"John Kessel - Buffalo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

Kessel's parents immigrated from Poland in 1911. Their
name was Kisiel, but his got Germanized in Catholic school.
For ten years the family moved from one to another
middle-sized industrial towns, as Joe Kisiel bounced from
job to job. Springfield. Utica. Syracuse. Rochester.
Kessel remembers-them loading up a wagon in the middle of
night with all their belongings in order to jump the rent on
the run-down house in Syracuse. He remembers pulling a cart
down to the Utica Club brewery, a nickel in his hand, to buy
his father a keg of beer. He remembers them finally
settling in the First Ward of Buffalo. The First Ward, at
the foot of the Erie Canal, was an Irish neighborhood as far
back as anybody could remember, and the Kisiels were the
only Poles there. That's where he developed his chameleon
ability to fit in, despite the fact he wanted nothing more
than to get out. But he had to protect his mother, sister
and little brothers from their father's drunken rages. When
 Joe Kisiel died in 1924 it was a relief, despite the fact
that his son ended up supporting the family.

For ten years Kessel has strained against the tug of that
responsibility. He's sought the free and easy feeling of
the road, of places different from where he grew up,
romantic places where the sun shines and he can make
something entirely American of himself.

Despite his ambitions, he's never accomplished much. He's
been essentially a drifter, moving from job to job. Starting
as a pinsetter in a bowling alley, he moved on to a flour
mill. He would have stayed in the mill only he developed an
allergy to the flour dust, so he became an electrician. He
would have stayed an electrician except he had a fight with
a boss and got blacklisted. He left Buffalo because of his
father; he kept coming back because of his mother. When the
Depression hit he tried to get a job in Detroit at the auto
factories, but that was plain stupid in the face of the
universal collapse, and he ended up working up in the
peninsula as a farm hand, then as a logger. It was seasonal
work, and when the season was over he was out of a job. In
the winter of 1933, rather than freeze his ass off in
northern Michigan, he joined the CCC. Now he sends
twenty-five of his thirty dollars a month back to his mother
and sister back in Buffalo. And imagines the future.

When he thinks about it, there are two futures. The
first one is the one from the magazines and books. Bright,
slick, easy. We, looking back on it, can see it to be the
fifteen-cent utopianism of Hugo Gernsback's _ P_ o_ p_ u_ l_ a_ r
_ E_ l_ e_ c_ t_ r_ i_ c_ s, that flourished in the midst of the
Depression.