Homeland [antikvár]

Author's Note THIS NOVEL is the first of a projected cycle about the members of an American family moving into and through the explosive events of the twentieth century. It's impossible to understand this century without some knowledge of the last one. This story therefore attempts to present a tapestry of American life and history in the years between 1890 and 1900, the decade in which a naive young giant flexed its muscles and began to understand and use its enormous strength. The Crowns live in Chicago because it is, and was, a quintessentially American place and, probably just as important, because I have always wanted to write about the rowdy prairie melting pot in which I was born and raised. A second theme of the story, which I was also eager to write about, is the immigrant experience. My maternal grandfather, to whom this book is dedicated, was one of those immigrants; he arrived at Castle Garden about 1870. The young German woman he married in Cincinnati was an immigrant too. The roots of my mother's family stretch back to Germany, where cousins of mine still live in Aalen, the town from which my grandfather set out for America. Germany, the country that gave us the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century, also gave us by far the largest immigrant group that came to these shores in the nineteenth. Strong people; good Americans, despite their occasionally strained loyalties. My grandfather and his family prospered in Ohio and Indiana. Not all immigrant stories ended that way. The baker of Wuppertal, a minor but significant character in the book, was a not uncommon figure at the time. JJ-