ABOUT THIS BOOK

Hilda Satt Polacheck's family emigrated from Poland to Chicago in 1892, bringing their old-world Jewish traditions with them into the Industrial Age. Throughout her career as a writer and activist, Polacheck never forgot the immigrant neighborhoods, markets, and scents and sounds of Chicago's West Side. In charming and colorful prose, Polacheck recounts her introduction to American life and the Hull-House community; her chance meeting with Jane Addams and their subsequent long friendship and working relationship; her marriage; her support of civil rights and women's suffrage; her work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom; and her experiences as a writer for the Works Progress Administration.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Hilda Satt Polacheck (1882–1967) was a writer, activist, and teacher. Dena J. Polacheck Epstein (d. 2013) is the author of Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Lynn Y. Weiner is a professor emerita of history at Roosevelt University and the author of From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980.

REVIEWS

"Scholars will find much to mine from Polacheck's vivid descriptions of urban life and socialist politics at a time of vast change. . . . General readers will be entranced by this sometimes dramatic, frequently funny, always engrossing autobiography."--Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times

"From the little details of immigrant life to the broad sweep of progressive politics, Hilda Satt Polacheck has given us an enormously valuable historical document. I Came a Stranger is the story of one of the 'obscure women' of history as she really was, an acute observer and an energetic actor in the public life of her time."--Ellen Carol DuBois, coauthor of Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I: A Polish Childhood, 1882-92
1. Memories of Poland   5
Part II: The Voyage to America: A New Life Begins,
1892-95
2. The Voyage to America   21
3. Transplanted   25
4. South Halsted Street  29
5. My Father   35
6. My Mother    43
Part III: Growing Up with Hull-House, 1895-1912
7. I Discover Hull-House  51
8. A Funeral   53
9. My First Job  56
10. Growing Up    61
11. The Oasis in the Desert  68
12. The West Side Turner Hall  81
13. The University  86
14. New Horizons   91
15. Jane Addams    96
16. New Horizons [II]  105
17. The Forward Movement    111
18. The Walking Delegate  118
Part IV: Family Life and Politics in Milwaukee, 1912-29
19. Milwaukee   129
20. War    142
21. Peace   147
22. Woman Suffrage   152
23. Women's International League for Peace and
Freedom    157
24. December 1927   160
Part V: Return to Chicago, 1929-35
25. Going Back to Chicago  167
26. WPA     172
27. May 1935   177
Afterword    179
Appendix A: Time Line   187
Appendix B: The Writings of Hilda Satt Polacheck  189
Notes    195
Sources Consulted  239