At last . . . a memoir finally worthy of comparison to the uproariously funny fiction of the great Jean Shepherd, author and narrator of the beloved
A Christmas Story
.
Only . . . it's all true. Sometimes . . . sadly true.
Award-winning presidential historian and baseball scholar David Pietrusza's witty and wise tale of growing up in the 1950s and 60s,
Too Long Ago
is no
Leave It to Beaver
or
Father Knows Best
episode. It's a unique glimpse into an unjustly ignored and forgotten immigrant experience—Eastern European and devoutly pre-Vatican II Catholic. A tale of a tight-knit Polish community, transplanted from tiny, impoverished Hapsburg-ruled villages to a hardscrabble, hardworking, hard-drinking Upstate New York mill town. It's how the first rust corroded the Rust Belt, sidetracking dreams but not hope.
It's a lively saga of secrets and hard times, of insanity, of manslaughter and murder, of war and postwar, Depression and Recession, racetracks and religions, books and bar rooms, unforgettable personalities and vastly unpronounceable names, of characters and character, of homelessness, of immigration—first to America and then from Rust Belt to Sun Belt—of vices and virtues, and how a sickly, bookwormish boy who loved history and the presidents finally discovered a national pastime and made it his own.
Meet
's mesmerizing cast of characters: Depression-ravaged Felix and Agnes Marek, Corporal Danny Pietrusza and his wartime adventures, Uncle Tony Lenczewski and his raided saloon, brutal serial-killer Lemuel Smith, the high-kicking weather-prophet "Cousin George" Casabonne, carpet heiress and OSS operative Gertie Sanford, caught behind-enemy-lines Mary Zaklukiewicz, and the homeless (but not hopeless) Uncle Leo Zack.
Alternately sharp-edged and warm-hearted—sometimes shocking and always surprising—
is a poignant tour-de-force, a no-stopping-for-breath, coming-of-age narrative, akin to cross-breeding Jean Shepherd's boisterous
with Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo's gritty semi-autobiographical novel
Mohawk
(set mere miles from
) and presenting the genre-bending result in the mesmerizing form of a decidedly non-WASPY rendition of an epic Spalding Gray monolog.