Third Generation

GRANDSONS -- Louis Adamic -- Harper ($2.50).

One trouble with educating U. S. immigrants is that after they learn the language some of them begin to think in it. Some even take to writing. And their foster-tongued thoughts are not always flattering to U. S. complacence. Immigrant Louis Adamic, from the Austrian province of Carniola (now part of Yugoslavia), still writes English with a slight accent but he thinks U. S. thoughts with disturbing clarity. How the U. S. looks to foreigners who are trying to become patriated is the subject of his latest book, Grandsons.

Grandsons purports to be the story, as told to Adamic himself, of three third-generation U. S.-Slovenes from Carniola. Peter Gale (whose immigrant grandfather was called Gale) shared a pup-tent with Adamic in the A. E. F. until he was wounded and gassed. Nine years after the War Adamic met Peter again, in Los Angeles. Peter was apparently a typical drifter, nervous, unsettled, unhappy, a newspaperman who never stayed in one place more than a few months. Gradually he got Peter's story out of him. Peter's brother, Andy, was the "front" for the Los Angeles beer racket and one of Capone's lieutenants. A goodhearted, not too brainy racketeer, he supported Peter, kept trying to persuade him to join his mob. But Peter wanted to be a writer. Moreover he had run across his cousin Jack, who had become an I. W. W. organizer, and whose devotion to the labor cause gave Peter something else to think about. While Jack languished in San Quentin, Peter to his horror fell in love with Jack's wife. To give him something to settle on, Adamic suggested he write the story of these three grandsons.

But eventually the conflicting problems of his story proved too much for Peter's nerve-torn mind. With Jack, just released from prison, kidnapped and murdered, his wife making radical capital out of his martyrdom, with his racketeer brother Andy's "brain guy" dead and Andy left blustering but defenceless before the gathering wolves of the Los Angeles underworld, Peter fell victim to amnesia and disappeared. By the time Adamic found him again Peter was in no condition to write anything but "finis."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.