Letters of a German American Farmer
“Whoever wants to farm should stay in Iowa. That's what I think. In Iowa there's plenty of everything: plenty water, plenty hay, plenty corn, plenty potatoes, and plenty opportunity.”—Juernjakob Swehn
Early in the twentieth century, drawing upon the hundreds of letters written to his father by students who had emigrated to northeastern Iowa from Mecklenburg, in northeastern Germany, Johannes Gillhoff created the composite character of Juernjakob Swehn: the archetype of the upright, honest mensch who personified the German immigrant, on his way to a better life through ambition and hard work. Gillhoff's farmer-hero, planting and harvesting his Iowa acres, joking with his neighbors during the snowy winters, building a church with his own hands, proved so popular with the German public that a million copies of Jürnjakob Swehn der Amerikafahrer are in print. Now for the first time this wise and endearing book is available in English.
“First, let's talk about pigs,”Juernjakob Swehn writes from his farm in Iowa. “In America, pigs have a curly tail and talk in Low German so I can understand them.” Swehn builds a log house and makes a success of farming, marries a woman who's “a whole different nation that has its confidence from the inside,” raises a family, and becomes an elder in the Lutheran church. He recognizes his good fortune but acknowledges that memories of his village grow stronger every year, that “being homesick is the best thing that home can do for you …no power on earth holds on to you like your homeland.” It is this sense of home, both in Iowa and in Mecklenburg, that makes Juernjakob Swehn appeal to today's readers as much as he appealed to readers in 1916.
Contents
Translator’s Introduction by Richard Trost
Author’s Preface by Johannes Giffhoff
1. Over the Ocean Waves
2. The Longest Month
3. My Own Farm
4. Life in the New World
5. The American Farmer
6. Our German Neighbors
7. As the Children Grow Up
8. A Little Farm and a Log House
9. All Kinds of Grief and Their Medicines
10. Indian Stories and Letters from the Children
11. At the Chicago World’s Fair
12. At My Mother’s Deathbed
13. Churches and Pastors in America
14. A New Church and a New Organ
15. The Old Skinflint
16. The Baptism of the Firstborn
17. In the Beginning
18. It Takes All Kinds to Make a Church
19. Try Anything, Once
20. Working Up the Corn Crop
21. Friends and Memories
22. Our School Needs a Teacher
23. Company from Back Home
24. Old Stories in the New Land
25. Jurnjakob, You’re Homesick
26. Mark This Page in Your Bible
Afterword by Hartmut Brun
Index of Family Names