Seems to me that if you lived anywhere close to Mildred Armstrong Kalish--call her "Millie," why don't you?'--life was good, even when it wasn't. What shines in Little Heathens, her glorious memoir about rural Iowa during the Depression is, well, Millie. What makes this book a wonder is Mildred Armstrong Kadish herself. Millie makes life shine. Millie is the story here.
The book is astonishing, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I'm not aware of its record of publication, but once it was out Little Heathens found its way to the desk of Elizabeth Gilbert, who reviewed books the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Ms. Gilbert, most obviously, went all giddy over Little Heathens, and, whoever makes such choices determined to spread Gilbert's review essay over the entire front page.
Let me step in here. That's where I ran into those Little Heathens, and I was dumbstruck. Ms. Gilbert's delighted review came as a shock, not because I thought her reactions were overblown--I hadn't seen the book--but that a book that covered material Gilbert said it did somehow found its way to the front page of Times Book Review seemed impossible. From what the review said, this Mildred Armstrong Kalish wasn't a whole lot different from your and my Aunt Mabel, a woman with a string of stories she's learned to tell delightfully--or soberly--stories about--hold on to something now--rural Iowa during the Depression.
Any landed family in Iowa had, in 2007, an aunt and uncle who could do nothing less than entertain--once you got them going--on the perilous beauty, the deadly fun of the thirties on the farm. I didn't belong to that class, but I married into it. If I knew Depression-era farm stories, I heard them from my father-in-law or two writer friends, Stanley Wiersma and Jim Heynen, who weren't quite that old but absolutely loved spinning beloved old farm yarns.
So I bought Little Heathens, loved it, passed it along to my wife, who loved it, and found herself in it, even though her mother was Millie Kalish's age and had many similar memories, memories she shared occasionally with a wholly different spin--my mother-in-law wasn't so greatly taken with her childhood farm experience.
Little Heathens doesn't say as much about poverty as it does about learning to make do. Little Heathens only incidentally talks about farm foreclosures because, as she honestly says, difficult discussions weren't hammered out where the kids could hear them. And this should be said too--Mildred Armstrong Kamish was born with a sweet aversion to the dark side.
Besides, as she says, the Armstrongs were "land poor," in short, they had no money, but they never lacked for meat and potatoes. And that's one of the absolute glories of this memoir of hers: she recounts in exacting (and loving) detail how the family got by, what they wore, what they planted, how they harvested. There's more than you'll ever want to know about making head cheese, about the magic of family when teamwork was their means of survival.
Listen, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, is a wonderful book that deserved the ink it received from the New York Times Sunday Book Review. It's a ball, and dream, a blessing. A year or so later, She didn't write it until she was in her eighties, and she was 84 when it was published. A year or so later, she won Iowa's Emerging Author Award.
But there are some loose ends. Millie grew up with a father. He was "banished," it seems, for some unholy reason. She doesn't talk about that, doesn't investigate either. Some readers--me, among them--can't help thinking it strange she simply refuses to know why.
But then the Mildred Armstrong Kalish of Little Heathens would deliberately and even naturally stay a room away from the kind of talk about a father who was, in her life, quite literally never there.
And there's just one line at the end of this wonderful book that furrows an eyebrow. At the end of the book, she confesses that her sister Avis, who experienced the very same Depression-era farm life, inherited the same genes and DNA, hated that same farm childhood and made it a point in her life never to return.
Some loved the years and the place where Mildred Armstrong was reared. Some were forever scarred.
Mildred loved it, and, trust me, should you choose to read Little Heathens, you'll love it too and want her for a neighbor. She shines like an Iowa sky on a bright summer morning. Blind spots and all, it's a wonder-filled book.
No comments:
Post a Comment