Immigrant Memoirs

No Smiling Allowed is a comedic take on life in the former Soviet Union, as an immigrant in America. Julia Bendis has compiled many years of funny stories about her old-fashioned and traditional Russian parents, their understanding of how life works in the United States, their hilarious adventures, and her own younger generation's view of what it was like to blend in as a weird-looking kid from Russia.

Molly’s story is a memoir. It is an account of a first-generation immigrant who came from Eastern Europe through Paris to America. We see the world, lovingly and playfully through the eyes of an innocent child, and then more reflective as an older adult. Her story is intermingled with those of her aunts and uncles who remained in Paris, and witnessed the horrors of Nazi occupation during World War II.

In a world of rapidly changing values and traditions, an Indian woman enters into an arranged marriage to a man she barely knows and moves to distant Canada. Thirty-year-old Nina is an English teacher living alone in Jangpura, India. With diminishing prospects, she agrees to an arranged union. Her groom is the Indian-born Ananda, who lives in Canada. He once dreamed of becoming a doctor but settled for dentistry. He is lonely, and also in want of a spouse.

Intimate and honest essays on motherhood, marriage, love, and acceptance. Brown White Black is a portrait of Nishta J. Mehra's family: her wife, who is White; her adopted child, Shiv, who is Black; and their experiences dealing with America's rigid ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Her clear-eyed and incisive writing on her family's daily struggle to make space for themselves amid racial intolerance and stereotypes personalizes some of America's most fraught issues.

Sam Louie grew up torn between cultures as part of a first-generation Chinese immigrant family from Hong Kong living in a predominantly African American neighborhood in the United States. He experienced the duality of existence with the tension of two vastly different worldviews, his identity intertwined with the country he lives in and his ancestral ties. What traditions and cultural beliefs get preserved, what gets discarded, and what gets lost in translation? Beneath it all was the presence of three generations of addiction, trauma, and shame.

In The Snakehead, Patrick Radden Keefe reveals the inner workings of Cheng Chui Ping aka Sister Ping’s complex empire and recounts the decade-long FBI investigation that eventually brought her down. He follows an often incompetent and sometimes corrupt INS as it pursues desperate immigrants risking everything to come to America, and along the way he paints a stunning portrait of a generation of undocumented immigrants and the intricate underground economy that sustains and exploits them.

Chasing My Dream: An African Immigrant Story in America is a story of courage, resilience, and perseverance in the face of life challenges. In this audiobook, Komi Afetse talks about his early years in Togo, West Africa, his adjustments to America, his life of service as a US Army Officer, and how he went from earning minimum wage to become financially independent in 14 years.

A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother’s Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler’s deadly path.

In Bronzville Brooklyn, NY, a single mother with three children faces the relentless challenges of being an immigrant who cannot read. Despite her persistent efforts to secure a stable life through marriage, each attempt ends in failure, culminating in a devastating assault. Struggling to heal and recover, she must confront her hardships with unwavering resolve. "Unwritten Resilience" is a powerful tale of perseverance, illustrating a mother's unbreakable spirit as she fights to overcome adversity and build a brighter future for her family.

This is a memoir about a man who left the comforts of a modern home in faraway India and did what he had to do to make a living and succeed in a new land. This book reaches out to immigrants and those who wish to immigrate. It reminds them that the journey toward a new, unchartered territory may be difficult, but to the brave, resilient, and hardworking, the promise of a safe and thriving life is not far behind. This book should give you a place to start planning your immigration. Now it's time to ask those questions, and hopefully, you get the answers you deserve.

Once upon a Time in America: The True Tale of an Immigrant is the debut manuscript from Karl Talla. This coming of age story follows Talla from his early years as an immigrant in the United States, to the highs and lows he experienced as he made his way in the world. With America as its backdrop, this transparent piece of literature gives us a fly on the wall view of how an immigrant family dealt with everything from the tragic events of 9/11, to the election of America's first Black president, Barack Obama.

What is it like to be a refugee? It is a question few in the West give much thought to, and yet to be a refugee - or an immigrant - is to grapple with your place in the world, attempting to reconcile the life you have known with the unfamiliar. With this comes the weight of the expectations (and fears and resentment) of those born in the host country; foremost is the burden of gratitude: to be forever thankful for the space you have been allowed.

Numerous newspaper and magazine articles have talked about it, and now this riveting book, We All Wore Blue, is the true account of a youth soccer team in Washington state that transformed over several seasons into a team comprised largely of immigrants from around the globe, representing a myriad of different countries, most races, and major religions. The story tells how these immigrant boys and families bonded with the middle-class White kids and their families, coming together and dealing with numerous challenges, great adversity, and racism.

Aquilino Gonell era un jóven cuando llegó a los Estados Unidos de la República Dominicana. Aunque no hablaba inglés, se dedicó a su nueva tierra adoptada, luchando para conseguir el dichoso sueño americano. Su resolución de lograr una vida de éxito le llevó a alistarse en el ejército, como manera de pagar sus estudios universitarios. Tras combatir en Irak, volvió a los EEUU con TEPT, pero siguió con confianza en las promesas del gobierno, y se concentró en su familia y en el proceso de sanarse.

“He is probably carrying a bomb in his bag”. A woman said this while passing by me in a Target parking lot. I was wearing a hefty backpack filled with my school and work belongings. My beard and hair were unkempt after a long day. That night in my basement room, I closed my eyes and thought about my life as an immigrant in the United States. Nothing has been easy. I experienced discriminating verbal attacks from strangers, hateful colleagues, no social life, and lost hope for the future...

After witnessing the beheading of his uncle, a very young Doc Ping and his family escaped from China on foot in fear for their lives. They left everything behind, including his father's position in the nationalist Chinese government and all of their possessions, and fled the country—first to Bangkok, and then to Taiwan. When Doc was nine, his father secretly arranged for him to travel on a freighter with 15 other civilians to the USA to live with the woman who helped resuscitate him from drowning a few years earlier.

On December 7th, 1955, Kitty McInerney lay dying in a New York hospital bed. The 47-year-old Irish immigrant, suffering from severe toxemia, was preparing for an emergency c-section to give birth to her 17th child. As a Catholic priest performed her last rites, Kitty succumbed to a rare moment of quiet reflection.

When Ye Pei dreamed of Venice as a girl, she imagined a magical floating city of canals and gondola rides. And she imagined her mother, successful in her new life and eager to embrace the daughter she had never forgotten. But when Ye Pei arrives in Italy, she learns her mother works on a farm far from the city. Her only connection, a mean-spirited Chinese auntie, puts Ye Pei to work in a small-town café. Rather than giving up and returning to China, a determined Ye Pei takes on a grueling schedule.

Annie was scared when her family and friends were forced to leave their homes when she was fourteen. It was 1904 when her parents traveled across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to New York City with her four siblings. This historical fiction reminisces the trials all immigrants made in the early 1900s.

Questions about color, race, and migration permeate the very fabric of our consciousness - including the workforce. This audiobook attempts to answer these questions by proposing seven transformative principles (with true-life stories and lessons) - that will help steer the listener to forging a practical plan of action for navigating the gnarly waters of corporate America.