He said it used to make him feel ”as though I was the maker of my own fate.” He longed for some of the remnants of his old life, and asks about hunting, missing the days he hunted with his old friend. The only work there was working in the mines. Unable to face a life without his wife in this strange place in his new country, he takes his son and heads east to Pennsylvania, to the mining town of Wilkes-Barre, where he had relatives and friends, people from his village. When he drank and someone was there to listen, he’d say that the Slavs of Pueblo had only exchanged life in one poor village for another, even if the journey to America, and then out west, promised to reveal a paradise. Born to parents who emigrated from Austria-Hungary in a search for a better life, this debut novel takes you first through a horrific tragedy, and returns to Pastvina, the village of Josef’s father, Ondrej Vinich. On Good Friday, the last night of March in the year 1899, Josef begins his life in Pueblo, Colorado.
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