Product Description

I tell of a time, a place, and a way of life long gone. For many years I have had the urge to describe that treasure trove, lest it vanish forever. So, partly in response to the basic human instinct to share feelings and experiences, and partly for the sheer joy and excitement of it all, I report on my early life. It was quite a romp.

So begins Mildred Kalish’s story of growing up on her grandparents’ Iowa farm during the depths of the Great Depression. With her father banished from the household for mysterious transgressions, five-year-old Mildred and her family could easily have been overwhelmed by the challenge of simply trying to survive. This, however, is not a tale of suffering.

Kalish counts herself among the lucky of that era. She had caring grandparents who possessed—and valiantly tried to impose—all the pioneer virtues of their forebears, teachers who inspired and befriended her, and a barnyard full of animals ready to be tamed and loved. She and her siblings and their cousins from the farm across the way played as hard as they worked, running barefoot through the fields, as free and wild as they dared.

Filled with recipes and how-tos for everything from catching and skinning a rabbit to preparing homemade skin and hair beautifiers, apple cream pie, and the world’s best head cheese (start by scrubbing the head of the pig until it is pink and clean), Little Heathens portrays a world of hardship and hard work tempered by simple rewards. There was the unsurpassed flavor of tender new dandelion greens harvested as soon as the snow melted; the taste of crystal clear marble-sized balls of honey robbed from a bumblebee nest; the sweet smell from the body of a lamb sleeping on sun-warmed grass; and the magical quality of oat shocking under the light of a full harvest moon.

Little Heathens offers a loving but realistic portrait of a “hearty-handshake Methodist” family that gave its members a remarkable legacy of kinship, kindness, and remembered pleasures. Recounted in a luminous narrative filled with tenderness and humor, Kalish’s memoir of her childhood shows how the right stuff can make even the bleakest of times seem like “quite a romp.”


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2901 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-29
• Released on: 2008-04-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780553384246
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Kalish's memoir of her Iowa childhood, set against the backdrop of the Depression, captures a vanished way of traditional living and a specific moment in American history in a story both illuminating and memorable. Kalish lived with her siblings, mother and grandparents-seven in all-both in a town home and, in warmer weather, out on a farm. The lifestyle was frugal in the extreme: "The only things my grandparents spent money on were tea, coffee, sugar, salt, white flour, cloth and kerosene." But in spite of the austere conditions, Kalish's memories are mostly happy ones: keeping the farm and home going, caring for animals, cooking elaborate multi-course meals and washing the large family's laundry once a week, by hand. Here, too, are stories of gossiping in the kitchen, digging a hole to China with the "Big Kids" and making head cheese at butchering time. Kalish skillfully rises above bitterness and sentiment, giving her memoir a clear-eyed narrative voice that puts to fine use a lifetime of careful observation: "Observing the abundance of life around us was just so naturally a part of our days on the farm that it became a habit." Simple, detailed and honest, this is a refreshing and informative read for anyone interested in the struggles of average Americans in the thick of the Great Depression.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
One of the most endearing qualities of octogenarian Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s Little Heathens is that it runs counter to what the memoir, sadly, has too frequently become—self-indulgent, self-promoting gossip. Despite circumstances that could easily have left her embittered, Kalish, a retired English professor, recalls her formative years fondly. Through simple, honest prose punctuated with "her old pagan rhythms" (New York Times Book Review) and a host of memorable examples, Kalish performs her greatest feat, which is to make some of us under 80 just the slightest bit envious—crazy to say, but such is human nature—that we never experienced the Depression-era challenges and triumphs so lovingly recounted.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
This unpretentious yet deeply intelligent memoir of growing up on a central Iowa farm in the throes of the Great Depression radiates the joy of a vanished way of life as Kalish recounts what appear to contemporary eyes as unendurable deprivations. Those who share Kalish's midwestern farm background will immediately identify with her recollections of winter nights spent under layers of quilts in unheated bedrooms. Others for whom agrarian life is uncharted territory will learn both the harsh rigors of days governed by unforgiving work cycles and the irreproducible sensual pleasure of savoring a just-picked, sun-drenched, ripe strawberry or tomato. In prose that never yields to mawkish sentimentality, Kalish details the roles of family, religion, thrift, and education in her upbringing. The complexities of wash-day chores will bring up short those who know only today's appliances. Kalish's disquisition on outhouse etiquette will simply amaze those accustomed to their own bathrooms. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

This book is a winner
This is an entrancing memoir of days now long gone, but vivid in the minds of those who lived them. While I lived on an Iowa farm in western Iowa rather than eastern Iowa, and was a boy, and was about six years younger than the author, this book recalled so much of what it was like that reading it was sn unmitigated delight. The author recognizes "the all-too-human tendency to gloss over the bad and glorify, or at least magnify, the good" when recalling one's childhood, but it sure makes greater reading to read of one's appreciated childhood than it does to read of one who looks back thereon in bitterness. Thus this book beats, e.g., Angela's Ashes by a mile in enjoyable reading.

Depression Modern
Little Heathens, the memoir of an Iowa farm childhood, is a marvelously vivid encounter with an iconic way of life that has largely gone the way of the elm tree. The author Mildred Kalish, valedictorian of her high school class back in 1940, turns a sharp, remarkably objective eye on those descendents of the pioneers, "more 19th century than 20th," who raised her to live off the land through Iowa's "fierce blizzards" and some of America's worst times.

But this is not Little-House-on-the-Prairie. Yes, Kalish can rustle up the poignant details of honey gathering and head-cheese making. She can tell you how to domesticate raccoons and explain the proper use of beets to draw boils. What's unique here, though, is Kalish's portrait of an austere people whose Puritan tradition frowned on joy, prohibited affection in word or touch, "built character" with an open bible and homilies that dotted their days.

Fortunately, while Kalish grew up hearing that "whistling girls and crowing hens will always come to some bad end," such warnings never dampened the spirits of the "little heathens" -- as her grandmother called the farm's children. Eight decades later she has brought those stern sepia-toned faces back to full color through their words (from "Oh my soul" to "shit from shinola"), their ideals ("better to wear out than rust out"), and their deepest pleasures ("the kinship of souls that is created when everyone gathers in the kitchen to prepare a meal"). Reading Little Heathens, you become part of that lovely kinship for a while.

superb memoir
Mildred Armstrong Kalish provides a deep look back to growing up on a farm in Iowa during the Depression. Ms. Kalish's family of seven lived a frugal lifestyle in which three generations resided in the home with the only missing person being her exiled father although why she was not sure. Her cousins lived on nearby farms so the extended family was nearby to help if needed.

The key to this superb discerning memoir is Ms. Kalish avoids acrimony and sugared (except when grandpa bought some) nostalgia to provide a vivid picture of a bygone era in which an extended family was there to raise the children with positive values. Life on the farm during harsh economic conditions was fun to a preadolescent Mildred although some chores were simply work. With black and white pictures to enhance the era and "farm food" recipes that were not microwave, LITTLE HEATHENS is a well written winner providing a powerful look at the 1930s in the Midwest. Ms. Kalish showcases how different life was back then from today when for instance the three Klausner brothers live in Georgia, New Jersey and Texas respectively and outhouses is a Three Stooges' joke.

Harriet Klausner