Born in Winnipeg to Icelandic immigrants in 1890, Laura Goodman Salverson embarked on a life marked by contradiction and cultural exchange. Her 1939 memoir braids the strands of her parents’ intellectual life in Iceland with a hardscrabble existence on the Prairies at the turn of the century, all against a backdrop of European settlement in post-Riel Manitoba and in colourful, self-assured prose. Leaving behind economic hardship, a difficult climate, and the threat of volcanoes, Lars Gudman was in search of stability for his family, but he was also ensnared by wanderlust. Travelling onward to Minnesota, the Dakotas, Selkirk, Duluth, and the Mississippi Valley, Salverson and her parents returned time and again to the Icelandic enclave in Winnipeg, a community struggling to adjust to life in Canada. In Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter Salverson makes real the political and cultural history of the twentieth-century North American west, even as she draws the reader into the inner life of a young girl growing up “hopelessly Icelandic” and finding refuge from discrimination and ostracism in the world of books. With a new introduction by Carl Watts situating the memoir and its prolific author in the literary canon, and reproducing Salverson’s original preface for the first time, Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter remains both a Canadian classic and an important social history of the experiences of women and immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century.

"American-born Catherine knows little of her Croatian mother's early life. When Marijana dies of ovarian cancer, twenty-two-year-old Catherine finds herself cut off from the past she never really knew. As Catherine searches for clues to her mother's elusive history, she discovers that Marijana was orphaned during WWII, nearly died as a teenager, and escaped from Communist Yugoslavia to Rome, and then South America. Through travel and memory, history and imagination, Catherine resurrects the relatives she's never known. Traversing time and place, memoir and novel, this lyrical narrative explores the collective memory between mothers and daughters, and what it means to find wholeness. It is a story where a daughter gives voice to her immigrant mother's unspoken history, and in the process, heals them both."--Amazon.com.

Many of us come from poor immigrant farm families and can identify with Tina’s story. Yet each story is different. Tina’s stunning story takes you at a fast clip from the early migrations of her Mennonite people from The Netherlands to Prussia to Ukraine. Her parents were born toward the end of the 19th Century in Czarist Russia, just in time to witness World War I, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in St. Petersburg, the Civil War that followed, and the reign of Lenin. For most of those years in their Ukrainian village the Klassen family prospered. The collectivization and purges of Stalin followed the Klassen’s emigration from Russia to Canada in 1925. Canada is the setting for Tina’s birth and life. See how the everyday chores, child’s play, schooling, and Tina’s curiosity intersect with her family’s struggle for survival in this foreign land. The cultural and natural environment was not always friendly. Drought, dustbowl, the Great Depression, learning a new language and customs all took their toll. Although they were dirt poor, you will be impressed with her family’s indomitable spirit and fortitude. Tina is imbued with this spirit and ethic as she prepares herself for independence and service. Achievements and progress are rooted in humble beginnings. Tina remembers from whence she came.

The conclusion of the Lavette saga focuses on Barbara, now in her sixties, whose campaign for election into Congress brings excitement, the renewal of a ramantic love, mortal danger, tragedy, and personal triumph