Afoot In The Balkans: A Reflection of Samojlo Mandarich

By K. F. Stewart

It has often been noted that the flood of immigrants coming to the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries had, collectively, a strong influence on what the United States was to become in the twentieth century. It is equally true that the lives which teenage and adult immigrants already had lived in their native countries had stamped these newcomers with characteristics which influenced and shaped their experiences in the new homeland. To appreciate the developments in American life during this preceding century, then, it would be helpful to know what sort of people these immigrants were, and what their life experiences had been, before ever they set foot upon the American continent.
This book contains a small and partial answer to this vast question. Samojlo Mandarich was a Serb who left his home in Croatia and came hither back when Theodore Roosevelt was President. As huge and daunting as that movement into a new world must have been for him, he had already experienced equally momentous changes, having run away from home twice as a child, the first time when he was nine years old and was gone two years. His return home lasted little more than a year, and at the age of twelve he lit out again, never to return to the village of his birth.
During the last decade of his life, living in California's San Joaquin Valley, he reflected on his childhood adventures. That written record constitutes the heart of this book, to which has been added a brief account of the man who translated that reflection from its Serbo-Croatian manuscript into a typed English copy. The translator was the immigrant's second son, who essayed that task after retiring as a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0CFZMN8WC
• ISBN13: 9798857802946
• Release Date: August 2023
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.0"