Products tagged with 'generational history'

More than four hundred Russian and Romanian Jewish homesteaders settled on about eighty-five farms in McIntosh County, North Dakota, beginning in 1905. After clearing rocks and boulders, growing wheat and flax, raising cattle and chickens, and selling cream from their sod houses, most were successful enough to own their own land.

Still is a history of five generations, a family we meet first as they flee Odessa and last as they make their ways as American Jews . . . and as Dakota farmers, as students and storekeepers, as soldiers and lawyers, and even as a teen in an international competition who stands face-to-face with Netanyahu. Rebecca Bender and Kenneth Bender answer the question recently posed to Rebecca by a newspaper reporter: Are you still Jewish?

Paperback, 370 pp

Unique in its topic and methodology, Echoes of the Old Country reveals purpose and power in childhood memory for the Germans from Russia who survived and prospered on the northern Great Plains. Historian Jessica Clark’s study draws on nearly two hundred oral interviews collected during the Dakota Memories Oral History Project, conducted from 2005 to 2010. Clark and a team of oral historians and videographers recorded the voices and memories of participants as they responded to various memory prompts—browsing scrapbooks and diaries or walking through towns and cemeteries where familiar storefronts and headstones stirred vivid recollections. No history of childhood draws from such a rich oral history source. Clark reveals that second-and third-generation German-Russians adhered to a collective identity rooted in the struggles and hardships experienced by their immigrant forebears. Yet, they simultaneously forged a new identity—one that found sport in chores and responsibilities and joy in pranks and play. Their evolving self-image contrasts with narratives of toil and deprivation often associated with growing up in rural and agricultural environments.