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On the Way to the Melting Pot: A Novel (Prairie Classics)

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On the Way to the Melting Pot is Waldemar Ager's biting, satirical rebuttal to Israel Zangwill's popular 1912 play, "The Melting Pot." In its pages, we watch helplessly as Norwegian immigrant families race to outdo one another in Americanizing themselves, forsaking their Old World traditions, values and even language. It is, in fact, a point of pride for many of the families that their children are idlers who can not hold meaningful conversations with their Norwegian-speaking parents. In the Skare household, for instance, the children learned quite early that their mother did not understand their speech. "Mother became like a piece of household furniture--the most useful in the whole house, essential and incomprehensible." Into this milieu enter Lars and his fiancée, Karoline, two young Norwegians just off the boat; and through their eyes readers obtain a Lettres Perses perspective on immigrant life in a small American midwestern city.

Ager penned the novel in 1917, during the crest of the last big wave of European immigration, and at the beginning of America's decade-long spasm of xenophobia and "100 % Americanism." American doughboys had just gone to France to "Hang the Kaiser!" and a push was on at home to level German pride, cultural traditions and language. The anti-German fervor spilled over onto other hyphenated Americans as well, and Ager undoubtedly wrote Melting Pot in part as a reaction to cries of "English only." But if the book in any wise reflected the reality in most Norwegian-American homes, Ager's biggest battle needed to be waged for the hearts and minds of his countrymen. History has shown Ager to be the loser, shown that over the last eighty years, Norwegian family traditions have attentuated unavoidably into nothing more than an occasional "Uff da!" and lutefisk at Christmas. Ager tried his best, though, and as his Yankee nemesis, Theodore Roosevelt, was wont to say, he "fought the good fight." ~~ Lizbeth Ager