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283 epilogue Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time and sometimes you weep. —CARL SANDBURG ANDERSONVILLE— A LIVING MUSEUM IN A TIME OF CHANGE Iam a man who lives in the past. I am a historian and that allows me to rationalize my meditations over events of long ago. I am a writer, and the creative muse inspires me to record the voices of the past. And in my mind, the past never recedes. It is always with me, and at times it can be a haunting, aching aria. The older I get the more time I have to reflect upon the lives of my father, Oscar, and my grandfather Richard, the two men who came to Clark Street all those years ago, one a political cosmopolitan of complex motivations, the other an unambitious laborer of small pleasures. They were odd contemporaries, my father and grandfather. But in small and unexpected ways they contributed to the Swedish experience in Chicago, such as it was, and they helped shape my attitudes and my life’s work. I return to Clark Street, the place of their convergence, quite often these days to retrace their footsteps, to buy my Göteborg sausage, limpa bread, herring in wine sauce, Christmas glögg from Simon’s, and expensive marzipan candies at Erickson’s, the last surviving Swedish delicatessen in Chicago. I have embraced my Swedish heritage and the opportunity to rediscover a valued sense of place and time that I once dismissed as absurdly old-fashioned and out of step with the rhythms of American popular culture . That was before the ghosts of the past caught up with me. I suppose it is that way for many of the children and grandchildren of the immigrant generations. Chicago’s Little Italy, much of it bulldozed and decimated 284 epilogue by the wrecker’s ball in the early 1960s, is more Italian today than it was twenty or thirty years ago. Irish, Italian, Swede, Pole, Czech, German—we go back to the places of origin because we must. It is a calling, and it is recognition of who and what we are. There were no remarkable treasures or notable buildings in the last Swedetown, this tired urban landscape where once there were coal companies, independent grocers, hardware stores, horse barns, delicatessens , and lots of saloons. To oversentimentalize that time and that place in the foggy nostalgia we attach to Chicago’s “old neighborhoods” is to overstate the fundamental working-class identity of a European way station. Swedetown existed as a halfway house and then lived on in the collective memory of those who passed through, and the few who fought gallantly to preserve it as a living museum. The “Swedes fought their heritage,” explained the Reverend Joel Lundeen of the Immanuel Lutheran Church in a 1972 interview with the Chicago Daily News. “We had a second-generation syndrome and wanted to prove we were Americans first and Swedes second or third.” The days of Andersonville as the gold standard of Swedish life in Chicago are mostly over. The rapidly assimilated Swedes and their children abandoned the community years ago, although the latte-sipping suburbanites are just as likely to return to Clark and Foster to visit Erickson’s and the Swedish Bakery. The tide of first- and second-generation Swedes living in the United States dropped by 35 percent between 1950 and 1960. In Chicago, during the year of the Andersonville ceremonies, 51,537 people were listed as either Sweden-born or relied on Swedish as their mother tongue. The city population of Swedes had declined precipitously since 1938, when 200,000 strong welcomed Prince Bertie and his family to town. The Andersonville emporiums that I visited with my grandmother in childhood have vanished from Clark Street: the Ricardo Nelson Travel Bureau, where several generations of Swedes booked their SAS vacations to Stockholm; C.B. Hedstrom, who opened his first shoe store at 3261 Clark in 1907; and Winsberg’s affordable clothing store up the street. More recently the Wickstrom (formerly Schott’s) delicatessen closed its doors. Handcrafted Swedish jewels were offered for sale at Ossian Nordling’s emporium; the Swedish Knit Shop traded in quilts and doilies; and cardamom-flavored coffee cakes were baked fresh each morning at Bjuhr’s, Lindahl’s, Nelson’s, and the Signe Carlson bakeries. Citing rising costs and dwindling patronage, the sons and daughters and grand- [18.189.2.122] Project MUSE (2024...

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