About this item
Highlights
- Immigrant Dreams is a memoir -- the story of one immigrant's journey in 1950 from postwar Germany to the United States.
- Author(s): Barbara Goldowsky
- 450 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
Description
Book Synopsis
Immigrant Dreams is a memoir -- the story of one immigrant's journey in 1950 from postwar Germany to the United States. Barbara was born in 1936, under Hitler's regime. Her earliest years are shaped by the Second World War and its atrocities. Five postwar years later, she immigrates to the United States as a teenager where her American dream begins to take shape. Believing that education is as necessary as bread, she searches for a way to attend a university. As her skill in her newly adopted language improves, the dream expands to include a writing career as a poet and a creative writer. Like the immigrant relatives who came before her, Barbara is willing to work hard physically and mentally so as to grasp every opportunity that may be offered. Realizing her dream will take ambition, determination, stamina -- and, as the author recounts in this stirring tale -- a good deal of luck.
Review Quotes
Immigrant Dreams is vital, memorable, and wise. An accomplished stylist, Barbara Goldowsky explores, in lively and luminous prose, a personal journey that reaches across languages and cultures. Rendering the delightful, sobering, and always compelling particulars of one immigrant's passage, Goldowsky accesses the deeper core not only of the immigrant experience but also of the human dream: In this account, the realization of immigrant dreams celebrates resolve, and talent, and inspiration; it also celebrates love.
-Becky Kennedy, Ph.D. What first strikes the reader of Immigrant Dreams is its complexity of perspective -- age-appropriate, phase by phase, yet subtly focalized through the memory, understanding, emotions, and values of the author-narrator. History is pervasive, of course, but backgrounded to emphasize key personal experiences and their impact, both immediate and life-long. The result is exceptionally engaging and enlightening. Highly recommended.-David Lee Rubin, Guggenheim Fellow Professor Emeritus of French University of Virginia Barbara Goldowsky's exquisite, poetic prose is both daring and satisfying. This vibrant, evocative immigrant tale offers poignant insights into love, loss, and remembrance, revealed with a sharp eye for detail. With its deep resonance of the past, Immigrant Dreams is a book of substance. -Victoria Hartman, Southampton, New York