A01=Daiva Markelis
alcoholism
american dream
assimilation
Author_Daiva Markelis
autobiography
belonging
biography
Category=DNBA
chicago
childhood
cicero
communism
community
daughter
depression
displaced person
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
europe
exile
expectations
family
first communion
gender
generations
identity
immigrants
immigration
language
lithuania
memoir
mental health
mothers and daughters
nonfiction
popular culture
refugees
religion
suburb
war
Product details
- ISBN 9780226505305
- Weight: 397g
- Dimensions: 15 x 22mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2010
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Her parents never really explained what a D.P. was. Years later Daiva Markelis learned that 'displaced person' was the designation bestowed upon European refugees like her mom and dad who fled communist Lithuania after the war. Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, though, Markelis had only heard the name T.P., since her folks pronounced the D as a T: 'In first grade we had learned about the Plains Indians, who had lived in tent-like dwellings made of wood and buffalo skin called teepees. In my childish confusion, I thought that perhaps my parents weren't Lithuanian at all, but Cherokee. I went around telling people that I was the child of teepees'. So begins this touching and affectionate memoir about growing up as a daughter of Lithuanian immigrants. Markelis was raised during the 1960s and '70s in a household where Lithuanian was the first language. "White Field, Black Sheep" derives much of its charm from this collision of old world and new: a tough but cultured generation that can't quite understand the ways of America and a younger one reared on Barbie dolls and The Brady Bunch, Hostess cupcakes and comic books, "The Monkees" and "Captain Kangaroo".
Throughout, Markelis recalls the amusing contortions of language and identity that animated her childhood. She also humorously recollects the touchstones of her youth, from her First Communion to her first game of Twister. Ultimately, she revisits the troubles that surfaced in the wake of her cultural assimilation: the constricting expectations of her family and community, her problems with alcoholism and depression, and her sometimes contentious but always loving relationship with her mother. Deftly recreating the emotional world of adolescence, but overlaying it with the hard-won understanding of adulthood, "White Field, Black Sheep" is a poignant and moving memoir - a lively tale of this Lithuanian-American life.
Daiva Markelis is associate professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. Her writings have appeared in the Chicago Tribune Magazine, Chicago Reader, and American Literary Review, among other publications.
