Bitter Trades: A Memoir - Softcover

Giovanna Miceli Jeffries

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1939693217 ISBN 13: 9781939693211

Publisher: Legas, 2018

Synopsis

In this memoir, the author tracks her childhood and adolescence amid the ageless beauty and migration-plagued Sicily of the fifties and sixties followed by her emigration to Canada and then USA. It is a narrative informed by pre and post migration experience, female agency and lack of it, factory work, higher education and the challenges of family loyalty and cultural boundaries. For those who, like the narrator, were uprooted and had no agency in their migratory displacement, it is ultimately a quest to trade longing and loss for tangible and intangible forms that weave unforeseen and intriguing patterns of a modest American Dream, in the midst of following an Italian Dream.

About this title

About the Author

Giovanna Miceli Jeffries was born in Ribera, Sicily where she grew up and finished high school. Giovanna emigrated to the United State where she pursued an academic career, teaching Italian language and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds a Master's degree and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. Prof. Miceli Jeffries has written several books and numerous scholarly articles. She is now an Emerita from the University of Wisconsin.

Review

BITTER TRADES explores new territory in the rich landscape of memoirs of immigration and displacement. With a cool but passionate eye, Giovanna Miceli Jeffries welcomes into the harsh terrain of her native Sicily, devastated after the War, impoverished and caught between the ancient and the modern. Without sentimentality or false nostalgia, she welcomes us into the complex and passionate lives of the people among whom she must learn and unlearn what it is to be a woman. A beguiling and utterly original volume. --Mary Gordon. Author of Here Your Heart Lies, The Liar s Wife

Growing up in Sicily in the 1950 s, a girl like Giovanna Miceli Jeffries had to learn to tell the bitter almonds from the sweet in gathering the harvest. In this memoir, she gives us both. The title essay, Bitter Trade: A Castle for a Trousseau, cuts to the heart of the immigrant experience in confronting a bitter truth: no matter how much is gained from the New World, it can never truly compensate for what has been lost. I loved this memoir. It reconnected me to an ancestry I thought was gone forever. --Jean Feraca. Distinguished Broadcaster Emerita, Wisconsin Public Radio; author of I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Life, Love, and the Radio; jeanferaca.wordpress.com

About this edition

• Publisher: Legas
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1939693217
• ISBN 13: 9781939693211
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240