FIRST MEETING: 2pm on February 11, 2025

The Torpedo Season:
Growing Up During World War II

by Richard C. Lukas

From the Amazon review by Catherine A. Hamilton, author of Victoria's War: "This upbeat WWII memoir has a message for all of us! This enchanting collection of short stories by Dr. Richard Lukas — a renown Polish historian and author of countless nonfiction books about WWII Poland — is the most delightful of memoirs...Set in the Polish immigrant neighborhoods of New England at the onset of WWII, Lukas brings to life the heartwarming tales of a boy who grew up immersed in Polish-American culture...From the bombing of Pearl Harbor to visits from Polish RAF pilots on leave from fighting the Germans from England; from a beach combing trip that unearths an undetonated Torpedo washed up on America’s Eastern shores, to quintessential Polish Christmas Eve celebrations, to parochial school capers, all through the eyes of a child whose curiosity, wonder, and humor resound on every page."

From the Review by Dr John M. Grondelski in The Polish Weekly: "The value of Torpedo Season is seeing World War II through the eyes of a Polish-American boy in a Polish-American family, an experience profoundly different both from a peer in Poland as well as from an “average” American child growing up during the Second World War....Even though even Americans living on the coast might have a notional awareness of German submarines off American shores, it was often more theoretical than practical....For Polish-American families, the War was much more existential. Most of them, not long removed from the experience of immigration, still had family in “the old country.... Apart from the war effort, Lukas also gives us insight into the challenges of growing up a Polish-American boy in the United States. Prejudice was one challenge. Lynn was a manufacturing town with plenty of immigrants, but also an older, nativist Protestant stratum. Lukas recalls being called a “papist” by Protestant boys who admitted they didn’t know what that meant. Later, when the family moved to neighboring Swampscott, a much more white Anglo-Saxon Protestant enclave, Lukas remembers various neighbors ignoring his family because of their Slavic roots."

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