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1 1 sweden and the sorrows During the first period of a man’s life the greatest danger is not to take the risk. — SØREN KIERKEGAARD (1813–1855), Danish philosopher and theologian Through the oral tradition of family history passed down from one generation to the next, many American families learn of their ancestors ’ wondrous journeys from the hellholes of the world to the shores of America to blaze a trail and reap whatever little promise there might be for success. I use the word “hellhole” without rancor, because that is how the hardships of the “old country” were so often remembered by so many for so long. In my personal family album, the first immigrant was my father’s father, Kålle (commonly Charles) Lindberg, and his particular hellhole was the rural provinces of southern Sweden. But he was no hardworking man who struggled to provide a new life for his family in a strange land. He came to America in the late 1880s and spent time on the northern plains—in the Dakotas and Minnesota. After many adventures and a fair amount of failure, my grandfather packed it in and returned to Sweden. Thirty-three years later, the Lindberg who came to America and stayed to build a new life was his son, my father, Oscar Lindberg. The tale of Kålle and Oscar, the two sojourners looking for a better way, has been part of family lore since I can remember. As a boy coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, I listened as Dad spun fantastic tales of his father—an old Indian scout traversing the plains where the fearless chieftain Sitting Bull waged war against a relentless tide of European settlers. The 1950s cowboys , gunslingers, and gamblers I remember best from television popular culture—Bret Maverick, the Rifleman, Paladin, and Sugarfoot—none of them had Swedish accents, but they were my heroes. According to my dad, Kålle was no hero. Grandfather Kålle was a rough-hewn, sod-busting frontiersman driven by the Furies and his yen for “potent potables”—the liquid fire 2 sweden and the sorrows that is homemade Swedish vodka. With another man’s pot of gold that he appropriated as his own, Kålle returned to Sweden a restless, disenchanted expatriate. He was compelled by an unhappy and homesick wife—a Swedish immigrant he met in Minnesota—to abandon the American West for the tedium of rural Swedish farm life. Years later, my father, bent and misshapen by Kålle’s violent rages, ran away from the farm to embrace the radical left movement and the lifestyle of a libertine in the freewheeling 1920s Göteborg, Sweden. When “Amerika fever” took hold, Oscar fled Mother Sweden under an assumed name and false papers, only days before his illegitimate first son was born in Göteborg. Looking back, it seems that he brought with him to America one strain of Swedish heritage—that of the left-leaning political and sexual libertine. Another side of Sweden—the more temperate, religious side of hardworking, silent sufferers—marked the lives of his siblings who embraced the ecumenical life, especially his brothers Ernst and Charles. This less liberal, more moderate side of the Swedish character also had an impact on my mother’s family, and the parallel immigrant struggles of my maternal grandfather, Richard Stone. Oscar’s and Richard’s lives intertwined in a dingy workingman’s tavern located in a slice of Chicago that was once a way station for the Swedes of Chicago—Andersonville— the last Swedetown. The Lindberg (or paternal) saga of Sweden to America and back again begins with Kålle Lindberg, who was born in Vaasa (Swedish: Vasa) on the west coast of Finland, in 1856. The family name is likely borrowed from the town of Lindberget, also located in western Finland. Swedish settlers colonized Finland from the port of Kokkola in the north to Kristiina in the south, spreading their language and culture across the land. Kålle called himself a “Swede Finn.” Such a person would be of Finnish background but conversant in Swedish. No one is sure whether Kålle was a “Swede Finn” or the more appropriate “Finland Swede,” which was applied to the descending generations of settlers who crossed the Baltic to reinvent their kulturarvet (cultural heritage). And though the distinction seems small to us now, it was one that haunted my father for years for reasons not altogether honorable, given modern-day...

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