P0RTRAIT OF AN IMMIGRANT (Steven A. Bachleda)

This short biography (167 pages) was of special interest to me because the author's father, Anton Bachleda, and mother. Maria Oleksakova, were born in the village of Zdiar, Slovakia.  This is the same village where my great-great-grandfather, Gregory Oleksak, was born in 1873.  The similarity in names and birthplaces of Gregory and Maria leads me to believe that the author and I may be distantly related!

Steven (Stefan) Bachleda was born in Trstany, Slovakia, in 1931, just a few months after his father left for America, supposedly to seek a better life for his family. Steven was the youngest of Anton and Maria's five surviving children.  During the first years of his life his mother struggled to feed and clothe her children and keep a roof over their heads .  Anton sent very little money back from America and eventually Maria lost their home, which was heavily mortgaged, and the five children were sent to live with relatives and neighbors.  Bachleda vividly describes the difficult living conditions in Slovakia during the 1930's and the family's first attempt to immigrate to America, an attempt thwarted when Hitler closed the borders. Eventually , thanks to the generosity of a dying American widow, the family is reunited with Anton in New York after an arduous sea journey.

Bachleda takes the reader through his hardscrabble childhood in the Bronx with an alcoholic father and lack of money (all of the Bachleda children were forced to leave school early to help support the family), but his story is tempered by friendships formed and a fierce determination to belong to and succeed in this new land.  In spite of way too many commas (editing could have been better), I would recommend this book.  It illustrates the strength of family and the pride many immigrants take in contributing to their adopted country through hard work and military service.  Anyone who believes that immigration is a bad thing should try to imagine themselves working as hard or needing as little to make a life as the Bachleda family did.