that would reconcile her to the family, Sara accepts being ostracized and works her way through night school and college to become a schoolteacher. Unfulfilled and lonely, Sara agrees at the novel's end to marry the principal of her East Side grammar school, who is a 'new man' of nearly identical origin as Sara and who inspires her to ask her father, now widowed, into their future home. A Freudian figure of incest, articulating Sara's sense of obligation to return to the paternal fold, governs the conclusion. This conclusion has proved troubling, for it seems to dismiss Sara's hard-won, and in many ways elegant, rapprochement between culture and opportunity as a pyrrhic victory. Although the nascent Russian Jewish critical establishment was originally supportive of Yezierska, Alter Brody, Yosef Gaer, and Johan Smertenko expressed dismay at Bread Givers, questioning its unflattering stereotypes (of men especially) and its seeming commitment to a radically Emersonian 'freedom' beyond community.
Public interest attached itself less to Yezierska's books than to the figure of the author. To counteract the disappointing sales of Hungry Hearts, Yezierska recruited innovative publisher Horace Liveright, who staged a publicity banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria where, it was claimed, she had once been denied work as a chambermaid: by excising her education and twenty-year sojourn among the middle classes from the public record, Liveright was able to market Yezierska as 'Cinderella of the Tenements,' an overnight success story, fairy-godmothered into professional authorship. On an even more popularizing front, Samuel Goldwyn purchased Hungry Hearts and Salome for filming, and in the first instance brought Yezierska to Los -388-, ostensibly to collaborate with dialect humorist Montague Glass on the screenplay but also for the purpose of parading her before the Hollywood gossip columnists. The double publicity for the book and the films turned Yezierska into a Sunday Supplement celebrity through the mid-1920s. Although her sketches were occasionally anthologized in the 1930s, and Charles Scribner's Sons published her autobiography in 1950 (Red Ribbon on a White Horse) with an introduction by W. H. Auden, her books were invisible from midcentury until the mid-1970s when Alice Kessler-Harris edited four volumes for republication, including Bread Givers, arguing for their importance as documents of the immigration of working women.
With something of the fervor if not the cosmopolitanism of the Jews, Scandinavians who had settled in the states and territories of the Northwest Plains built for themselves, language-group by language-group, strong periodical presses, sectarian schools and universities as well as churches, and organizations for the promotion of their Old World literatures and cultures. Despite the institutional commitment to their native tongues, writers were soon using English to treat Old World themes, and those that won national attention were, time and again, of Norwegian background: from the early novelist Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen to the historian Marcus Hansen, who set forth the principle of 'third generation return.' The first Norwegian American novel, Boyesen's Gunnar (1874), was written in English, though its material was, in the words of one critic, 'all Norwegian,' meaning not only that it was set in Norway among goatherds but also that it featured a mermaid and several trolls. Boyesen's subsequent books were realist novels in the progressivist tradition, without Norwegian themes; so that the depiction of the Scandinavian migration and settlement actually was not achieved until the mid-1920s — with the translation into English of a novel written by a Norwegian, Johan Bojer, for the Norwegian market and with the release of competing works by two Norwegians, O. E. Rölvaag and Martha Ostenso, who had been immigrants themselves and who had been educated in the Norwegian North American community.
Born in 1876, and having settled in the United States at age twenty, Ole Edvart Rölvaag had dedicated the better part of his life to Norwegian American affairs, as a prized student at St. Olaf College, a cofounder in 1910 of the Society for Norwegian Language and -389- the author in 1912 of the semiautobiographical Amerika-Breve (Letters from America). Rölvaag's I de Dage (In Those Days) was published in Oslo in two parts in 1924 and 1925; the translation, which Rölvaag did with Lincoln Colcord, was published by Harper and Brothers in 1927 as Giants in the Earth, then rereleased two years later with a special introduction by Vernon L. Parrington, a major scholar and promoter of early twentieth-century realism.
Giants in the Earth narrates the settling of the South Dakota frontier by a small community of Norwegian pioneers. In Book One of the novel, we see the work of clearing the land, of coming to terms (not always honestly) with the native inhabitants and with Irish settlers who had laid prior claim, and of fending off the fierce Dakota winters; in Book Two, we see how, despite such scourges as locusts and disease (including the mental disease of great isolation), the pioneers moved steadily from bare sustenance to lucrative cash farming, established a school, 'civilized' their living conditions, and, perhaps most difficult of all, reached a genuinely productive balance between competition and community among themselves. For Rölvaag, however, and in marked distinction to Cahan, the drive for 'kingdom building' is as much 'Norwegian' as it is 'American' — Scandinavian Lutheran in its origin, and American to the extent that it contributes to and participates in the general Protestant spirit of United States capitalism. Yet the force of resistance to this spirit on the Dakota frontier is also Norwegian in origin: a countervailing energy of self-vigilance within Scandinavian Lutheranism itself. It is a spiritualism among the pioneers (especially the women) that comprehends as ungodly the mania with which they (especially the men) have pursued personal kingdoms beyond established society. The fear of having radically individualized and hence subverted God's mission drives the novel's central female protagonist — Beret Holm — to the edge of insanity as it drives her husband, Per Hansa, into a suicidal act of contrition.
Buoyed in part by the novel's critical acclaim both in Norway and in the United States, as well as by his own missionary zeal to depict more recent developments, Rölvaag completed two sequels focused on the maturation and adulthood of Beret and Per Hansa's son: -390- Peder Victorious (1919) and Their Fathers' God (1931). In Peder Victorious, he narrated the boy's break from Lutheranism to a less vigilant modern secularism and from the Norwegian farm community to a 'melting pot' of varied Northern European origins. In Their Fathers' God, Peder marries an Irish Catholic woman and together, as entrepreneurial farmers in their fathers' tradition, they face the boom-or-bust cycles of both nature and the increasingly nationalized farm economy, which threatens not only to bankrupt individuals but also to destroy the forward-looking alliance between his Norwegians and her Irish. Although both these books put in short appearances on best-seller lists, and are worth reading as continuing chapters in the settling of the frontier, they are in the final analysis unhappily schematic.
Martha Ostenso was born in Norway and raised from the age of two in various small towns in Minnesota and South Dakota. When she was fifteen, her family moved north to the farmlands of Manitoba, Canada — conditions there approximating those of Minnesota and South Dakota thirty or so years earlier, in the immediate postpioneer period — where she went to high school and began college. From 1921 to 1922, she studied fiction writing at Columbia University, not three years after Anzia Yezierska's studies there, and became interested for a time in the Lower East Side. From 1925 to 1958, Ostenso published sixteen novels, three of them set in the Canadian frontier, the rest of them in Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin. Her first novel, Wild Geese, won a 1925 competition — against 1300 entries for a prize of $13,500 — sponsored by the Pictorial Review, Famous Players — Lasky Corporation, and Dodd, Mead and Company, who immediately published it. Though also published by McClelland & Stewart of Toronto, the novel was scarcely noticed in Canada. In the first year alone it went through twelve printings in the United States, where she resettled permanently.
In The Immigrant Strain in American Literature (1936), Carter Davidson of Carleton College cited Ostenso, after Rölvaag, as the most notable of Scandinavian American writers. In recent years scholars have suggested that Ostenso's novels were in significant measure ghostwritten by her Anglo-Saxon Canadian husband, Douglas Leader Dirkin. If one then wonders why they were released under her name -391- only, consideration must go to the marketing of her maiden name, which authenticated the authorship of her books as doubly 'other': Norwegian and female.
Wild Geese, set in Manitoba, is Ostenso's best-known and most respected work. It narrates the rebellion of willful and forwardlooking Judith Gare against her brutal father, who blackmails Judith's mother into submission and whose continuing success as a multicrop farmer continues at the expense of the labor and lifechoices of his three children. With the help of a young female schoolteacher, Judith learns to take herself and her desires seriously, ultimately defying her father and jettisoning his bloodless Protestantism to run away with her lover (with whom she has conceived a child) to the city. As Mary Dearborn has pointed out, Ostenso's plot is remarkably close to that of Yezierska's Bread Givers. The engagement that concludes Wild Geese is also haunted, but it is understood as a flight rather than a partial return,
