A book about somebody else's dead relatives – complete with fuzzed black-and-white photos – sounds about as welcoming as a hard church pew.
Does Mildred Armstrong Kalish have a surprise for you. At 85, in a sturdy, unvarnished voice, Kalish conjures a bygone era in her tough, delightful memoir, “Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.”
BOOK REVIEW
Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
Mildred Armstrong Kalish Bantam, 292 pages, $22
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Note the paradox in the subtitle. Reporter Timothy Egan gave us a searing account of Dust Bowl suffering in “The Worst Hard Times,” but Kalish shows us the singular joys of a rural childhood all the more vivid for being set amid deprivation. So, we read about stampeding horses and determined hens, ingenious home remedies and the correct way to start a head cheese – children douse the head of a decapitated pig with baking soda “and scrub the head until it was pink and clean.”
After an unsentimental march through the monumental labor of Wash Day, which explains why one set of clothes was worn all week, Kalish asks: Is there any sense in trying to make the modern-day reader understand the immense satisfaction we experienced in viewing our bright, clean wash arranged in such a meticulous fashion on the clothesline?
“To crawl between crisp sheets, warm and fresh from the sun and air, at the end of a bone-wearing day, is one of the true soul-restoring luxuries of life, which hardly anyone of the current generation will ever know.”
If you smell a whiff of nostalgia amid the bacon fat – a down-home aroma that serves as Kalish's madeleine cookie – the author balances it with crisp asides about farm injuries, unwanted babies and the unfair contracts that indentured rural school teachers. Decembers were so unbearably cold that “my idea of winter sports is to sit around shivering violently.”
For readers descended from rugged Midwestern stock, a joy of recognition animates this text. The attitude and language are all here: Lunch is called dinner; “goodhardworkers” is one word.
Kalish's grandma is a presiding spirit here, the one who inadvertently named this book, being that she reliably called all the children “littleheathens.”
When grandma catches wind that the kids were bathing outdoors, she is terse in her displeasure: “A body'd think you had no upbringing. They'd think that you'd been peed on a stump and hatched in the sun.”
Kalish herself has reached that poignant juncture when she is the only one left to remember the verses of songs, the melody of an old hymn and the mantra of her cash-strapped childhood: “Use it up; wear it out; make it do; do without.”
We trust these memories for their specificity and their vividness. Indeed, Kalish gives us too many old time-y lyrics and goes a bit heavy on obsolete recipes. She can't seem to resist ending chapters with a touch of moral instruction. Nora Ephron she is not, but Kalish is winning in her own way.
This is a book to awaken your family's own half-remembered stories – or better, to send you back to your elders to scour up your own.
Kalish writes, “It's probably difficult for anyone today to comprehend or appreciate the eagerness with which we anticipated an evening spent in the company of an ancient grand-aunt, eating candy and popcorn, telling riddles and singing hymns, but Saturday nights were a real treat for us.”
In fact, we can imagine it, thanks to “Little Heathens.” Its tart, observant author has punched our ticket to a lost world.
© Newhouse News Service
