Former resident crafts novel set on Pittsburgh’s South Side
The Pittsburgh of the 2020s is a universe removed from the Pittsburgh of the 1940s, and nowhere is that reality better reflected than on the city’s South Side.
What was once an enclave of German and Eastern European blue-collar families, the South Side is now an epicenter of nightlife, with the young people who flock to its bars, restaurants and clubs giving it a spring-break feel on most Friday or Saturday nights. Kathy Kasunich, a South Side native, takes a nostalgic look back at the way it was when World War II was raging in its residents’ ancestral homelands in “Always Remembering,” her debut as a novelist.
A photographer, Kasunich has done some writing before, including work for the Observer-Reporter and The Almanac. “Always Remembering” has long been gestating, she explained on the phone from her home in Williamsburg, Va. Starting work on it about 10 years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic and its enforced isolation gave Kasunich the time to polish it and wrap it up.
“That’s one good thing that came out of COVID,” she said.
“Always Remembering” is a romance featuring Helen, a young South Side woman who dreams of marrying Mike, who is shipped off to the battlefields of Europe in World War II. Their relationship is complicated by the conflict, but also by Helen’s domineering mother, who wants her to marry another suitor, and meddlers on Mike’s side of the family. “Always Remembering” was inspired by letters Kasunich’s father wrote to her mother when he was serving in Europe in the U.S. Army during World War II, along with a diary he kept during the conflict.
“I felt there was a story that represented everybody in World War II,” Kasunich said. “Everybody could relate.”
Having grown up on the South Side, Kasunich has her own memories of it, and used newspaper articles from World War II to help capture the mood and details of the era.
“I’ve tried to give you a feel of being back in the 1940s,” she said. “I hope when people read it they feel like they are back in the 1940s.”
Her greatest inspiration as a writer? Her father, Kasunich explained.
“He gave me the love to just read,” she said. “I spent days and hours with him at the library. He would take me there and show me books and maps.”
Kasunich will, in fact, be launching “Always Remembering” at Pittsburgh’s South Side Carnegie Library at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 9, the same day the book goes on sale through Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additional information is available at www.kathykasunich.com. The library’s phone number is 412-431-0505.