A Pennsylvania Dutch Boy

Book excerpt: This book paints a portrait of how the Pennsylvania Dutch, or correctly, the Pennsylvania German people are changing. Originally the predominant ethnic group in Pennsylvania, with a population of hundreds of thousands, they are now losing their Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, their Dutchified English accents, and their German cultural traditions. They are falsely perceived as being the Plain people, as symbolized by an Amishman of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It relates how the influences of the great depression of the 1930s and of World War Two swept through the group and turned their culture upside down. Through a memoir that chronicles their struggles, triumphs and realizations, and suffused with the zeitgeist of the era, it celebrates, through the life of a real Pennsylvania Dutch Boy, a beautiful heritage, and is an invitation for readers to explore the essence of identity and culture.