Personal Narrative: German Immigrant

German Immigrant- $5. Husband and three children.

It was not at all how I had imagined it would be. America, the land of the free, was awfully confined. I stepped off the boat with anger filling my entire body. If I was forced to spend one more minute with my infuriating husband, Adel, and our three pestering sons, I was bound to jump right off into the churning green. It was my fault we were here, sure, but their four rotten attitudes were more than I have ever been able to handle.

If it were up to me, I would have never married. Adel was brude and stubborn, believing since the day he laid eyes on me that I was nothing but a pretty face, inferior to him in every way. Unfortunately for me, my mother agreed. She was a fiery, bitter little

Americans who used to be so well off, the ones who shot me crude looks and spat upon my mere existence, were now living on the streets. How ironic. Luckily, I had been living this way for years now, fending for myself when there is no one left to depend on. I now lived in a small, rural community that the depression could barely touch. Everyone here was already poor, so for us, it was all almost comedic. I still had very little money and had lost my job, but so had the majority of the country.

There was one thing, however, in this whole cruel country that woke me up at night in cold sweats. My little, precious Bem. He would be around ten now, and I wished with every ounce of me that still believed in such naive motions that Adel had found a way to provide for him. Considering the poverty and death rates, I had no clue how the four of them would be faring.

If Adel could survive the terrible economy of Germany after the Great War, surely he could continue to provide for the four of

There was a single window on the north wall that looked out onto the street, and while I told myself it was only to leave myself an escape if necessary, that window was my closest friend. I couldn’t afford a radio, I never earned enough money before the depression to blow on entertainment, but with my little window I didn’t need it. The radio could tell you that the stock market crashed, that the people were starving and America was in a drastic state of poverty, but the window could show it to you. Through this glass I have seen both joy and sorrow, smiles and tears, death and birth, old and new. These were the people, these were the real stories that would never be told, but I was allowed to witness