what little spare time he had, Frederick began to study borrowed books from Dr. Becker and read for an hour each week he bought the town's newspaper, the Beatrice Optimist, and slowly worked his way through it, dictionary by his listened closely to conversations at the tavern, eager to grasp the language's strange was an assiduous year after their arrival in America, he had amassed a fair vocabulary and was rarely caught out by the army of irregular verbs that lurked in for all his hard work, Frederick had no gift for the dour rigidity of his native tongue, its anarchy unnerved was always a glimmer of apprehension in his eyes when he spoke, as if every sentence were a high wire from which he was liable to topple at any unease made him retreat from the perils of adopted a cautious, formal mode of speech, although this wasn't just because of his fear of opaque colloquialisms: English was the language of his family's deserved to be spoken with respect, not sullied with lazy elisions and cheap he listened to the alien words form themselves in his mouth, his heart would swell with pride.

Frederick loved loved its big open spaces, the sunsets that drenched the evening sky in blistering loved the warmth of the all, he loved the smell of promise that hung in the , he could see now, was slowly suffocating under the weight of its own America the future was the only thing that turned his back on everything that had gone before, and looked ahead into the bright lights of the young a man could reinvent determination to learn a new language was his own path toward such became just an echo of his past.

was not so 's birth, rather than directing her eyes toward the future, instead turned her gaze back toward the home she had left changed everything that she thought she was now refracted through the prism of a new mother's stared down at Joseph as he slept, and knew that she would be destroyed if he ever left , remorse flooded through her as she thought about her parents, alone now on the other side of the had been her idea to come to America, but now she began to wish that they had never she watched Frederick eagerly immerse himself in his new country, she kept her homesickness a guilty her husband, Jette learned scarcely a word of everyone in the town still spoke German, and she found her old language a welcome comfort in the face of the strange parade of foreign customs outside her front door.