Reseña del libro "An Old-Fashioned Romance: The Courtship of my Parents (en Inglés)"
This lovely story is a fictionalized account of the courtship of my mother’s parents in the small Lithuanian town of Kelem in the late 1880s. My grandmother, Anna Marie in the story, had never learned to read, but she had a sharp, fond eye for living and a memory of personal detail that my mother Rose was forever eager to learn about. She loved listening to her mother’s stories about Lithuania, with all the details of life in a world long gone. After my grandmother’s death in 1946 Rose continued the tradition of retelling the family stories for decades thereafter. She became a delightful storyteller in her own right. The setting and stories seem so real that you could truly sense the life that the family led then in their small village of Kelem in Lithuania. She had a superb style in building characters and dialogue. Though she had never known any of them personally, except for her parents, she was able to draw very shrewd, sensitive portraits of her parents and their interactions with each other. The interplay and dialogues of the characters in the book, however, are primarily her own creations. My mother Rose wrote this story in six months at the age of 59, finishing the original draft in 1960. She jealously guarded the manuscript until her death in 1990, not letting anyone touch it. To her it was a very personal experience, but she had dreams of one day having it published. After her death in 1990, the manuscript was lost for six years. When it was finally recovered her daughter-in-law, Phyllis, typed it up and added a section of family history along with old photographs. Rose’s two sons, Bob and Lee had several copies printed out and distributed to the extended family. This historic novel is a tale to be relished and enjoyed, as much as Rose enjoyed remembering the stories and writing them down. It is our gift to our mother that her story finally be told.
