I’ve read a lot of books about Swedish immigrants coming to the US in recent years, so I thought I would describe some of them, and how their perspectives differ, and bring up how the American Girl series about the Swedish girl, Kerstin, seems to clearly cannibalize from a previous book.
Utvandrarna/The Emigrants, Vilhelm Moberg — I read this in Swedish, I got it from the Los Angeles library. This book is about a very poor, starving family who moves from Sweden to Minnesota in 1849, and they have all the worst luck in the world. Not least because they go off in one of those old wooden sailing boats, for which a typical journey lasted about 6 weeks. But with their luck, they got stuck in the wind doldrums and it took 10 weeks, and in the last weeks they had a sickness on board and like 10% of everyone dies. Now, if they had been able to wait 10 years until they moved, by the 1860s, steamboats were much more prevalent and a steamboat only took 10 days to cross the Atlantic. But I guess they couldn’t wait that long, because they were already starving. This book had a lot of information about how elitist and heavy-handed that church was back then, which I had no idea about. This is the first book of a series of four books total. The first half the book deals with their last years in Sweden, how they ended up starving, and why they decided to leave, and the second half of the book is their long, long boat journey and it ends just when they land on New York City. Back in those days, you didn’t need a passport, and they just paid like $2.50 at the border. This was before Ellis Island, so they landed at Battery Park. The second book in the series deals with how they journey from New York to Minnesota, and then how they manage to spend their first winter in Minnesota.
American girls, Meet Kirsten — When I was a kid, and I saw Kirsten’s stupid Princess Leia-like hair style on the cover of the book, I immediately didn’t like her, even though my family told me, “this is about a Swedish girl!” Even that couldn’t overcome her hairstyle. So I never read Kirsten until much later, but then I really liked her. When I was reading Utvandrarna (the book above), I started thinking, hey, let me go back and re-read the Kirsten books, because I distinctly remembered that series also starting off with their boat journey across the Atlantic, and just wanted to see how they stacked up. What I found out is that actually, it seems like the person who wrote Meet Kirsten had first read Utvandrarna (I suppose in English) and then just copied the information straight from there! Utvandrarna, the first book, is like 500 pages of tiny print, while Meet Kirsten is like 60 pages and for 8-year-old girls, so of course, it’s not exactly the same. But look here at all the similarities:
- In Meet Kirsten, they are also on a sailing boat, stuck in tiny cramped bunks, and the trip takes much longer than expected.
- When they arrive in New York City, they sit under trees at Battery Park, with Castle Garden right there. I mean, the scene is exactly the same.
- Then, in both books, the dad says he is going to go off and get buns and milk, with their milk pitcher. Even that detail about taking the milk pitcher with him is exactly the same! And he takes the kids with him, while the mom rests at the park!
- In both books, the girl goes missing during the journey in the US, and the parents panic trying to find her, though with the difference that in Utvandrarna, it happens when they’re stopped in Detroit, while in Meet Kirsten, it happens during that scene in New York when the dad takes the kids to get milk and buns.
- In both books, they are very worried about cholera striking them on the ship from Sweden to the US, but in the end, it doesn’t happen. Instead, in both books, they are stricken with cholera when they are on a boat trying to get to Minnesota, going up the Mississippi River, I think it was.
- And in both books, when people die on the boat from cholera, the captain quietly stops the boat to bury the dead in a forested bit of land
- And the kicker is, in both books the cholera-stricken boat on the Mississippi is even called Redwings. I mean, they couldn’t even come up with a unique name.
Just to be very clear, Utvandrarna was published way before Meet Kirsten. I would say these are too many similarities to just be coincidence.
Fredrika Bremer’s letters from America — I’ve written about Fredrika Bremer before, I’ve read her books in Swedish, too. Now, she in real life traveled to America, all by herself as an older single woman, and she did it in 1849, the same year the family in Utvandrarna come to America. And Fredrika Bremer stayed for two years and documented her whole journey in letters that she wrote to her sisters, which I’m in the midst of reading. She had a much, much more comfortable journey to America than the Utvandrarna family did. She came on a steamship rather than an old sailing ship, so it only took like a week or two across the ocean. And she had her own special berth, rather than just being in a cramped dungeon beneath deck with lots of bunk beds. I was super, super surprised, sort of, to be reading about two completely different voyages from Sweden to America, in the very same year. Of course, Fredrika Bremer was already a famous and wealthy writer when she came to America, so she was able to pay for the comfort.
The Golden Name Day, Jennie Lindquist — I’ve written about this book earlier, too, I want to actually write a whole separate post about it, because it is so so good and such a sweet and delightful story. This book is about Swedish immigrants living in New Hampshire. It’s never made super clear, but I think it is set in early 1900s, or late 1800s. The immigrants in the book are the grandparents. If I remember correctly, they came as 18-year-olds, something like that. So they got married and had their children all in the US. But they gave them Swedish names (like Anna) and still kept speaking Swedish at home, and singing Swedish songs, and celebrating Swedish holidays. So when their children got married, they also gave their kids Swedish names, like Sigrid and Elsa. Sigrid is not a nice name, is it? Sounds like a military command. Any case, the book is about the little girls, the third generation in America, and they are all just very happy.
The Birchbark House, Louise Erdrich — I wrote more about this book here previously, if you scroll through the list. This is a book about a little girl of the Ojibwe tribe living near present-day Lake Superior. Looking at the map, I think they are in Minnesota. Now, they are obviously NOT immigrants from Sweden, but the immigrants from Sweden were arriving in roughly the same area, so I wanted to include it here. I had a strange sensation when I was reading Utvandrarna, the first book in this list, when they arrive in Minnesota and are walking through the forest to their final destination where they plan to farm. The forests are huge and untouched and just miraculous, and those descriptions really for the first time struck me how shattering the whole European migration to western hemisphere was. If you have spent generations stewarding the land so that it still has these huge beautiful forests teeming ecologically, and then some people just show up and take it from you? Take it from you, destroy the ecosystems, hunt everything to death, have a bunch of things go extinct, decide you need more pest control, spray DDT everywhere, oops, that hurts the birds, etc etc. I get mad if I found out both me and my office-mate got new chairs, but his was more expensive. (That hasn’t happened, but just an example). I cannot imagine a whole beautiful continent that you’ve taken such good care of being snatched.
Laura Ingalls Wilder books (Little House in the Big Woods, On the Banks of Plum Creek) — I’m including these books as well because although Laura Ingalls and her family are not Swedish immigrants, they were also living in Wisconsin and Minnesota with many other Swedish and Norwegian immigrants who pop up in the books. I read these books when I was little, and I’ve kept on reading them on and off throughout the years, and most recently I read Pioneer Girl, which was Laura’s original autobiography about her life. When I was still a kid, it was already obvious that this little family in the Big Woods and alone on the prairies was struggling, and so when Pa could just wander off and trap a bunch of fox and otters, and kill bears and deer, and then have both meat for food and furs that he could sell to buy Laura and Mary peppermint candies, I thought this was the best thing in the world. It was just recently that it finally (finally) dawned on me, those foxes and bears were not Pa’s to hunt. Those foxes and bears had flourished for millennia here because people were being responsible and wise and smart in taking care of the land. And all the surplus riches that had accumulated because of their care was suddenly snatched by Pa and his family, and others, and they got rich off of it, and could pay off their debts, and have food to eat, and they gobbled it all up within a few decades until all the forests were cut and a bunch of species were extinct. Just wow! How can something so irredeemably unfair happen, and how can Martin Luther King Jr say the moral arch of the universe tends towards justice (LOL!!) and there’s been literally no redress. I mean, I’d get mad if during a simple group project, I had to do all the work and the others got the same score. I cannot imagine how to deal with a crime of the enormity of what happened to the original people on this land.
mejshasan.com 