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Other People’s Impressions
Life on the range
My mother grew up in Keewatin, Minnesota where she had arrived around 1900. I recall her tales of teaching school in Floodwood, Minnesota, when she was about 19. Floodwood was, apparently, a Finnish community not too far away from Keewatin but a bit isolated in the winter.  She lived with a Finnish speaking family and learned to speak Finnish... in the manner of the local loggers.
Many years later, watching some Finnish carpenters constructing our house in Berkeley, California, she commented on some aspect of their work of which she did not approve, in a manner they found startling, to say the least!
Her dad, my grandfather, was mayor of Keewatin at one time and, besides the picture of him cutting the ribbon on the newly paved road from Keewatin to Hibbing, I treasure the one from a little theater production in which he is standing on stage with the local doctor... who is in drag!
My grandfather and his children (a son and five daughters) became very much a part of the small mining community in many ways... speeding the process of assimilation in our family. But I still enjoy looking at the family samovar which they brought with them from Anashischk when they emigrated.
— David Nasatir
The Berkowitzs were our neighbors — nice comfortable people. When you walked into their house, the cooking always smelled so good. I learned about garlic in chicken from them.
At the end of the war a relative joined their family. She was supposed to be a relative rescued from the camps. She seemed like and ‘ancient of days’ to me. She sat on their porch — unmoving — never smiling or responding.
— anonymous
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