The final book of Deanna Bennett’s Anna Immigration Trilogy: five years of upheaval, and a girl who refuses to be pushed around by any of it. A tribute and a review.
Between 1914 and 1919 the world came apart. The Great War ravaged Europe. The influenza epidemic killed millions. Temperance reformers fought to outlaw alcohol, and an avalanche of newcomers poured into American cities. Deanna Bennett dropped a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl into the middle of all of it and asked what she’d make of herself.
Anna: American Dream is the last book of the trilogy Deanna built from her grandmother’s life. I knew Deanna from the East Lake Writers’ Workshop, the critique group she founded in Palm Harbor, and I spent many hours at her table critiquing her Anna pages as they came in. By the third book, the research she’d been collecting for years had become a whole world.
What is Anna: American Dream about?
Anna wants a new life: new clothes, moving pictures, public parks, Saturday night dances. She also gets unscrupulous men and family tragedy. A job starts her on the road to independence from an overbearing mother and a miserly brother, and the road is rough the whole way.
She fights off an attack by her supervisor. She tries to get the police to help a friend and can’t make them understand her, because she doesn’t speak English yet. So she decides to learn. Visits to a settlement house turn bad when she uncovers theft and ends up facing a threat on her life. Through all of it she holds on to one dream: a handsome, kind man and a happy married life.
The scene with the police gets to me. A girl with something important to say, standing in front of people who could help and can’t be bothered to understand her. She doesn’t give up. She goes and learns the language. That’s the immigrant story in one decision.
In memory
Remembering Deanna Bennett: the founder of the East Lake Writers’ Workshop, the woman at the head of the table, and the writer behind the Anna books.
What history does the Anna Immigration Trilogy cover?
The whole trilogy runs from 1914 to 1919, and this book carries most of the weight: World War I, the influenza epidemic, the settlement house movement that helped immigrants find their feet, and the temperance campaign. Deanna embedded true anecdotes and real historical figures in a fictional storyline that she described, with some humor, as populated by murderers, schemers and anarchists, and some normal people.
After a career managing military research and development, Deanna turned that same discipline on her grandmother’s life. It paid off.
Keep reading
Hiring a ghostwriter for an immigrant’s story: what it takes to get a family’s crossing onto the page before the people who remember it are gone.
What happened to the real Anna?
Deanna answered that herself. After the trilogy she finished Anna’s Daughter, the memoir her mother Helen Dragunas had started, and in it readers learn what became of the real Anna after she married the man of her dreams. Read the trilogy in order, Anna: Going to America, Anna: American Journey, then this one, and finish with Anna’s Daughter. Anna: American Dream is available on Amazon.
A girl who couldn’t make the police understand her grew up, married, and raised a daughter who raised a writer. Deanna closed the circle, and she did it in print.
