ORIENT, N.Y., Aug. 4, 2004 (PRIMEZONE) -- Most modern Americans are descendants of immigrants who came to the shining shores of the United States searching for salvation or fortune. Although many Americans live with the prosperity their ancestors once dreamed about, Nicholas Stevensson Karas' new novel, Hunky: The Immigrant Experience (now available through AuthorHouse), captures the sweat and sorrow upon which today's wealth was built.
Karas tells the story of two Rusnak families who abandoned the Carpathian Mountains. Living barely 30 miles apart in east-central Europe, they endure the same suffering and isolation. The families do not meet, however, until they enter the factories, mills and coal mines of industrial America. Expecting a land of opportunity and riches, these immigrants, likes thousands of others, discover long hours, squalid living conditions, low wages and rampant poverty are their immediate rewards.
Hunky spans a hundred years in the lives of Karas' ancestors and follows different generations as they marry, intertwine and struggle together. From the steel mills of Pittsburgh to the factories of Binghamton, N.Y., Andrij and Stefan Karas, Vasyl Nadja, Katerna Mynko, Zuzanna Ivanco and others toiled, like most of the other 1.5 million Rusnaks, to create a prosperous life for themselves and their families. Karas depicts how these immigrants barely afford to live, which kept them bound to the strenuous labor of their work and their dreams out of reach.
Hunky is an emotional and elaborate epic that explores the struggles of Karas' ancestors and echoes the tribulations of those who preceded most Americans prospering today.
Karas is an ichthyologist and journalist who has written a dozen books, nearly 500 major magazine articles and more than 3,500 newspaper columns. Born in Binghamton, he attended St. Lawrence and Johns Hopkins universities and received his master's degree in journalism from Syracuse University. He has served on the staff of True and Argosy magazines, traveled throughout the world as a fulltime freelance writer and served as a columnist for Newsday. He is currently a freelance columnist for the New York Times and several major magazines. Hunky is his first novel.
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