Customer Reviews

When I Was a Child

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In 1897, in a poor soldier's cottage, in Trangadal, Smaland, Sweden, a baby by the name of Karl Artur Valter Strang was born. As Valter grows up, he tries to understand the world around him. He looks for love, honesty and equality, but instead finds a country riven with inequality, alcoholism and duplicity. As he ages, he finds what he can give his heart to, to helping his fellow man through Socialism and his own ability to write. This is a portrait of life in Sweden at the beginning of the 20th century, as the country industrializes, and as masses of people emigrate, looking for a land of promise.

In many ways, this book is the flip side of Moberg's Emigrant series. Whereas Karl Oskar Nilsson left Sweden at the beginning of the great Swedish exodus, Valter Strang was young during its height. Herein is a Sweden where people have more relatives living across the Atlantic than in their own country. It also shows the life of those who could not, or would not, go. In many families, one child remains to take care of the aging parents, setting up an interesting dynamic. This book is quite fascinating for its look at this era.

On the downside, this book (written in 1944, 5 years before The Emigrants) is not an upbeat, "feel-good" book. The young women that Valter encounters are less than virtuous and truehearted, and no happy ending lurks around the corner. But for all that, it is a powerful book, showing again the wonderful talent that Vilhelm Moberg possessed.

If you want a happy book, then you might want to look elsewhere. But, if you are looking for a powerfully written, achingly emotional book, that is also a great work of history, then I highly recommend that you get this book!

Having read and enjoyed Moberg's Emigrants series immensely, I was hungry for more. And this was a worthwhile choice. In "When I was a Child", Moberg relates more of the Swedish emigration experience .. but this time from the perspective of those who stayed behind in Sweden. This story is set in Smaland in the early 1900s.. and emigration to America is no longer for just the daring and the bold adventurers. Most families have relatives already settled in America. They send back letters and photographs to Sweden... sometimes even passage-fare for the next one in line to come to America. The steamer ship leaves regularly with more and more people emigrating to America....(certainly offering a much easier crossing than Karl Oskar, Kristina, et al, fared on the "Charlotta".)

Typical Moberg style, the characters are richly described.. the reader feels for them long after he puts the book down.

Highly recommended.

I bought this book as part of my researches in my family history. This is an autobiographical novel by Vilhelm Moberg detailing his childhood, up until his late teens. He was born in 1897 as the youngest child of an indentured soldier and his wife in Småland: my interest was specifically to find out about the life of these indentured soldiers and their families, as in my family we have four generations of such soldiers. Moberg's father was amongst the last of the indentured soldiers; after that the Swedish Army turned to 'normal' recruitment. The book starts with such simple language that my little boy could read it fairly easily, but I quickly realized that this was Moberg's way of giving the novel a strong flavor of his life as it was when he was a baby and toddler. As he progresses in age and learning, so does the language develop from the concrete to the more abstract. He is excellent at remembering and conveying the kinds of feelings children have, from the accepting of everything at a young age to rebellious absolutism in the teen years and finally, the getting of wisdom. What the life was, was very, very hard and very poor in a land that (at the turn of the 20th Century) was a poor country. The indentured soldier is only one step above the poorest, but everything he has comes with his position: from his name and his rifle to his house, land, cow and pig. When Moberg's father died, it all had to go back and he and his mother were left to make the best of what they could living in a backstuge -- landless, able only to sell their labor for whatever the local farmer or factory was willing to pay, and sometimes dependent on the charity of the better-off. It's a sad, sad story, but like the story of my own ancestors, life eventually got better. In Moberg's case it was his self-education that made him into a writer (and socialist); in my family's case they emigrated to America. If you want to get a clear and detailed impression of life amongst the poor Swedes in the 19th and early 20th Centuries (imagine having to use an outdoor 'dung ditch' in the Swedish winter because the farmers who support Soldier 128 Sträng won't pay for a privy!), then this is very much the book for you.