Thorvald Kofoed “I’m not going to freeze for five dollars a month in Minnesota.”
Astrid Lovestrand “A lady from the YWCA met us and she talked Swedish.”
John Kuivala “Butter on the bread.”
Emmy Berg “I worked for wealthy people, that’s for sure.”
Marie Berglund “It’s hard to be put down.”
Ralph Strom “I was with the worst—gamblers, prostitutes, everything you could think of.”
Hanna Sippala “They like Finnish girls.”
Grethe Petersen “We sold fresh-churned butter right out of the churn.”
Anton Isaksen “I have put in seventy years on boats.”
Margit Johnsen “I never did like housework.”
Ole Nissen “We haven’t got a tailor between 23rd and East Madison.”
Jenny Pedersen “Everybody’s gonna eat and everybody’s gonna wear clothes.”
Anne Hansen “The women had their babies at home.”
Olaf Sivertson “I started out just like the pioneers did in the wild timbers.”
Christine Emerson “Dad needed someone to stay home.”
Hans Fredrickson “You’re gonna go to school, if I can help it.”
Anna Johnson “There is nobody that can take a mother’s place.”
Gertie Hjortedal “I saw the little, beautiful girl and I was happy and satisfied.”
Part Five / New Lives: Tradition
Jon and Gudrun Magnusson “We had the Iceland library in our home.”
Julius Tollefson “It was just like getting a letter from home.”
Signe Steel “Everybody were your friends.”
Frederik Madsen “Because I am a Dane and have gone to folk schools, I think I am a better American.”
Hilma Salvon “All my life, I’ve been eating rye bread.”
Arnfinn Bruflot “I have my language from Norway, and my tradition.”
APPENDIX: INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE
Foreword
In New Land, New Lives, Janet E. Rasmussen tells us what she, as a thoughtful and compassionate listener, found to be instructive and emblematic in the personal accounts of ordinary people whom she and her assistants interviewed orally over a period of several years. The narrators all shared a common experience of emigration from one of the Nordic countries—Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, or Iceland—and they all found a home in the Pacific Northwest.
Their evocative recollections cover a broad array of human experiences, ranging from the festive to the mundane tasks of everyday living, and give precious insights into their time and place in history. They all emigrated as children or young adults during the early decades of this century. Distant memories and emotions are recaptured as retrospective accounts of their childhood surroundings in the old country, the meaning of their arrival in America, and their lives as strangers in a new land. Here they for the most part entered the culture of the working class in occupational pursuits common to the earlier Nordic immigrants settling on the west coast of the United States. It is the voices of unknown everyday people, the participants in history who rarely speak directly to us, that we hear in these life histories.
Janet Rasmussen demonstrates her mastery of oral history in these interviews. She uses them with great care, with sensitivity, and with knowledge of the literature on the investigative techniques. She thereby avoids the pitfalls associated with this kind of documentation. The recorded narratives ring true to the historical situation and provide vivid impressions only possible in oral history of individual attitudes and values. She is currently Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Modern Languages at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Rasmussen’s major scholarly focus, as evidenced in publications of high merit, has been on women and their life choices. In addition to a series of in-depth studies of Norwegian female literary figures, she has investigated and published articles on domestic
