Read an Excerpt
One
American Innocence
The 1930s
It always starts with innocence.
Eight-year-old Elmer Hovland stood steadfast on the dusty plains beneath the big open skies of Kenneth, Minnesota, wheat-blond hair waving in the wind, his clear blue eyes taking on the color of the sky.
His parents, Nels and Mary, were devout Lutheran immigrants from Oppland, Norway, who, in the late 1890s, along with a million other Norwegians, left poverty and hunger in their homeland for a pioneering life on the great plains of Minnesota.
They lived at first in a sod house, then eventually settled into a simple log home they built themselves, a spartan dwelling with no electricity or modern conveniences, with an icebox to keep food cold and a wood-burning cast-iron cookstove, which helped heat the home. They drew their water from a well and had an outhouse in the backyard. It was the definition of an austere life.
Moving to a new country was difficult enough, but the Great Depression brought hard times and distress, especially in the farming sector. Despite the hardships, the Hovlands settled into their new life on Dakota tribal land platted only at the turn of the century, with towns seven miles apart, because that's as far as you could go in one day in a horse and buggy.
They set up a farm just outside Kenneth, population 118, a tranquil town one square mile in size with one crossroad, and became a part of the patchwork fabric of Scandinavian immigrant families drawn by the timber, mining, and farming industries rooted in Minnesota's barren, windswept plains, river valleys, and cold climate. In many ways it was not unlike the land they had left behind.
The Hovlands and those like them lived in relative isolation, but there was new opportunity for growth and prosperity in this land of rolling hills and fertile black soil borne of flat lake plains. The family grew corn, wheat, and barley and raised dairy cows and chickens, laboring on a land that carried its story in the winds of its dusty promise. Unable to cope with the changes and homesickness, many went back to the land of the midnight sun, but the Hovlands stayed on and built a life.
By 1930, they were living an uncomplicated existence grounded in hard work, their days marked by sobriety and an abstemious reverence for the pure and simple.
Guided by their deep Lutheran faith, a pious family who believed in the power of prayer, the Hovlands bowed their heads at every meal, prayed over their crops, knelt bedside at night, and woke up every morning asking for God's blessings on every new day.
Faith helped them weather every challenge they encountered, from the heavy black clouds of the Depression years to droughts that marred the land for a time. The family was thrifty and frugal: they made their own or did without. Nels didn't talk much, believing that the hardest truths could be spoken with the fewest words, and he instilled in his children an upstanding propriety rooted in the rectitude of his Norse ancestral lineage. He taught them that an honest day's work was a virtue, that a man had to be competent and skilled, and that he had to have a backbone to get a job done right.
Nels taught Elmer at an early age how to wield tools and build things. At twelve years old, Elmer surprised his mother with the family's first clock, which he had carved out of red pine, working over many months to master the inner workings of the intricate mechanical parts, the gear train and time hands, trying to get it to work. His mother praised his ingenuity and placed his creation up on the mantel of their log cabin, where it became the centerpiece of an otherwise unadorned home. For a family who had only ever known the time by the positioning of the sun in the sky, Elmer's clock was a luxury.
Above all else, Nels and Mary emphasized sound moral character; that one should lead with the virtues of kos, warmth and compassion, and janteloven, the self-deprecating concept that family and community, the group, was always more important than one individual standing alone; that each member was a thread woven into the tapestry of a greater good.
While Nels still read the Norwegian News and the family still embraced their native customs, singing old Norse songs, speaking Norwegian around the dinner table, ice fishing in the winter, and celebrating around midsummer bonfires, and Mary and the girls griddled up lefse during the holidays, the Hovlands embraced life in the United States and acclimated well to their new home. They even gave their children American names, making sure Elmer LeRoy and his siblings learned the words to the national anthem.
Though hard work, dust storms, and privation were harsh realities, it didn't occur to Elmer that life was difficult. A happy, humble, seemingly ordinary boy, he faced his days tilling soil and baling hay with an eager optimism.
Despite his serious affect, young Elmer was the epitome of winsome American boyhood. When he wasn't at school or helping on the farm, he could be found immersed in the simplest of bucolic childhood pleasures in the verdant playgrounds of nature: taking walks among the tall June prairie grasses and dallying through wildflower meadows in his blue cotton dungarees. His idea of a perfect afternoon was to walk barefoot down to the fishing hole, reel in a pike, skip stones across the surface of the lake, then fling himself off a rock into the cool water. He learned how to swim by jumping off a bridge into the Rock River, and for fun and frolic, he and his brother hopped railroad cars that came through Kenneth. A farm boy at heart, Elmer's playgrounds were the vast open spaces of an unsullied landscape where green cornfields met the blue sky on the horizon, and where at night one could gaze at a million stars that spanned the great Minnesota sky.
By the mid-1930s, millions of immigrants had settled across the United States, eager to become a part of mainstream America. Encouraged by President Roosevelt's welcoming words to root and assimilate, to plant and to build, they were grateful to be given an opportunity to forge a new future. They came together to support and learn from one another, to establish their communities, and to contribute to America's greater purpose and aspirations.
By the time he reached adolescence, Elmer was solidly grounded in faith, tethered to his family and to his community. While his mother swept a dusty porch as tumbleweeds rolled by and his father tinkered with farm machinery, young Elmer looked to the horizon and wondered where life would take him, certain of only one thing-that the Lord would lead the way.
On the other side of the country, just outside the densely populated cosmopolis of Boston, lived another boy from another immigrant family.
As streetcars and trolleys clanged, making their way past peddler pushcarts and commuter carriages, and horse-drawn carts clopped their way around vendors hawking their wares in the market district, the Custom House Tower near Boston Harbor stood watch over a bustling humanity of nearly 800,000 in a city that was home to the Revolutionary American independence movement and aptly known as the Cradle of Liberty.
On the streets, men with Brylcreemed hair wore derby bowlers in the city and boater hats on the waterfront as ladies shopped the market district. It was a city teeming with immigrant laborers toiling in shoe, garment, and rubber factories. Boston newspapers ran the scores coming out of Fenway Park and announced horse-race winners in between pages of ads for Lucky Strike and Chesterfield cigarettes. In a city where the end of Prohibition was celebrated with gusto, taprooms once again served up gin rickeys, burlesque tempted, and organized crime operated just under the surface as tommy gun-wielding gangsters hung back in the shadows between iconic American landmarks, five-and-dimes, and flophouses, all of which were mixed into new Irish and Italian immigrant neighborhoods.
Beyond the brownstones and the busy streets, in nearby Waltham, Sammy DeCola lived with his large, spirited family in a predominantly Italian Catholic area.
A few years older than Elmer, the two boys could not have been more different. Short, wiry, and scrappy, an Artful Dodger of sorts, Sammy was a street-smart, extroverted kid with a thick Boston accent who had a flat boxer's nose, wore an Italian coppola cap, and had a wisecracking, little-tough-guy attitude to match.
Like many Italian families, cooking and eating was central to the DeColas' well-being, and their lives revolved around a rich, soul-giving "food is love" modo di vivere way of life. Conversations were loud and animated, sometimes explosive, punctuated by whipping hand gestures and playful digs. Tempers flared and doors slammed, but they embraced the messy and the beautiful and argued as fiercely as they loved.
While Ma grew tomatoes in the backyard garden to make her homemade pasta sauce from the pera d'Abruzzo recipes handed down from her family in the "old country" in their native Civitaquana, Sammy's pa, Nicassio DeCola, was fixated on his American dream-to own an iconic single-module, stainless steel, silver barrel-roof diner that served up all-American fare like burgers, meatloaf, and apple pie. The diner, as it turned out, would be an instant success.
It was a hardscrabble life in the city for the immigrant family with five children, but the DeColas were determined to make it. They loved baseball and listening to Red Sox games on the radio. Sammy was raised with a lot of passion, rapturous laughter, and a fallback to the lighter side of life when things got tough.
Little Sammy was passionate about two things: food and Ma. She was built like a tank, boldly embracive, and unapologetically unfiltered, and she spoke little English. Ma was Sammy's whole world-he adored her, and Sammy, her youngest son, was her bambino. She coddled him in her beefy arms, where he nestled shamelessly in her bosom. She called him pomodorino (her little tomato), which sometimes landed as the butt of his father's teasing that he'd grow up to be a "Pomomammone," Mama's sweet little tomato boy, tauntings that didn't faze Sammy one bit. Sammy helped Ma raise tomatoes in the garden and she taught him how to harvest at peak. Warmed by a big black potbellied stove and braising smells in the kitchen, he kept her in stitches, her full-bodied belly laughs music to his ears. His second favorite sound was when Ma called, "Andiamo! Si mangia!" (Let's go, it's suppertime!), especially when she served his favorite spaghetti and meatballs.
Ma was the backbone of the family and her unexpected death when Sammy was eleven left him heartbroken. Inconsolable, Pa was suddenly left with five children to raise. He threw himself round the clock into work at the diner to push through his grief and provide for his family. Lost and rudderless, unsupervised Sammy acted out, at times even talking back to his father. He became a bit of a hooligan around town, an angry boy with a chip on his shoulder and a newfound propensity for finding trouble, picking fights, and skipping school. Pa found it hard to curb his youngest son's errant behavior, and with all he had to tend to, a chasm grew between father and son.
In 1933, Americans were still struggling through the Great Depression. Some 15 million, about 25 percent of the workforce, couldn't find jobs, and those who could were scraping by on an average of 40 percent less pay. With more Americans than ever before facing hard times, there were long lines at soup kitchens as a nation came to a standstill.
In Kenneth, Minnesota, in addition to the farm, the ever-frugal Nels had scraped together enough to buy a modest inn, a small grocery, and an animal-feed grain elevator, and all that helped bring in income until the market crashed and they lost their businesses, though the farm harvest helped sustain them through the toughest times.
In Waltham, Pa did his best to keep his diner on Main Street afloat, but when things went south and he couldn't pay his employees, he pulled in his older sons and wrangled in a rebellious thirteen-year-old Sammy, saying, "We're not giving up. People still gotta eat."
Despite the collapse of the nation's economy, somehow the two families persevered.
By the time they reached their teenage years, as sober and rooted as Elmer was, Sammy was a bit of a lost soul. The boys didn't know each other and had little in common, but their paths as young men would one day cross.
While young Elmer helped his family on the farm, and Sammy bused tables at the diner, like millions of other young boys growing into American teenagers, along the way they learned the ethos of Americana: duty to family, community, God, and country. They pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes and idolized their baseball heroes, Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio.
Two
A German Jewish Boy
Across the ocean, in Mönchengladbach (MG), near Cologne, in northwestern Germany, life was just starting to blossom for Eddie Willner, a cherubic little eight-year-old boy with a mop of curly black hair and jet-black eyes. An only child in a thriving middle-class Jewish family of many cousins, aunts and uncles, great-uncles, and grandparents, everyone either lived across the cobblestone street, down the road, or in surrounding boroughs around the city, an old urban municipality that dated back to the tenth century that had grown around a Benedictine monastery named Monks Gladbach for the Archbishop of Cologne and the monk Sandrad of Trier who settled the town on the Gladbach River.
Eddie's family had lived in and around the city for seven generations. As European Jewish families tended to be, the Willner clan was close-knit and communal. They came together in some form or another nearly every day to celebrate life, to share in their joys and their problems, to confer with or advise one another in their work while sitting in the garden, in the parlor, or around the dinner table, chattering in German and in Yiddish.
In Mönchengladbach, a flourishing midsize European commercial center for the textile industry, Jews were doctors and lawyers, some owned clothing factories and weaving mills, but the vast majority were, like the Willners, middle-class merchants, tradesmen, and livestock dealers.
Jews first appeared in MG in the 1300s. In the mid-1800s, German law gave Jews full legal rights as citizens, and by the 1930s, the city's nearly 1,400 Jews-about 1 percent of the total population-had become a part of the fabric of everyday life, experiencing little systematic antisemitism and, in the main, enjoying harmonious relationships with their Christian neighbors.
