Through Different Eyes

About the Book

What happens when a meagerly-educated peasant girl is chosen in 1903 to leave her family and accompany her illiterate godfather from Europe to the Midlands of America?

Young Anna Barbara Mrkvicka left the dirt floor of her over-crowded one room home to enter an unknown world and overwhelming challenges at every turn. Through Different Eyes describes the back-breaking peasant life of that era. Anna worked in the fields at six years of age. It travels with the young peasant in steerage on a daunting ocean voyage, and it reveals the frustrating immigrant experience of Ellis Island. It explores the sounds and smells of sleeping for six weeks on steamy tenement rooftops of New York City’s dangerous Lower East Side, sometimes with a knife handy for protection. The journey includes a lengthy train ride into the Heartland of the United States, reveals the anxiety of arriving to work with strangers on an isolated farmstead in early Iowa. With no way to learn the English language of America, for three hard years the frightened girl was unable to escape an abusive step-aunt. She was neither paid for her exhausting farm work nor allowed enough to eat; she was beaten.

Yet Anna not only miraculously survived her ordeals, her grit and determination at last enabled her to bring all seven members of her family and a foster brother to Iowa in 1909. It was just in time; World War I was threatening to engulf Europe.

After years of research, this creative biography honors all unsung immigrants like young Anna. It pays homage to the millions of men and women who desperately struggled to transplant their family lives to the freedom of America—their precious gift to those of us so privileged to be citizens of this great land.

About the Author

J. Barbara Alvord retired from the corporate world to write. Her poetry has been published in Lyrical Iowa, Byline and Cayuse Press zines: Retrozine and The Green Tricycle. One of her plays, Due Time, has been performed at Iowa’s Living History Farms. In 1992, as Barbara stood on Ellis Island pondering her grandmother’s name on the Immigrant Wall of Honor, she vowed to write Anna Mrkvièka’s courageous story. Anna was but a fourteen-year-old, meagerly-educated peasant girl in 1903 when she was sent without blood relatives from Europe to America. Her journey included a daunting ocean trip in steerage, weeks at Ellis Island, and sleeping on steamy tenement rooftops of New York City’s Lower East Side. When she finally arrived to work on an isolated Iowa farm, she had no way to escape an abusive step-aunt, no pay, and little to eat. Yet Anna miraculously endured and brought her entire family to join her before World War I engulfed Europe. After years of research, this creative biography was written to honor all immigrants like Anna. They struggled desperately to transplant their family lines to America— a precious gift to those of us so privileged to be citizens of this great land.