Timothy Egan's award-winning book, The “Worst Hard Time” is subtitled, The Untold Story of Those Who SuReview of THE WORST HARD TIME by Carolyn Leonard
Timothy Egan's award-winning book, The “Worst Hard Time” is subtitled, The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl ... and there are a lot of memories told about the horrible dust storms. The website “Goodreads” claims this book has 1849 reviews and 9444 ratings. Egan, a national enterprise reporter for the New York Times, on this book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Washington State Book Award in history/biography.
The author dedicated the book to his dad “who had been raised by his widowed mother during the darkest years of the Great Depression, four to a bedroom.”
The Chicago Tribune said this book, “Masterfully captures the story of our nation’s greatest environmental disaster.”
The New York Times book review noted “Ten-thousand-foot-high dust storms whip across the landscape, choking people and animals, and eventually laying waste to one of the richest ecosystems on earth.”
Seattle Times (winner of eight Pulitzer prizes) remarked: “After reading Timothy Egan's new book, "The Worst Hard Time," one could make a case that the Joads made the best of the situation. "The Worst Hard Time" is about the disaster that befell those who were left behind.
AND YET I remembered none of those things after reading the book. I had heard the dustbowl stories from my parents, who lived through that time. I had seen the photos of the sad faces, terrible times. I knew a few of those people and many of their descendants. But I never think of those stories when I remember the book.
What I remember is the stoutheartedness of the Germans from Russia who settled around Dalhart, Texas, and on up into the edges of the panhandle in Oklahoma where I grew up. No one else mentioned it. I pulled the book back out to see if I was confused about that subject.
Finally I found what I was looking for. Chapter 4, High Plains Deutch. From Page 60 to 72; only twelve pages, but for me this is the heart of the book. George Albert Ehrlich would tell his nine children around the table about the bad years on the Volga River in Russia in the village of Tcherbagovka. He spoke in a very old style of German with a sprinkling of Russian, spiced with the dialect of Texas-Oklahoma. He told them about being chained to horses in barns to deter horse thieves. Through an improbable journey of 166 years, these people had bounced from southern Germany to the Volga River region of Russia to the Cherokee Outlet of Oklahoma.
The Russlanddeutschen were not Russian nor were they fully German. Hardened by long exile, state cruelty, and official ridicule, they wanted only to be left alone. In those twelve pages you find the reason why those German families, mostly Mennonites from around the Black Sea, Conscientious Objectors by religion, excellent farmers who were opposed to war in a country where their countrymen coould and did kill without flinching. Catherine the Great offered them a manifesto of homestead land in Russia, tax breaks, cultural freedom and NO military conscription. The Russlanddeutschen went, but they held on to their religion, their food, their dress, their language, their family stories, and their seeds of grain, When that promise was broken many years later, Russlanddeutschen families closed up their villages in Russia and fled to America.
This is their story, how they came all that way from Germany to Russia to America, bringing their heritage with them. I remember their food best of all, when the Lutheran church ladies (mostly of the Germans from Russia families) served food. The Bierox, my favorite, a sort of meat pie with cabbage - delicious! and how they brought us the hard, red winter wheat that could survive our western plains extremes of weather, they sowed the seeds into the hems of their clothing. But they accidentally brought also the Russian thistles or tumbleweeds that blow across the land.
Egan introduces us to the stoic, long-suffering men and women. He takes us into the lives of families in places like Dalhart, Texas, and Boise City, Oklahoma, the latter being almost smack in the center of what was known as "No Man's Land," the Oklahoma panhandle.
Read those twelve pages. If you never read more you will have gained an education in being stouthearted like the Germans from Russia. ...more
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