The Bohemian Flats
A Novel
The story of a man caught up in the immigrant culture of a river village in Minnesota, and in the throes of World War I
Details
The Bohemian Flats
A Novel
ISBN: 9780816692200
Publication date: May 2nd, 2014
280 Pages
8 x 5
—David Rhodes, author of Driftless and Jewelweed
"Ellis is a magician with historical details. From the walks Raimund takes through Minneapolis neighborhoods, to the sort of food he eats and the sort of beer his Bohemian neighbors brew, the authenticity of his life comes fairly bounding off the page." —Star Tribune
"The Bohemian Flats is fascinating for what it tells us about the past, about the pain and pleasure of leaving one home for another, and how world events, family secrets, and entrenched prejudice can follow us from country to country—and era to era." —Minnesota Magazine
In The Bohemian Flats, Mary Relindes Ellis’s rich, imaginative gift carries us from the bourgeois world of fin de siècle Germany to a vibrant immigrant enclave in the heart of the Midwest and to the killing fields of World War I.
Shell shock, as it was called, lands Raimund Kaufmann in a London hospital, a victim of the war but also of his own, and his brother’s, efforts to get out of Germany and build a new life in America. While his recovery eludes him, his memory returns us to Minneapolis, to the Flats, a milling community on the Mississippi River, where Raimund and his brother Albert have sought respite from the oppressive hand of their older brother, now the master of the family farm and brewery. In Minnesota the brothers confront different forms of prejudice, but they also find a chance to remake their lives according to their own principles and wishes—until the war makes their German roots inescapable.
Following these lives, The Bohemian Flats conjures both the sweep of irresistible history and the intimate reality of a man, and a family, caught up in it. From a nineteenth-century German farm to the thriving, wildly diverse immigrant village below Minneapolis on the Mississippi to the European front in World War I, and returning to twentieth-century America—this is a story that takes a reader to the far reaches of human experience and the depths of the human heart.
Mary Relindes Ellis (1960–2016) was the author of the novel The Turtle Warrior.