Gold in the Streets

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. 1945. First Edition. Hardcover. [modest shelfwear, top rear corner bumped; the jacket is a bit edgeworn, with very slight paper loss at both ends of spine, one tiny chip and one tiny closed tear at top edge of rear panel]. This novel "brings to life a colorful group of people, Greek peasants who came to America in the early 1900's to the mills of Massachusetts with the hope of gathering enough of the fabulous gold in its streets to return as princes to their olive-crowned Island of Crete." Simone 185: "Appalled by their reception at Ellis Island, [the three friends] intend to stay only temporarily. But, despite hostility from the earlier Polish immigrants working at the mills, two of them decide instead to stay permanently, sending for other family members and their local priest and his daughter, whom [the main character] has long wanted to marry. [Another of the friends] opens his own coffee house, as the Greek community grows and flourishes." The jacket blurb offers this about the author, born in Hartford, Connecticut: "The daughter of Greek immigrants, she has planned to tell their story -- their hopes, experiences and problems -- ever since she spent the four years from 1932 to 1936 in their Cretan homeland and herself experienced, in reverse, the change from the Greek countryside to an American mill town." (Another fun fact: during World War II she "worked in the Greek section of the Office of Strategic Services," precursor to the CIA.) ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-fiction." .