenian American writer/journalist Louis Adamic (1899-1951), who emigrated as a teenager in 1913. Adamic went on to become perhaps the most prominent chronicler of the early 20th century "new immigrant" experience.

They called them "new immigrants" to distinguish them from the "old stock" Americans who had came earlier, from Great Britain and Western Europe. Mostly, these new Americans were Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe. They had funny accents and hard-to-pronounce last names.

Many of the "old stock" Americans worried about the consequences of opening the doors so wide. Eventually, the doors slammed shut, with restrictive legislation in place by the mid-1920s.

So I'm grateful that the doors were open long enough for my family to slip through. My Slovenian grandfather came through Ellis Island around 1913, just like Louis Adamic. My grandmother was born to parents who had emigrated from Slovenia around 1900. (Louis Adamic was her cousin, according to family lore.) When my mother with very young, they spoke only Slovenian at home.

My late father was Scottish, an ethnic background that's always been acceptable to "old stock" Americans. But I think there was something a little dodgy about how he got here. His family seems to have slipped in by way of Canada. My father didn't figure out he needed naturalization papers until he was drafted in World War II.

So now the "new immigrants" and their descendants have become the old guard. Too many of them—of us—are worried about the newest immigrants, legal and not, from all those other places. Mexico and China. India and the Middle East and Africa. How many of us are prepared to shut the door now that we have safely passed through it ourselves?

We need to remember where we came from and be grateful. And, when we can, we need to open doors and not close them.

(Note: this was originally written as a post-Thanksgiving essay on gratitude, in connection with the Red Room writing community. It seemed like a fitting way to initiate this new blog.)