Gringo: The Making of a Rebel

ISBN: 1931807167

Author: Willimetz, Emil

Condition: New

Gringo offers both general readers and scholars a journey behind the lines of the Great Depression, combat in Normandy and northern Germany, and early civil rights and labor organizing in the South. Gringo opens with a quick gloss on how Emil Willimetz came to see himself as a gringo. "As a boy in the Bronx I was born in an immigrant family, my parents speaking broken English, undoubtedly 'Greenhorns.' Uncircumcised in a Jewish neighborhood, I was a 'Goy.' Living in the South I was a 'Damnyankee.' Today, in the North, in Maine, I am an 'Away Person'."Willimetz's sense of time, place, and character is acute, even when he is reconstructing family history from before his birth; as when he writes of the "nine brothers Willimetz" in Vienna, and of his parents' passage through Ellis Island in 1913.This autobiography, which ends at midlife, contains historically valuable portraits of Black Mountain College in the late 1930s, the Highlander Folk School under educator Myles Horton in the 1940s and '50s, and CIO organizing projects, including the attempt to bring the plains-based Farmers' Union to Tennesee in the late '40s. Willimetz was deeply involved with all these projects, and their leading actors help shape the life he tells.