"American-born Catherine knows little of her Croatian mother's early life. When Marijana dies of ovarian cancer, twenty-two-year-old Catherine finds herself cut off from the past she never really knew. As Catherine searches for clues to her mother's elusive history, she discovers that Marijana was orphaned during WWII, nearly died as a teenager, and escaped from Communist Yugoslavia to Rome, and then South America. Through travel and memory, history and imagination, Catherine resurrects the relatives she's never known. Traversing time and place, memoir and novel, this lyrical narrative explores the collective memory between mothers and daughters, and what it means to find wholeness. It is a story where a daughter gives voice to her immigrant mother's unspoken history, and in the process, heals them both."--Amazon.com.

Mary Terzian was born in Cairo to Armenian parents, refugees of the 1915 genocide. She lived and worked in Egypt, Congo, Togo and Lebanon before immigrating to the United States. Her memoirs of life in 1940s Cairo, seasoned with wit, portray struggles to safeguard her inner self, thwarting parents' obstinate adherence to outdated traditions. Willpower, perseverance, and self-confidence gained through education help her break conventional rules to bloom on her own.--From publisher description.

More than a memoir of personal and political achievements, this volume chronicles a family's development from Mexican immigrants to American leaders. Written in an authentic and unique voice, this book describes how the author's Mexican parents instilled a love of learning, a desire to excel, and a commitment to community in their children. Relating how her heritage and upbringing allowed her to lead her community and promote social justice, the author conveys a courageous story of hope, love, faith, and a fighting spirit long committed to social and environmental justice, regardless of the personal cost.

★FIVE STARRED REVIEWS★ NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS, BOOKLIST AND MORE! Equal parts heartbreaking and hopeful, Tiger Daughter is an award-winning novel about finding your voice amidst the pressures of growing up in an immigrant home told from the perspective of a remarkable young Chinese girl. Wen Zhou is a first-generation daughter of Chinese migrant parents. She has high expectations from her parents to succeed in school, especially her father whose strict rules leave her feeling trapped. She dreams of creating a future for herself more satisfying than the one her parents expect her to lead. Then she befriends a boy named Henry who is also a first generation immigrant. He is the smartest boy at school despite struggling with his English and understands her in a way nobody has lately. Both of them dream of escaping and together they come up with a plan to take an entrance exam for a selective school far from home. But when tragedy strikes, it will take all of Wen’s resilience and tiger strength to get herself and Henry through the storm that follows. Tiger Daughter is a coming-of-age novel that will grab hold of you and not let go.

The Immigrant Child is an entertaining, exciting, thought-provoking children's book. It chronicles a child's experience moving from a developing country to a developed one with her parents. The initial excitement dwindled when she was faced with many cultural differences. A highlight of the book is the questions at the end that target the different levels of comprehension.

Taking us from the open spaces of rural New Mexico and the fields of California's Great Central Valley to the intellectual milieu of student life in Berkeley during the 1950s, this memoir, based on an oral history by Mario T. García, is the powerful and moving testimonio of a young Mexican American woman's struggle to rise out of poverty. Migrant Daughter is the coming-of-age story of Frances Esquibel Tywoniak, who was born in Spanish-speaking New Mexico, moved with her family to California during the Depression to attend school and work as a farm laborer, and subsequently won a university scholarship, becoming one of the few Mexican Americans to attend the University of California, Berkeley, at that time. Giving a personal perspective on the conflicts of living in and between cultures, this eloquent story provides a rare glimpse into the life of a young Mexican American woman who achieved her dreams of obtaining a university education. In addition to the many fascinating details of everyday life the narrative provides, Mario T. García's introduction contextualizes the place and importance of Tywoniak's life. Both introduction and narrative illustrate the process by which Tywoniak negotiated her relation to ethnic identity and cultural allegiances, the ways in which she came to find education as a channel for breaking with fieldwork patterns of life, and the effect of migration on family and culture. This deeply personal memoir portrays a courageous Mexican American woman moving between many cultural worlds, a life story that at times parallels, and at times diverges from, the real life experiences of thousands of other, unnamed women.

The book is a true narrative of a young Jamaican teenager who, broken and devastated by the tragic death of her father, found herself tossed out too early into the rough seas of life. The historic accident of Train and Truck of July, 1973, the tragic deaths and sad funerals stirred up so much emotion among the citizens of the town, including the representatives of the then Prime Minister, Mr. Michael Manly. The sad circumstances of the tragic events transformed and continue to define the lives of spouses who felt marooned and kids orphaned and abandoned. This novel is a captivating story, the lived experience of one of those kids who emerged from the ashes of that wreck that upturned the life and fortunes of so many in Manchester, Jamaica. Her wild initiation was celebrated on the treacherous streets of Kingston away from the loving grasp of her adorable and long suffering mother and grandma to whom she attributes her survival instincts, determination, and faith.

In the Russian shtetl where she and her family live, Hannah is given a diary for her tenth birthday, and in it she records the dramatic story of her journey to America.

Many of us come from poor immigrant farm families and can identify with Tina’s story. Yet each story is different. Tina’s stunning story takes you at a fast clip from the early migrations of her Mennonite people from The Netherlands to Prussia to Ukraine. Her parents were born toward the end of the 19th Century in Czarist Russia, just in time to witness World War I, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in St. Petersburg, the Civil War that followed, and the reign of Lenin. For most of those years in their Ukrainian village the Klassen family prospered. The collectivization and purges of Stalin followed the Klassen’s emigration from Russia to Canada in 1925. Canada is the setting for Tina’s birth and life. See how the everyday chores, child’s play, schooling, and Tina’s curiosity intersect with her family’s struggle for survival in this foreign land. The cultural and natural environment was not always friendly. Drought, dustbowl, the Great Depression, learning a new language and customs all took their toll. Although they were dirt poor, you will be impressed with her family’s indomitable spirit and fortitude. Tina is imbued with this spirit and ethic as she prepares herself for independence and service. Achievements and progress are rooted in humble beginnings. Tina remembers from whence she came.

Born in Winnipeg to Icelandic immigrants in 1890, Laura Goodman Salverson embarked on a life marked by contradiction and cultural exchange. Her 1939 memoir braids the strands of her parents’ intellectual life in Iceland with a hardscrabble existence on the Prairies at the turn of the century, all against a backdrop of European settlement in post-Riel Manitoba and in colourful, self-assured prose. Leaving behind economic hardship, a difficult climate, and the threat of volcanoes, Lars Gudman was in search of stability for his family, but he was also ensnared by wanderlust. Travelling onward to Minnesota, the Dakotas, Selkirk, Duluth, and the Mississippi Valley, Salverson and her parents returned time and again to the Icelandic enclave in Winnipeg, a community struggling to adjust to life in Canada. In Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter Salverson makes real the political and cultural history of the twentieth-century North American west, even as she draws the reader into the inner life of a young girl growing up “hopelessly Icelandic” and finding refuge from discrimination and ostracism in the world of books. With a new introduction by Carl Watts situating the memoir and its prolific author in the literary canon, and reproducing Salverson’s original preface for the first time, Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter remains both a Canadian classic and an important social history of the experiences of women and immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century.