What happens when a meagerly-educated peasant girl is chosen in 1903 to leave her family and accompany her illiterate godfather from Europe to the Midlands of America?
Young Anna Barbara Mrkvicka left the dirt floor of her over-crowded one room home to enter an unknown world and overwhelming challenges at every turn. Through Different Eyes describes the back-breaking peasant life of that era. Anna worked 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.
