Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me

by Catherine Kapphahn

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780578545028
Publisher:	Catherine Kapphahn
Publication date:	08/21/2019
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	292,035
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Catherine Kapphahn's Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me received The Center for Fiction's Christopher Doheny Award. Her writing has received multiple grants from the Queens Council on the Arts. Her essays have appeared in Astoria Magazine, the Feminist Press Anthology This is the Way We Say Goodbye, CURE Magazine, and SalonZine. She earned a B.A. from Hunter College and an M.F.A. in writing from Columbia University. Catherine is an adjunct lecturer at City University of New York at Lehman College in the Bronx, where her students' brave stories continue to inspire her. Catherine is also a yoga teacher. She grew up near the mountains in Colorado and now lives between two bridges in Queens, New York with her husband and two sons.

Editorial Reviews

"What if we could learn the stories our mothers didn't tell us? Through the powerful magic of love, grief, imagination, and the grit that her mother instilled in her, a daughter brings her mother's untold journey to life in cinematic detail. Readers will be transported and deeply touched."-Elizabeth Seay, author of Searching for Lost City: On the Trail of America's Native Languages

"The memoir crackles with imagination, raw feeling, and the kind of stark empathy we come to literature precisely to experience. The two key threads of the book-the author's and her mother's-play off one another with a delicate harmony I've rarely seen in memoir, showcasing Kapphahn's ability to use both her personal experience and her mother's unique, striking narrative to build an intimate story about longing, identity, and how the imprints of our family histories can echo, strangely, through the actions of our present." -Mike Scalise, author of The Brand New Catastrophe

"Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me is a search for a mother's traumatic history and a daughter's cultural identity. As Kapphahn takes the reader on her mother's harrowing experience in WWII Zagreb and escape from Communist Yugoslavia, she digs into her grief with searing language that illuminates the emotional impact of war and upheaval on the body. Such an engagement with her history and culture gradually unfolds intricate layers of love and acceptance. This memoir's brilliance lies in its overlapping narratives that amplify universal experiences of loss and longing, transforming pain into transcendence."-Nancy Agabian, author of Me as Her Again

"By braiding together her own, present-day journey of discovery with her mother's, Kapphahn shows us how we can be cosmically linked to those we love - across physical and temporal barriers - and emerge whole, through the will of our imagination." -Brenda Lin, author of Wealth Ribbon: Taiwan Bound, America Bound

"In this moving study of her mother's past, Catherine Kapphahn has shown how traumatic historical events can enter a family's bloodstream. The bond between mother and daughter - forged in a new world so full of promise, marked by the darkness of times past - sings with tenderness and urgency."-Courtney Angela Brkic, author of The First Rule of Swimming

"Kapphahn weaves together a book that is both a memoir of a fascinating woman and a history of a remarkable time period, all while meditating on questions of illness and grief with a quiet and honest grace." -Michelle Bailat-Jones, author of Unfurled

"An exceptionally well written and inherently interesting read from beginning to end, Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me showcases author Catherine Kapphahn's genuine flair for originality and narrative driven storytelling."

--Midwest Review of Books

From the Publisher