Antonette: I am Antonette Willa Skulpa Turner, the granddaughter of Anna Sadilek Pavelka, who was “My Ántonia” that Willa Cather wrote about. I didn’t know that Grandma could go through all this. I said, “Is this really true in this book?” “Most of it is,” she says. “It really is.” Great-grandfather was a great musician. He played in the Czechoslovakian orchestra; he was really kind of reluctant. He didn’t wanna leave his orchestra and his profession there in Czechoslovakia, but there he sent the $100 over, and they said, well, they would find a place for him in Nebraska.
They packed up a trunk, Grandmother put mushrooms in her feather bed and she thought they might bring that. That was about all they brought, Grandmother told me. And they were on the water for 21 days, and she said, “I didn’t think we’d ever see land again; we didn’t know why we were coming. My, my […],” she called him, that’s in Czech, that’s “father” in Czech. She said, he’d entertain on that old, old… with his violin. He had that violin! They told him to bring his violin and a gun, because he may have to live to live off the prairie. There weren’t supermarkets around or anything like that, you know. So this is what they did.Host: Betty Kort is the Executive Director of the Cather Foundation.
Kort: These immigrants had come from Europe probably from middle class families, and they come to America because they had gone as far as they could go in a classed society over in Europe. And they come here with education—Ántonia’s father, for example, was a very well educated man. He played the violin, and in his own country, the scholars came to talk to her father because he was so wise. But in America, he is alone and is not respected, because he doesn’t speak English, and he’s just a common worker. That, too, was part of the immigrant experience. But Cather predicts that that immigrant class will become something like the aristocracy of the plains.