North Dakota Immigrants

Throughout North Dakota Immigrants, the author endeavors to provide the reader with a wealth of detail to accurately descirbe all that the emigrants went throught in their quest to reach North Dakota, and to make a home for their family in the Flicktail State. The author utilizes so much detail throughout the novel that readers will come away with a feeling as if they know each family. For anyone who has an interest in the history of immigrations to the United States and North Dakota, or who just loves history, North Dakota Immigrants: Coming to America is the book for them. North Dakota immigrants include: Abraham and Neta Youngquist, John and Alida Freburg, William and Hilma Cross, John and Alma Yunker, Hans, Gusta, and Otto Tveter, Jens and Inger Langedahl, Konrad and Sophia Feickert, Anna Teresa McGarry, Edvart and Anna Hanson, The Holen Family, Nicholas and Anna Zuzulin, and William Allan and Evangleine Tompkins. The book includes "Sources and Contributors" "Picture Credits" and a detailed index.

To most Jewish immigrants New York was America. Not many ventured as far as North Dakota at the turn of the century. Sophie Trupin writes of her father and other Jewish farmers who came to the northern plains: "Each was a Moses in his own right, leading his people out of the land of bondage—out of czarist Russia, out of anti-Semitic Poland, out of Romania and Galicia. Each was leading his family to a promised land; only this was no land flowing with milk and honey—no land of olive trees and vineyards." Dakota Diaspora adds a little-known chapter to the saga of the settlement of America. In a series of vignettes Sophie Tmpin recalls her childhood in "Nordokota," where her father built a sod house and farmed a quarter-section of rocky land before opening a butcher shop in the town of Wing. Against that background plays out the perennial conflict between her father; who had escaped the violent anti-Semitism of his native Russia and found here a man's freedom and dignity, and her mother; who felt "trapped, betrayed and helpless in this desolate land," far from her roots in the Old Country. But out of the struggle to bring in the harvest, survive the blizzards, and maintain a kosher home, a warm family life developed, as well as a sense of community with Jewish neighbors on scattered homesteads.

When Scandinavian immigrants and Dakota Indians lived side by side on a turn-of-the-century reservation, each struggled independently to preserve their language and culture. Despite this shared struggle, European settlers expanded their land ownership throughout the period while Native Americans were marginalized on the reservations intended for them. Karen Hansen captures this moment through distinctive, uniquely American voices.