Hunky: The Immigrant Experience Paperback – Illustrated, February 27, 2004

Hunky by Nicholas Karas is novel, biography, history all rolled into one. This book will appeal to anyone with family roots in Eastern Europe. Especially those who have Grandparents and Great Grandparents who left their ancient homeland in search of a new life and crossed the storm tossed waters of the Atlantic Ocean in search of this dream called America. Many Americans have immigrant ancestors who crossed over from Europe but I will bet many have never stopped to understand what courage, commitment and even loss that those people had to endure to do start again in a new land. Nicholas Karas uses his family history and stories to explain this to his readers in great detail. From starvation and desperation in Galicia to vomit filled steerage aboard the ocean liners bringing them to America. Then the novelty of arrival and harsh reality of the mines and mills that absorbed the lives and dreams of these people. Our people. For me, I felt a connection since my family immigrated from Slovakia in 1903. I now have a much better idea of what it must have been like for them to leave everything they knew for a dream. No internet, phone, TV or Radio. No planes, color photos and few cars. Most of them could barely read or write if at all, yet they took those fateful steps out of the fields of Eastern Europe, boarded the ships like human cattle to brave an ocean and chase the dream of America. Simply amazing. Mr. Karas has given me a vividly detailed look into my Great Grandfather's life and the sacrifice he made so that me and my family live the life we do now rather than the same one he lived. This book is a priceless gift. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to understand the why and how of their ancestors greatest journey.

Personal use

I recently discovered that my Grandfather came from the Carpathian region. Just like the characters in the book, his family immigrated to Penn. in the early 1900s and worked in the coal mines. This book was a wonderful way to 'experience' what it must have been like for those families. I am truly grateful that Mr. Karas took the time to research and write this book. He did a nice job bringing the story to life. Well done!However, I only gave it 4 stars because the book clearly was not well edited. I found numerous incorrect usage of words like 'loose' when it should have been 'lose' and 'bellow' when he mean 'below'. The author seems to write well, so the fact that so many editorial errors got into a published book is perplexing.

This book pulled together many of the stories my parents told me about their parents' lives in "the old country" in the Carpathian Mountains, and my parents' lives as youngsters in the coal mines of West Virginia and Scranton, PA + their time working in the Endicott-Johnson shoe factories in Binghamton.The ancestry, heritage, and values of our people as Rusyns/Rusnaks, the courage of my 4 grandparents to travel to the USA, work in the coal mines and the steel mills, their trips back home to get more family members to "come over", and their lives as new Americans was riveting in its accuracy, and gut-wrenching in painting the realistic & desparate situation they were in for much of their lives in Eastern Europe and again in the USA. The section on working in the coal mines and the shoe factories was extremely compelling and correct, right down to the names and locations of the "beer gardens" on Clinton Street in Binghamton, NY.I will give copies of this book to each of my grown children, so that they can have a historical record of what their ancestors did and how they lived, as seen through the author's family.As a teenager and young man in the Binghamton area (and still today at age 62 in New England) I describe myself as a "Hunky", and if a fellow-Slavic person called me that, I would not be insulted. But if a non-Slav called me that, it would be an insult.The only inaccurate piece of the book is in the author's introduction, where he says "there are no 2nd generation Hunkies."He's wrong; I'm one, and proud of my Hunky heritage.

I found this book to be as close to my family's story as any I have ever read. I had never heard of the term "Hunky" until quite recently but it was something my mother remembers hearing growing up in a Slovak neighborhood in the 1950's. The term means nothing to me because I'm a third generation American but I understand the derogatory meaning of it and how insulting it must have been.This book was well written and had such rich detail. It spans the Rusyns in the old country, describing their hardships and their decisions to give it a go in America. I loved the chapters describing the journey across the ocean - it was so well detailed that one could almost feel seasick. The author probably did many years of family research and it shows. It was a little confusing to me because there were so many people intertwined in the story. A family tree in the back of the book would have been helpful.Some of the book was very sad but it reminds you that in every family there are bad endings and mistakes made. Overall I think this book was hopeful and I was rooting for them at every step. It is a story about making your own American dreams come true. I was hoping for a good ending that left me with no questions of "then what happened?" and I think the author accomplished that for me.