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Most early immigrants understood little about the America they strove to reach. Anna learned something very important at her very first day of school with the good nuns:

"What captured Anna's attention most mid-afternoon was Sister Marie Helena explaining exactly where the six-year-old "was" in the world.  Where she really "was."  The little girl never had seen a map before.  The hand-painted one hammered to the schoolroom wall intrigued her.  The Austrian-Habsburg Empire was a large and prominent shape spread on it, green with shaded browns for mountain humps.  The wimple-clad Sister tapped her pointer to a spot with "Kutná Hora" printed beside it, looking sternly at her pupils to announce, "This is where you sit in God's world.  Right here!"  Anna was fascinated, her different eyes wide.

Then the nun showed the class where Prague was located nearby, at the center of Europe, and she continued to identify countries and continents as they spiraled out from Kutná Hora, where Anna "was."  She tapped on Germany, France, and the British Isles.  At last her pointer moved across a painted blue sea dotted with inked images of billowy sailing ships afloat on inverted v-shaped waves.  She finally banged her stick on a strange brown shape called the United States of America.

Anna glanced back and forth between the spot that was Kutná Hora, her spot, and the brown shape across the blue Atlantic Ocean.  So that was the America grown-ups talked about so much by firelight.  It didn't look so far after all from where she "was" on the colorful map.  From that time forward in her mind the United States was a strange and irregular brown blob beyond bright blue seas."

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