Oilcloth Stories

 When immigrants from Central Europe arrived in America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they often came to cities like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania – cities bursting with the new energies and opportunities of industrialization, and with the challenges of assimilating dozens of cultures into what had been pastoral communities only a few decades before.

For most immigrants, industrial working conditions were harsh and brutal, and living conditions were not much better. But the immigrants – Windish, Hungarians, Slovaks, and others – stayed and made lives for themselves … lives that reached from nineteenth-century famine in Europe and the horrors of World War I to man’s landing on the moon and the dawn of the computer age.

It is in the stories of individual lives that this immigrant journey can be glimpsed – in everyday stories, universally human stories – stories told around a table covered in oilcloth.

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