Obtain Immediately Their Fathers God Produced By O.E. Rølvaag Made Available In EText

was good to follow the rest of the story, but I can't say it was a compelling piece to read, I read this last book of the trilogy before the second book, I knew it was wrong to do, but I did it anyway, guiltily, I figured at worst it was a venial sin, That small voice of conscience kept nagging at me but did not keep me awake at night,

This was a window book for me even though I am Norwegian, It help me understand my grandparents a little better and what they mustve gone through when coming over here and having children who adapted to the new culture and language much more than they did.


So here we catch up with Peter, now married and with the child, where as he was only a small boy in giants in the earth.
I am looking forward to the middle book of the trilogy to see how he got from here from there, Either way, lots of action about the church and politics and clashes between cultures, And of course, the friction between families and within families as values clash, If you haven't read the previous two books, Giants in the Earth and Peder Victorious and plan to in the future, do not read this review.


Their Fathers' Gods is, like Peder Victorious, a Norwegian novel translated into English thus, as Agar, the translator notes, some of the actual mood art of the original is lost.
This is the last book Rolvaag wrote featuring the Holms family, In this novel he tackles the mixed marriage of Catholic Susie and Lutheran Peder, as well as the political antagonism between the two groups, Irish Catholic and Norwegian Lutheran, in South Dakota.
What is surprising in many ways is how universal the themes in these last two Rolvaag novels have been, Even today we struggle with the question of immigrants becoming Americanized, especially in speaking English, While there are many mixed marriages of different faiths today, there is still an underlying hurdle that must be crossed for them to succeed.
Once these different religious beliefs are woven together with opposing political views, with various clergy fully participating, the outcome is bound to be negative.
In the end we are never told if Peder achieves either happiness or success, He has been truthfully told he will not have both in his life,
Very Highly Recommended for those reading all three Rolvaag books, sitelink blogspot. com/

I would like to tell the author could you write an ending, please, I like resolution. I stayed up late to see if the rainmaker could make it rain fordollars, Peder wanted to run him out of town for being a fake, There is no ending here, on to the next crisis, This book read like short stories put together in apage novel, This is the last book in the prairie saga that started with Giants in the Earth, Peder and Hans are grown men, Beret was their mother. She went crazy for awhile and got better, In this book she is an elderly lady living on her farm with Peder and his wife, I fell in love with Beret, She was the voice of wisdom Peder should have listened to, There were so many conflicts it was hard to keep track, The community faced drought, hardship, falling market prices and political battles, The stereotypes might upset some people in today's world, Peder married an Irish Catholic, The Irish are typecast as dirty and slovenly in their housework, The Catholics were referred to as black artists, Beret said you don't mix wheat and potatoes in the same bin, At first I thought it was awful, but she knew Peders marriage was in trouble from the start, He was mean and abusive to his wife, Religion took up too much of the book, Peder had no time for God and forbid Susie to practice her faith, I was scared for her life, especially when she had their son secretly baptized in the Catholic Church, The ending was scary, it came to final blows, I wondered how much abuse the poor woman could take, Rølvaags final novel in his trilogy ends with a whimper, Peder is an adult living as a secondgeneration American on the farm built by his mother and father, He battles antiscience quacks, religious frauds, and populist political cranks who create divisions in the region, mostly along ethnic and religious lines.
While this seems like a compelling idea that might draw on the nowtermed “revolt from the village movement" of the previous decade see Masters, Lewis, Anderson, et al.
, the novel struggles to hold its narrative drive, instead devolving into a series of episodic incidents centered on Peders marriage problems with his Irish wife, Susie.
By the halfway point, I was pretty much over the soap opera subplot of Susie and Beret Peders mother battling each other with competing baptisms of Peders son.
The constant bickering among these three sullies what otherwise could have been a decent novel, although Peders characterization as the rational, nontheistic, antipopulist, Freethinking hero has seen better treatments by other American writers in the modernist period.


As for its place in the trilogy as a whole, the novel reinforces a hunch I had when reading sitelinkPeder Victorious: that Rølvaags trilogy is really about matriarch Beret.
She is the glue that holds together these three novels an ironic statement, considering her erratic mental state is the irritant that so often threatens to disrupt life in the family.
Her death near the end of the novel is both a relief and a disappointment, leaving the finalpages to be mostly anticlimactic.
This is also a bit ironic, since those events chronicle the rise of Peders political career, which could have been and probably should have been the meat of this novel, instead of being relegated to the final thirty pages.


Despite my disappointment with this novel, I still enjoyed the trilogy to the point where I might seek out Rølvaags earlier work somewhere down the road.
Final book in the trilogy, This is a moving but lesserknown tale following the classics Giants in the Earth and Peder Victorious set on the high South Dakota steppe during the depression of the's.


Scant attention is given to describing the spartan scenery or meager lifestyle, Instead, the story is a deeply emotional look at the issues plaguing a family from different religions, They endure not only economic hardship, but drought, injury, and death of loved ones, Primarily, they struggle to tolerate one anothers' religious beliefs, customs, and culture, This is in no way helped by their families, the townfolk, or clergy, many of whom foment the strife at every turn.


It is only through selfless strength of character and abiding love that they survive the tumult physically or spiritually, Another important element is political strife sweeping the community, which inspires Peder to seek political office as he discovers his gift for leadership and good old fashioned plainspeaking.


These themes have been explored many times since, but there is a strong flavor of originality in Rolvaag, both because it was written and set earlier, and because the protagonists are first generation Americans, some of the first to carve out an egalitarian identity, finding a way to blend and respect different cultures and beliefs.
In so doing, they pioneer America not only geographically, but also socially,

The book illuminates the problems faced by believers in different faiths, even Christian ones, While I normally disdain the misguided imprudence of such beliefs, this story was told with such care and detail that I found myself invested in their lives, longing for their happiness and wellbeing.

Most of the book was excellent and completed Rolvaag's trilogy beginning with the well known Giants in the Earth, The story is set within a marriage between a Norwegian Lutheran and an Irish Catholic in lateth century South Dakota and the struggles therein.
The ending slowed things down to a leaky faucet drip primarily because of the political squabbling in the final chapters, reminding me too much of today's political environment.
I did like the political quote from our protagonist as he was running for office, "Hatred of one party for another never brings forth good fruit.
It keeps you rooting about in the mire it warps your minds and makes you see crosseyed, It's the devils own way of getting his work done, . . ". Not much has changed there, Susie Doheny, an Irish Catholic, and Peder Holm, a Norwegian Lutheran, fall in love and marry in South Dakota in thes.
Soon their marriage is tested by drought, depression, and family bickering, Susie believes they are being tested by their fathers' God, Peder blames Susie for the timidity of her beliefs Susie fears Peder's pride and skepticism, When political antagonism grows between the Norwegian and Irish immigrant communities, it threatens to split their marriage,

Against a backdrop of hard times, crisscrossed by Populists, antimonopolists, and schemers, Rölvaag brings the struggle of immigrants into the twentieth century.
In Giants in the Earth the Holm family strained to wrest a homestead from the land, In Peder Victorious the Americanborn children searched for a new national identity, often defying the traditions their parents fought to uphold.
In Their Fathers' God, Rölvaag's most soulsearching novel, the firstgeneration americans enter a world of ruthless competition in the midst of scarcity.


The University of Nebraska Press also publishes Peder Victorious and Paul Reigstad's Rölvaag: His Life and Art.
Religion divides oh my, how it divides,

As a holder of a couple of theology degrees, I found this quite interesting, . . Their Fathers' God is a story about a young, married couple ins South Dakota who have an interdenominational marriage Lutheran and Catholic.
Can their marriage and love survive despite the contention between the groups culturally and politically

My fatherinlaw suggested I read this book.
I suppose I'd rate it,stars, although I was impressed that in some ways it was fairly current, Overall, though, I found the book to be dull, I read this series a long time ago and wish I owned the books so I could reread them,
Another classic from the author of Giants in the Earth, this carries forward the story of Norwegian farmers in thes Dakotas.
Set against the backdrop of theUS presidential election, a young farm couple struggle against challenges they set themselves a mixed marriage in culture, language, and religion and ones beyond their control drought, falling farm prices.
The tension in the book seems to me no spoiler, I think whether their inner resources of character are great and strong enough to withstand the forces that pull them apart.
In, O. E. Rolvaag was born in a small fishing village in northern Norway about five miles from the Arctic Circle, In, he emigrated to South Dakota to work on his uncle's farm, He later enrolled in St, Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, graduating with a bachelor's degree in, and becoming a professor of Norwegian literature at the school the following year.
In, he earned a master's degree at St, Olaf.

Two years earlier, he had become an American citizen and had married Jennie Marie Berdahl, They would have three sons and one daughter, One of the sons, Karl, would become governor of Minnesota in the's,

All of Rolvaag's books were written and originally published in his native Norwegian language and were then translated into English.
They were popular in both Norway and the United States,

He published the first of his six novels in, But it was inthat his masterpiece, Giants in the

Earth, was translated and published in America, It is a classic study of the immigrant experience in America and even more so the classic book about the Norwegian immigrant experience.


It is a book about the reality of contending with the harsh elements that characterized the South Dakota plains drought, locust swarms, blizzards, and, especially for women, loneliness, isolation, and often despair.
And the wind always the wind and the flat, treeless plain, where there was a

bright, clear sky over a plain so wide that the rim of the heavens cut down on it around the entire horizon.
Bright, clear sky, today, tomorrow, and for all time to come,

And sun! And still more sun! It set the heavens afire every morning it grew with the day to quivering golden lightthen softened into all the shades of red and purple as evening fell.
Pure colour everywhere. A gust of wind, sweeping across the plain, threw into life waves of yellow and blue and green, Now and then a dead black wave would race over the scene, . . a cloud's gliding shadow now and then .

It was late afternoon, A small caravan was pushing its way through the tall grass, The track that it left behind was like the wake of a boatexcept that instead of widening out astern it closed in again.


Yes, as in the rest of the West, life was harder for women, Men tended to be optimistic that whatever the obstacles might be, they could be overcome, And sometimes it was necessary for them to travel many miles to the nearest town in order to purchase necessary equipment and supplies.
But the women remained at home to care for their children and tend the livestock and they rarely saw anyone outside of the family.


There are stories of how the monotony of this existence drove women out of their minds, And in one case in Giants in the Earth it does that very thing,

Two years later, a sequel, Peder Victorious: A Tale of the Pioneers Twenty Years Later, was published, Whereas Giants in the Earth was epic in scope, the sequel narrowed its focus, There were still occasional droughts and harsh winters, but because of the growth of population in the ensuing years the isolation and monotony had lessened as did the despair.
The land had been conquered,

The great struggle now became one of how to become Americans, And an essential element of that struggle was the pain and dismay among the immigrants who resisted but could not prevent the Americanization of their firstgeneration children.
This struggle is at the heart of the story of young Peder Holm and his Norwegian mother, Beret,

Two years after Peder Victorious, the third book of the trilogy was published, Their Fathers' God begins in the late's and extends into the new century, The farmers of the South Dakota plains have to contend with a long drought and, like the rest of the country, with an economic depression.
But there is another struggle, one that is much more deepseated and more lasting than the others, It is the division that exists between two groups of immigrants, the Norwegian Lutherans and the Irish Catholics,

The two groups are able to live as accommodating neighbors as long as well, as long as each is able to maintain its own culture, including language, but especially religion, without any interference from the other and as long as there is no intermarriage between Protestants and Catholics.


But there is that, Peder Holm, the young rebel from the second book, has married Susie Doheny, a devout Catholic, Peder thinks the Catholic religion is no more than myth and superstition and he probably could live with that except he and his young wife live on the farm and in the house owned by his mother, Beret, who is as devout in her Lutheran faith as her daughterinlaw is in her faith.


Peder, of course, has been raised in the Lutheran church, but in truth he opposes any organized religion, But he is caught in the middle, Soon his marriage is being severely tested, It is tested not only by drought and depression, but even more troublesome it is tested by family bickering, and maybe, as Susie believes, it is being tested by their father's god.


There might have been a fourth book in the series, In fact, the conclusion of Their Fathers' God would seem to point in that direction, But it was not to be, O. E. Rolvaag died the year that book was published, He was fiftyfive years old,
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