Wanderlust

ISBN: 0595326838

Author: Sandler, Heidi

Condition: Used

In the early 1900s, in a German village on the North Sea, a man named Wilhelm Schoon mistakenly thought he'd killed someone in a bar fight. Nervous, he slipped over the Dutch border and emigrated to Iowa, "where you can just spit on the ground and the corn grows three meters high!" Thirty years later his three granddaughters back in Germany inherited his land in America. One chose to emigrate; the other two stayed behind. Wanderlust chronicles the repercussions of their choices. The daughter of a midwife recalls her childhood during WWII as her home is attacked by fellow Germans. A nine-year-old boy watches his father learn the art of farming in "Amerika." An American woman follows her German husband back to Europe and for the first time views the U.S. through foreign eyes. A young man in East Germany devotes his life to the study of the violin, secretly hoping to gain a place in a touring orchestra so that he will have the chance to defect, but as the Berlin Wall falls he finds he must reevaluate his life and his ambitions. Wanderlust is both a memoir and a travelogue, a story of work, family, love, and immigration.