Richard Sallet was the young editor of the Dakota Freie Presse published at New Ulm, Minnesota. It was the newspaper that for many years gave a unifying voice to the Russian-Germans. (Sallet preferred Russian-Germans to German-Russians.) In the 1920s, after each harvest, Sallet would leave his desk and travel from one subscriber to another, hoping to lengthen his mailing list. More than that, he got to know the people he sought to serve. As he traveled, he asked questions and took notes. Supplementing his notes with archival sources, he published this book in 1931--in German. He answers our questions about who, from which Russian villages, settled where, when, and why. His book is full of imaginatively gathered facts: The sugar beet industry in Montana drew Evangelical Volga Germans. A scattering of Russian-German communities on the east coast of the United States were established when the immigrants ran out of money for the train trip west. Others took up land where they could find it, so there are Russian-German settlements in Utah, in Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, Florida, and New York. Also, for a time, Russian-German people moved freely back and forth across the border between the United States and Canada.
Sallet observed that assimilation was rapid. People Anglicized their children's names. They took delight in personal freedoms, so they especially embraced the Fourth of July and all it stood for. They became naturalized citizens, gradually gave up the German tongue, and felt the fruits of their hard work in increasing prosperity. Dr. Rippley and Dr. Bauer, who translated the book independently and learned of each other's work only as they sought publishers, collaborated on the final form of the book and have added meaningful materials. Dr. Rippley's introduction puts the body of the work into its historical framework. Dr. Bauer records the old-country villages with both their Russian and German names, the district in which they were located, and the number of of residents. An appendix supplies census figures. To round out the book, there is an essay by Fr. William Sherman on the style of the homes the Russian-Germans built on the prairies and state maps that show major settlement areas.
Review © 2003 by Edna Boardman
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