Status Updates From Remembering Ahanagran: Stor...

”In Ireland, Sara had assumed her Irishness. She resisted what seemed a contrived and forced nationalism. . . . But in Chicago, Irishness was cultivated, even as its cultivation marked the cultivators as more and more American. This was, and is, the great paradox of American ethnicity. Celebrating where you come from is but another way of underlining who you are now: an American, a Yank.”

”As she had in Ireland, Sara moved among the shadows of events that had taken place long ago. The past is more than memory; fleeing it, forgetting it, or hiding it does not eliminate it.”

”Irish Chicago was in that way different from Ireland. Life in Bally was lived as annotated text. Things happen; they were described and commented on. Ballylongford was a small village, and gossip ran like a stream through its streets. In a place so poor, there was often nothing to share but talk.

”But what supposed to be native seemed alien to Sara. She resisted what the teachers thought was her true identity and her true name. In school she perfected resisting and enduring. In that, she was true to the place that gave her birth.”

"She had mastered a small geography of childhood, and in hindsight those years, although poor, fatherless, and filled with drudgery from eleven on, were, nonetheless, 'great years.' Emigration would give Sara a freedom from this tight world. But it was a freedom that she did not want. Emigration was, she says, not a choice she made."