Longing For Home

by Lisa M. Wayman

Seventeen-year-old Irena clutches all of her belongings, waiting to be processed through Ellis Island in 1892. She hopes for a better life than she had as a Slovenian maid.

“Life in America is difficult and unsettling,” she thinks. “I had the sensation of disintegrating. I felt myself in little pieces. Was I Slovene, American or even maybe Irish? Catholic or Pagan? For a moment I wasn’t sure even if I were male or female. I felt myself dissolving into the mountains and the fresh blue sky.”

Against the backdrop of the Wyoming cattle wars, an Irish neighborhood in Chicago’s meat packing district, and through the depression of the 1890s in Durango Colorado, Irena must tap into unknown strengths and learn to love herself and her husband in order to find her way home.

Longing for Home is a tale of exploration, love, hardship, resilience and finding one’s place in the world, set against the backdrop of the great American Age of Immigration.

304 pages, Paperback

Published May 15, 2016

About the author

Lisa Wayman wrote ‘Longing for Home’ to explore her own heritage as well as work out what it means to find a home and family. She has many Native American friends who formally introduce themselves with their tribe, band, family and name. Lisa is at a disadvantage because she don’t know her tribe and band. She is the great grand-daughter of Slovene, German and Irish immigrants and told this fictional story to explore the culture of her ancestors and to honor the ‘huddled’ masses of immigrants to the US.



Lisa is also a navy brat with an itinerant childhood who has spent much of her adult life looking for home. This novel let her explore what home and family means through a fictional character – the Slovene immigrant Irena.

Lisa has written professional articles for nursing journals and autobiographical chapters for books which explored her experience of grief after the death of her 12 year old son. Her story was told through words and visual art which can be seen at Lisa’s art.

Longing for Home is Lisa’s first foray into fiction. As a PhD nurse researcher she learned to delve deeply into the facts and has extensively researched the historical context for this story. However, this story is much more about the people than it is about history, and in this aspect Lisa’s nursing background has been most informative. Lisa has had the honor of being a nurse for more than 20 years. As a nurse, she has cared for all types of people: rich and poor, resilient and struggling, healing and dying. Her nursing experiences give Lisa a unique view of human nature and informed the responses of the book’s characters. Lisa deeply loves the characters and hopes you find that Irena’s story of struggling to meet the demands of her time and her quest to find where she belongs resonates with you.

Lisa lives in Phoenix Arizona with her husband of 31 years, Charlie. She has a grown daughter, Katrina who lives with her husband Chris in New Zealand where Lisa visits whenever she can.

Reviews

[Jenee Rager · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever I classify a book as romance I'm afraid it will turn some readers off. Hopefully that is not the case here because "Longing For Home" is so much more than a simple romance, but the relationship between Irena and Seamus is certainly romantic and at the heart of the novel.

Irena is a US immigrant in the late 1800's. Her father has arranged for her to come to America and be wed as a chance to make a better life. within a week of being married, she is widowed and that is just the first time life in America turns out differently than she imagined. Lisa Wayman does a fantastic job of transporting her readers to the time period. The book is wonderfully written and I just wanted it to keep going. Through each trial and tribulation I felt as if I was in Irena's shoes. The doubts she felt as not only an immigrant, but as a new bride, and simply as a woman transcend time.

I won this book from goodreads in exchange for an honest review. The author included a personal notecard in my book, which I found sweet and moved this book up to the top of my pile. I was so happy the book was excellent because I didn't want to have to give a negative review to such a kind person.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Longing for Home opens in 1892. Seventeen year old Irena has traveled from Austria to Ellis Island to begin her new life. Her father has arranged for her to marry a man she has never met and they will live and work in Cheyenne, Wyoming. During their trip to Wyoming, tragedy strikes, changing Irena's life once again. She finds life in America daunting. A new language, different customs, strained family relations and an uncertain future are, understandably, overwhelming. Then she becomes the victim of a violent crime. How can she survive in this country?

The author brings to the reader an exquisitely told story of survival, personal growth and the strength of the human spirit. The relationships between the well developed characters are emotionally stirring. Can they settle into a new future?

This is a moving, memorable and powerful story. There is much to be gained from reading it. Highly recommended.

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Irena is only seventeen when she lands on the shore of Ellis Island in 1892. This book was of particular interest to me because my grandparents were processed there too, not much longer after this date.

Irena goes through a lot at her young age as she discovers who she is, what she wants, what she identifies with, etc.

The book seems particularly relevant now with all of the immigration status in this day and in our politics. It is a well written book about love and loss and learning about one's self through hardship, circumstance and determination.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is one that I enjoyed reading. I found it difficult to put down. I found myself reading until early mornings. It had historical as well as folklore weaved throughout the book which made for a good read. I highly recommend this book.

[Laurette Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is what I call a chocolate box book. Just one more, just one more… the chapters are as addictive as Belgian truffles. If you are a reader who loves a good story, this book is for you. Lisa Wayman will make you gasp, make you laugh, make you cry and keep you hooked until the very end.
The narrator is Irena, arriving in the USA in 1892, a 17 year-old Slovenian immigrant from a small Alpine village. The sights, the sounds and above all the over-powering smells of Ellis Island come to life in the author’s description of this gateway to a new land and new future. In the queue of anxious applicants some will know the relief of being allowed through, others the despair of being turned back. Irena is ‘passed’, but the suspense continues. She is heading for Wyoming where her father, Ciril Jacopic, owns a small business. First, though, is a stop in Cleveland. Here she will meet her father’s business partner, Blaz, a man she barely remembers from the old country, and will become his wife.
And so, in the space of a few days, Irena undergoes two momentous experiences: finding herself a newcomer in a foreign land and a bride in an arranged marriage to a virtual stranger. As the train sets off on its long journey from Cleveland to Cheyenne, she tries to take it all in. ‘…was I no longer to be Irena? I guess to Blaz I was his wife; something that he owned just as he owned a horse and a share in my father’s business.’
This is a book about journeys and discovery. There are the interminable days spent travelling back and forth across this vast land with its teeming cities and awe-inspiring landscapes. Irena discovers the ‘Wild West’, Cheyenne, a town of ‘dirt streets and wooden boardwalks’, in the grips of a bloody war between cattlemen and horse thieves; then Chicago, the meat packers’ district, men and women reduced to the barest essentials, struggling to eke out a living in overcrowded slum tenements rife with disease and permeated by the stench of the slaughterhouses; finally Colorado, whose towering mountains remind her of her native Alps, a land of pure sweet air and communities trying to forge a new life in the mining town of Durango.
But Irena’s journeys are not just geographical. She must also decipher the unfamiliar terrain of a foreign language and its concepts, find her way through a maze of strange and sometimes shocking customs, belief systems, and social structures. Sometimes, she writes, she feels herself ‘disintegrating’, no longer knowing whether she is ‘Slovene, American, or maybe even Irish? Catholic or Pagan?’ Suffering the pangs of homesickness she is nonetheless able to embrace the idea of creating a new identity for herself, one that looks towards the future while not forgetting precious elements from her past, an American identity. She marvels at the modernity and progress of a country in which light can be produced by electricity, where people using something called a telephone can talk over great distances. First a listener, then a participant in discussions about religion, social norms, the role of women, and the promise of women’s suffrage, she learns and adapts. At times overwhelmed by the raw violence of this emerging country, the viciousness of its racism and xenophobia, the casualness with which men rape and kill, she succeeds in finding a way through the different trials that beset her, succeeds in surviving and overcoming. And all the while she is building a more personal future, one in which she becomes part of a close-knit community, one where she can fulfil her role as a woman, a wife, a mother, one in which she can find the home that she longs for, in a country to which she belongs. ‘All my life I had wanted to belong somewhere.’
In her dedication, Lisa Wayman says that in this work of fiction she wishes to honour the memory of her immigrant ancestors, ‘their trials and resilience’. I think they would indeed be honoured.
I received a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

[Story Circle Book Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Longing for Home is a well-researched historical debut novel by Lisa M. Wayman. The story begins on May 26,1892 when seventeen year old Irena Marija Preseren, a virgin Slovenian from Austria, arrives at Ellis Island, after a twenty day voyage across the Atlantic in steerage. Her father had immigrated several years earlier, and arranges a marriage for her with a hard working Slovenian man. Her fiancé works for her father at his restaurant in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Irena can read, write, and do simple arithmetic. She also speaks three languages: Slovenian, German and English. Traveling with distant relatives from Austria, they stay with other relatives in Cleveland for a couple of days.

There she is introduced to her fiancé and married on the same day. Their honeymoon is spent traveling by train to Wyoming. West of Chicago, their train derails in a deadly accident that leaves Irena a seventeen year old widow, though no longer a virgin.

Homesickness is threaded throughout the story, as was the new immigrants desire to re-create the culture, and customs they'd left behind in the old country. When business thrives, the immigrants did also. But when business slows, there is no safety net.

Irena and her second husband, Seamus, an Irish widower, end up living in a Chicago tenement apartment house. When work slows, alcoholism and domestic abuse are rampant, as well as contagious diseases, with severe hunger a constant companion. Their neighbors in the tenement are poor immigrants from all over Europe. The tenements are depicted accurately (I have visited the Tenement Museum in NYC); they offered shelter from the elements though not a feeling of home. The plot includes rape, kidnapping, gunfights, cattle wars, hangings, a cholera epidemic and much more.

Irena and Seamus do not have a child of their own for several years after their marriage. Their natural love of children leads them to help their neighbor's neglected children and help them the best they could, sharing their food, time and talents. Later when they finally leave the city they had grown to respect but still dislike, they took with them an acceptance of other cultures and customs besides those that are familiar to them. Their way of saying good-by to Chicago was to visit the Columbian Exposition World's Fair of 1892. Seamus said, "...even though we are poor we deserve some joy."

The second part of the book takes place in Durango, Colorado. It is here the characters mature and develop the depth that stays with the reader long after reading. They buy a run-down cabin with good structural bones; it is on the outskirts of the town. They develop a sense of family with their neighbors; it is like a small United Nations village with so many different countries of origin represented on their street. The work together and thrive; it is an American melting pot. Meanwhile her father and her half-sisters lose their restaurant, and suffer financial difficulties as they move with the Slovenian community to another part of the west, no more Americanized than when they first immigrated. I believe the main point of Looking for Home - to truly find a home, it is necessary for immigrants to let go of their pasts and blend into their new lives in America.

by Ann McCauley
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

[Marie-Jo Fortis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through the eyes of seventeen year old Slovanian Irena, Longing for Home narrates the story of immigrants in the US in the 1890's. If America is supposed to be a land of opportunities, these opportunities are not easy to grab. For from Chicago to Colorado, those who have flown their own country to improve their lot will face challenge.

Forced into marriage by her father, ignorant about sex, widowed, then nearly raped until finally falling into the arms of the man she truly loves, the epopee will not become smoother for Irena. There will be vermin in the confined spaces of the North, prostitution where mountains and open lands seem to offer other new prospers. There will always be need for more money. But there is also an extending hand from time to time; solidarity.

Wayman describes settings and conditions well. For instance, she will mention characters with missing teeth, so that readers are fully aware that those aren’t times with dental hygienists or with many people who can really afford dentists. She will report cleaning methods of, say, wooden floors with water and vinegar. She will repeatedly show Irena hand washing clothes. On darker, Dickensian aspects, she will describe the exploitation of the workers—the sweatshops of the post industrial revolution era. She will insist on the constant lack of hygiene in city life; the dust, the vermin, leading to disease, diphtheria, cholera; the death of children.

But there is hope, as well, as roaring in the background is Susan B. Anthony, defiant and giving speeches, whose impact has already given women the right of vote in some places.

And then there is the romance between Irena and her beloved Irish husband or, if you prefer, the lovely sex scenes, specially if you consider this is neither happening today nor in libertine and aristocratic 18th Century. This makes Irena a free spirit. And this free spirit had found her land.

If you want saga with plenty of suspense, you should look elsewhere. I must admit, I personally would have preferred a little bit more tension. It’s there a little bit at the beginning but it soon fades away. Then, during the Chicago part, I was hoping for a more Zola-esque Wyman, someone who would portray capitalism as a villain, say, with a big belly and a fat cigar (or orange skin, orange hair and an arrogant and barking voice?).

But then I realized Longing for Home reads like a narrative chronicle. And chronicles don’t go for dramatic effects. They are more like historical tableaux with symbolic effects. And this, Wyman does quite well, weaving the basis of what this country is made of.

[Dean Robertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lisa M. Wayman's book, Longing for Home, is about--well--longing for home. It is a topic fraught with possibilities, a title the very sound of which can cause a catch in the breath, a quick flash of memory, a kind of sorrow. Is it the longing to which we all so immediately relate? Is it home, which in one way or another we all have had and most of us have lost? Is it the nearly unbearable combination of those pulls on the heart?

Longing for Home opens with a section titled "Family: Ellis Island May 26 1892," and is there a more familiar metaphor for home--for leaving home, for searching for home, for the home promised in America? Ellis Island. And in the crowds waiting to be processed into this new country--or returned to the homes they are hoping to leave behind--we meet Irena, seventeen years old, a domestic worker, a maid, from Austria, a Slovene. Before we have left her and her story, Irena will have travelled, and searched, and carved a life from Ohio to Wyoming to an Irish neighborhood in Chicago's meat-packing district, against the backdrop of the fabled "Gilded Age" and the great American Age of Immigration.

Longing for Home is set, in fact, in an exceptionally rich time in American history, and one of the great accomplishments of the book is that it juggles this heavy load without allowing it to overwhelm the one thing whose importance overrides every other consideration in a work of fiction--the telling of a story. We never forget that, while certainly we are being called to a consideration of history and of the many large problems of the late nineteenth century, we are, before all else, being summoned to participate in Irena's story.

[Anthony Stancomb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very affecting book in many ways. It is a very moving document of the life of immigrants at the turn of the century, and also an intimate portrait of a girl from Slovenia who arrives at Ellis Island aged 17 and has to get on with the life she finds.
She is immediately married off to a man produced by her family and goes with him to work in a primitive Slovene community in the Mid-West. Her struggle to fit into it, and then into Chicago where she has to flee with a second husband, gives the reader a vivid depiction of the difficulties faced by immigrants at that time. The hard life with erratic employment is graphically portrayed as the girl finds herself coping with the realities of living a hand-to-mouth existence on the borderlines of society.
The author demonstrates considerable skill in managing to show a delicate being from a sheltered background coping with what life throws at her – and also great skill in managing to lift the book above the usual pitfalls of over-dramatisation and mawkishness that so often bedevils the genre. An added charm of the book is that the voice of the seventeen year-old narrator and her observations are written in a suitably simple and naïve way.
The story moves along at a great pace and is absorbing. Within the first few pages you become charmed by the wide-eyed, insouciant openness of the narrator, whose plight gets worse and worse as the book progresses, and by the end of it one has a very good understanding of what life must have been like for the multitude of immigrants who went to America.

[L.N. Denison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longing for home, follows the story of Irena, an Eastern European immigrant, who has been set up in an arranged marriage to her father's business partner, Biaz, in America. All is not plain sailing as Irena is hit by tragedy. Her new life isn't looking so rosy, but then she finds the true love of her life, and life only gets better. The story is an authentic realisation as to how harsh life could be after leaving a place you'd called home for most of your life, and how difficult it is to adjust to new surroundings.

The immigration process was so much simpler in those days, and it's outlined well in this story. I thoroughly enjoyed the romantic aspect of this story, but it wasn't your usual romance, which I liked even more. Irena had her trials and tribulations, but she won out in the end.

I really do recommend this book to anyone who likes a bit of romance and history rolled into a nice neat package, as this is what this book is: a well written piece of work by a very talented author.

*I was given a free copy of this book for an honest review.*

[Wendy Morey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book does a great job of allowing you to completely identify with the very real characters and travel with them through their adjustments and life passages as they strive to make a home in their new country. It was interesting to experience firsthand the hardships of turn of the century America and the author does a great job of helping you feel the deep cold of a harsh Chicago winter and the bleak despair of being unable to provide enough food for your children. You will find yourself rooting for Irena and anxious to move with her through her day's experiences. A perfect read to appreciate the struggles of our ancestors and appreciate life anew.

[Tori · Rating 4 out of 5]

I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. It was an advance reading copy, so any mistakes may have been corrected before publication, but there were a few places where they (mistakes, repetition of description, etc.) pulled me out of the story. Otherwise, I enjoyed the book. It spanned a period that isn't usually one I read, but the story was believable and the characters were true. I feel the author did a wonderful job researching the time period and the locations/settings. Though this isn't my favorite/usual era for historical fiction, I would not hesitate to read this author again.

[Belle's Wish · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a beautiful tale that will keep you reading until the end. It touches on the historical backdrop in an accurate way, without losing its focus on the characters in it. Reading it took me on an emotional journey with Irena through all the sweet, funny, tragic, and touching scenes. Irena is a strong female while still being true to the women of her time. I would encourage anyone who loves a historical adventure to give this one a try.

[InD'tale Magazine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing view into the life of an immigrant in America as the world floods forth into the young melting-pot nation.

Read full review in the 2017 February issue of InD'tale Magazine.

[Michelle Olms · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book

[Penelope Bartotto]

You will find this review in an upcoming issue of InD'Tale Magazine