Icon of Spring

In this memoir of her childhood during the Depression, Jason, whose parents came from Czechoslovakia, says, ``When I observe the easy immigration today, I am sad at how little recognition there is for the blood, sweat, and tears the crossing to America entailed for our parents.'' During Jason's youth in Pennsylvania's coal-mining region, money was scarce: the mine employing Jason's father and older brother operated perhaps only once a week, and bank failure wiped out her parents' savings. Older sisters left school to work as domestics in Pittsburgh and to send home some of the dollar bills Jason's mother carefully hoarded. Yet seen through the eyes of the child, life could be surprising and colorful: snatching a forbidden look at a gypsy camp; witnessing the shooting of a member of the mine's police; feeling a sense of community at the wedding of an older sister or making her first confession; encouraged by a kindly priest, who translated the grandeur of the Eastern Orthodox church into simple love between God and an eight-year-old girl. Jason's readable memoir preserves, from a personal perspective, a small fragment of America that could otherwise have been lost. (Jan.)