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J. Barbara Alvord, former educator, has retired from the corporate world to write.  Her poetry has been published in Lyrical Iowa, Byline and Cayuse Press zines: Retrozine and The Green Tricycle.  Her stage plays Due Time and The Waving Man have been produced.

In 1992, as Barbara stood on Ellis Island pondering her grandmother's name on the Immigrant Wall of Honor, she vowed to write Anna Mrkvička's courageous story.  Anna was but a fourteen-year-old, meagerly-educated peasant girl when she was chosen in 1903 to leave her family and accompany her illiterate godfather from Europe to the Midlands of America.  She left the dirt floor of her over-crowded one room home to enter an unknown world with overwhelming challenges at every turn.

Through Different Eyes describes the back-breaking peasant life of that era.  (Anna worked beside her parents in the fields at six years of age.)  It travels with the young peasant in steerage on a daunting ocean voyage, and it reveals the frustrating immigrant experience of Ellis Island.  It explores the sounds and smells of sleeping for six weeks on steamy tenement rooftops of New York City's dangerous Lower East Side, sometimes with a knife handy for protection. 

The journey includes a lengthy train ride into the Heartland of the United States, reveals the anxiety of arriving to work with strangers on an isolated farmstead in early Iowa.  With no way to learn the English language of America, for three hard years the frightened girl was unable to escape an abusive step-aunt.  She was neither paid for her exhausting farm work nor allowed enough to eat; she was beaten.

Yet Anna not only miraculously survived her ordeals, her grit and determination at last enabled her to bring all seven members of her family and a foster brother to Iowa in 1909.  It was just in time; World War I was threatening to engulf Europe.

After years of research, this creative biography honors all unsung immigrants like young Anna. It pays homage to the millions of men and women who desperately struggled to transplant their family lives to the freedom of America--their precious gift to those of us so privileged to be citizens of this great land.

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Copyright 2003  J. Barbara Alvord
ISBN: 1-4134-3488-6 (Paperback)
ISBN: 1-4134-3489-4 (Hardback)

Pages: 342
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Publish Date: March 2004
Subject: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General
Subject: HISTORY / General