Books: Refreshing Immigrant

THIS IS MY COUNTRY — Stoyan Christowe—Carrick & Evans ($2.75).

The best-known autobiographies of U. S. immigrants—Edward Bok’s autobiography, Michael Pupin’s From Immigrant to Inventor, Louis Adamic’s Laughing in the Jungle and My America—have been written by immigrants from the smallest countries: Holland, Serbia, Yugoslavia. With publication last week of Stoyan Christowe’s autobiography, this unexplored coincidence still held good. Son of a Bulgarian village sage, stocky, fierce-looking, congenial Author Christowe, now 40, is known as a contributor to the defunct, highbrow Dial, author of two well-received books, Heroes and Assassirts, an account of Macedonian terrorists, and Mara, a novel. Least pretentious of immigrant autobiographies, and one of the best-written, This Is My Country is a simple chronicle that contrasts particularly with the excitable, brooding record of Louis Adamic’s Americanization.

Fired by returned immigrants’ tales of electric lights, elevators and other such wonders of “Amerikanska tzivilizatzia,” little Stoyan pestered his father for passage money, got it by going on strike. He was then 13 years old. His guardian for the trip was a returning naturalized U. S. citizen. In St. Louis, Stoyan lived with an uncle, in an apartment where six countrymen, haggard with overwork and economizing, slept in shifts. They worked in the railroad shop, made $1.50 a day, saved most of it. In a shoe factory Stoyan got $7 a week; room was 50¢ a month, board $1 a week. In his spare time he hung out in a Greek coffee shop, whose proprietor used words like “status quo,” “ukase,” gave attentive Stoyan the valuable advice that “you must learn to read, write and speak English in one operation.” He told him to read signs, wrappers on packages, etc., for, said the Greek, “English is spread all over, like a rug, like a picture. . . . And behind it is America.”

When his uncle died, Stoyan went to Montana as water boy to a railroad construction gang. He and a friend made the 1,500-mile trip in dilapidated boxcars outfitted as bunkhouses, which whipped over the tracks like a snake, threatening momentarily to fall to pieces. But the Balkan occupants had no qualms at all. If the Chewtobaccos, the big bosses, said they were safe, they must be safe. Their faith in democracy was often demonstrated just as literally. Because a giant worker heard that workers were equal with the rich, he carried a mattress, white sheets, wore silk pajamas, and one derisive titter at this display was worth a titterer’s life. Brooding one time over a ludicrously unfounded case of discrimination, he asked Stoyan, the gang’s spokesman, to complain to President Wilson. Then Stoyan refused, this giant lost a lot of faith in democracy, left the gang in sad disgust. What most amazed Stoyan was that a gang of Balkan peasants could lay a track good enough to carry the Northern Pacific’s Fast Mail. In his bunk-car he got together a library consisting of a grammar and an unabridged Webster, in three snowbound winters practically memorized them.

The last pages, describing his job as secretary to the Bulgarian Consul in Chicago, the start of his literary career, his return to his native country as Balkan correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, are less interesting, but refreshingly unsoulful.

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