Willa Cather incorporates auto-biographical elements into her books. I found an interesting statistic that the foreign-born population in Nebraska during her childhood significantly outnumbered the native-born (3 to 1 in the 1910 census). It bothered her that native-born Americans ignored the traditions of the foreign-born or with snobbish attitudes looked down upon them. She reflects her fondness for her foreign-born neighbors of her childhood, especially the old women, through the character of Mrs. Lee, who is treated kindly by Alexandra to remember her old traditions and in opposite by her brother, Lou, and his wife, Annie Lee, who are small-minded and become more uppity now that they are have more land and want Mrs. Lee to be more civilized and forget those ways. Lou even loses his accent and now speaks just like "anybody from Iowa." Similarly, Alexandra is compassionate towards "Crazy" Ivar and his religious ways in contrast to her brothers and the rest of the town who'd rather banish him to the asylum. I thought it was a bit much to throw Oscar's Missouri wife into the mix as being ashamed of marrying a foreigner and also their children don't understand any Swedish.
Here are some memories in Willa's own words that you can see take shape in the book.
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On Sunday we could drive to a Norwegian church and listen to a sermon in that language, or to a Danish or a Swedish church. We could go to the French Catholic settlements in the next county and hear a sermon in French, or into the Bohemian Township and hear one in Czech, or we could go to church with the German Lutherans. There were, of course, American congregations also.
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We had very few American neighbors. They were mostly Swedes and Danes, Norwegians and Bohemians. I liked them from the first and they made up for what I missed in the country. I particularly liked the old women; they understood my homesickness and were kind to me.....these old women on the farms were the first people whoever gave me the real feeling of an older world across the sea. Even when they spoke very little English, the old women somehow managed to tell me a great many stories about the old country. They talk more freely to a child than to grown people....I have never found any intellectual excitement any more intense than I used to feel when I spent a morning with one of these old women at her baking or butter-making. I used to ride home in the most unreasonable state of excitement; I always felt....as if I had actually got inside another person's skin.
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