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As Told To Felice Austin I was born the youngest of ten children on February 28, 1931, in Roscoe, Pennsylvania to Mary and Peter Bailey. My mother was born in a small, remote village called Puskanova, north of Budapest, on September 7, 1890. The nearest city to Puskanova was Mukachevo, which is now part of the Ukraine. At the time my mother was born, Austria's position as a great European power was declining and Franz Joseph was the dual monarch of the combined Austria-Hungary. My mother and father both grew up in the same area. They descended from a Carpathian mountain people, and they spoke a pure form of Ukrainian, which is often confused with Russian. Ukrainian, however, is much softer. My mother came to the United States when she was 17 years old. When she arrived, she stayed with her sister Julia, who had already emigrated to the U.S. and was living in New Jersey. They also had a brother who came and died during a flu epidemic. He was my mother's favorite brother. She cried every night over his death until one night he came to her in her dreams and said, "Mârrka, stop crying; you're drowning me." My mother never cried after that.
My father came to the United States several years before my mother. They had known each other in Europe, and I assume that New Jersey is where they became reacquainted. I don't know any stories about how they met, or about their courtship. I think what happened was that when she came to the U.S. he just happened to be there, and being from the same town, she felt a familiarity around him. She was young and, I suppose, needed to feel like she belonged to something in this country. They married and moved to Western Pennsylvania where many immigrants found work in the coalmines and steel mills.
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