NewsSouth

From Minneapolis’ American Swedish Institute to the monuments to Swedish-Americans at the state capitol, Minnesota is rife with a rich Scandinavian heritage. About 1.4 million Swedes immigrated to the United States between 1850 and 1920, most of them settling in the Midwest, where they found a climate and landscape comparable to that of their homeland.

“At that time there was such poverty and famine in Sweden that they used to make this bread out of birch bark,” said Jerry Sjorstrom, a guide at ASI for 14 years. “My grandmother made it once and I tried to feed it to the dog, but even he wouldn’t eat it.”

As eager as Swedes were for a new start without poverty and famine, they were also eager to preserve their cultural heritage. My great-grandparents frequently wrote letters home, returned to Sweden several times and joined a Swedish lodge in Chicago, nurturing a nostalgia that made them always Swedes, even as they became American citizens.

Emma Heikensten, a 21-year-old Swedish student studying at Lund University and my roommate from study abroad, said she feels most Americans don’t have a very good understanding of contemporary Sweden.

“I don’t understand why Americans refer to themselves as Swedes,” Heikensten said. “To me they are just Americans.”

Swedes like Heikensten have a hard time understanding that Americans’ search for identity is more complex than theirs. America is still relatively new, and American identity is such a dynamic concept that we have to reach back to our ancestors’ culture in order to identify with some larger tradition.

Leaving Sweden was a sad time for my ancestors because they knew they’d never see many of their relatives and friends again. Missing everything they knew caused them to cling to romantic ideas of their homeland that they passed down to their children and grandchildren like a Carl Larsson painting.

“My aunt came back from a trip to Sweden and she asked my mother, ‘How could you leave?’ and my mother said, ‘Because we wanted to eat,’” said my grandma, Margaret Appel.

Coming to America allowed my grandparents to continue to eat, but being Swedish or part of any larger cultural tradition is about more than eating lutefisk and Swedish meatballs at Christmas. In preserving the traditions of our ancestors there exists an opportunity to enrich our identity by learning from the past and playing an active role in the future.

And for immigrants like my great-grandfather, the future was prosperous. A permanent exhibit at the ASI called “Swedish life in the Twin Cities,” details how the new immigrants worked in the mines and mills until they could fully realize the American dream. In 1904 Swan Turnblad, the self-made millionaire publisher of the Swedish-language newspaper Svenska Amerikanska Posten, began building the Turnblad mansion. In 1929 it became the ASI, an organization dedicated to preserving America’s Swedish heritage and the immigrant experience that is stilling being unraveled today.

“We actually don’t know much about the Turnblads,” Sjorstrom said. “Most of what we know is from letters we’ve found or that have been given to us.”

While Minnesota got a living legacy of Johnsons, Petersons and Lundstroms, Sweden got enthusiastic letters about America and much-needed aid packages .

“During World War II mother would send packages to Sweden because they couldn’t get hardly anything there,” Appel said.

Flo Berggren, who married a Swede and has volunteered at the ASI for more than 20 years, continues to send packages and letters across the Atlantic. In three visits to Sweden she said she’s learned a lot about the history that she’s participating in every day. Even as time distances us from the mass Swedish migration of the early 20th century, the two countries can benefit from maintaining cultural ties. In this case, I’ve learned that a couple of 90-cent investments can go a long way.

“In Sweden my father was one of seven kids and he went to the mines at 14, so he had to learn almost everything he knew on his own,” Appel said. “They were happy for the opportunities they had in America, but they kept their culture very much alive.”