Such Is Life: A Memoir (Crossings). This item is unavailable.Such Is Life: A Memoir (Crossings)

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian by Laura E. Ruberto. "An immigrant woman's moving account of what one gains, but also what one loses, when emigrating to the U.S. from a village in rural Campania. All those who have been uprooted from their homes can identify with this Southern Italian woman's life story--marked by acceptance of hardship and the poetic memory of the village in which she was born and to which she could not bear to return"--Paola Alessandra Sensi-Isolani, Professor of Anthropology, St. Mary's College of California.

Leonilde Frieri Ruberto was born in Cairano (province of Avellino, Italy) in 1913. She completed the fourth grade, married, worked, and raised four children before she and her family emigrated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1954. She died in Sound Beach, New York, in 2000. Encouraged by one of her daughters, and prompted in part by the destruction of her home village in the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, she wrote her life's story.