For Immediate Release
Contact: Patricia Spencer, Public Information Officer
406.459.0614 or pspencer@lclibrary.org
Join Montana Author Christy Leskovar for a Zoom Discussion of East of the East Side
May 6, 2021 (Helena, MT)— Join the East Helena Library Reading Circle on Friday, May 14th at 3PM for a virtual chat with Christy Leskovar, High Plains Book Award finalist and author of East of the East Side; One Night in a Bad Inn; Finding the Bad Inn: Discovering My Family's Hidden Past.
East of the East Side is Leskovar’s third book and is the story of Tony Leskovar, a Slovenian peasant boy, an Austrian musician in Paris, a war refugee, and the Edsel dealer in Butte, Montana. “When my grandfather Tony Leskovar began his music career at the dawn of the 20th century, concert musicians in Austria were treated like movie stars of today,” said Leskovar. “They were idolized. The flags were lowered to half mast in Vienna when an opera star died. And then to be performing with the opera in Paris in 1914–Tony was definitely at the top of his game. It had to be a heady existence for him. It all went to pieces when the First World War started.”
Leskovar traveled to Slovenia and Vienna where she pored through archives and library holdings and visited the places in the book, and she spent a great deal of time at the Montana Historical Society, Butte Archives, World Museum of Mining, and courthouses digging through their records. “Some of the entries in the church books in Slovenia were written in Gothic German, which I don’t read,” she said. “Fortunately I met many helpful people there who did read Gothic and translated for me.”
East of the East Side spans the late 19th to mid 20th centuries. The places include peasant farms in the Slovenian region of Austria; Imperial Vienna; 1914 Paris; Helena and the smelter town of East Helena; as well as the copper metropolis of Butte and the Slavic enclave of East Butte; the Flathead Indian Reservation; San Francisco; and the fertile desert of eastern Washington. “This is such an American story,” says Leskovar, “to go from the Paris opera to the Flathead Indian Reservation with rugged smelter and mining towns in between. I found it fascinating.”
Registration is required for the free virtual chat with Leskovar on May 14th at 3PM. To register visit: http://www.eventkeeper.com/mars/xpages/L/LCLIBRARY/ekp.cfm?curOrg=LCLIBRARY#6665100.