Ten the Hard Way

Sanny Lindberg Hermanson was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1896, four years before the turn of the twentieth century and sixteen years before the Titanic disaster. And while that tragedy was worrisome to her during her youth, she discovered that, as a woman, her future was severely limited by a system that tried to keep her in the hard labor camps of marriage, children and subservience to her husband. Sanny didn't want anything to do with the European system for women she had been born into; all her life she had heard the American system calling to her through the stories of her friends indoctrinated by other family members who had already made the journey and their fortune, and that America was a place of high living with streets of gold in a land of plenty where everyone had a house, an automobile and financial freedom wherever they decided to settle. And, with that picture in mind, Sanny left for America ready to seek her own fortune in the New World, arriving there in October, 1913 at the age of seventeen. What happened next has been captured in truly gritty fashion by Sanny in her hard-earned new language, through the Great Depression and World War II, while barely keeping notes, body and soul together for the next seventy years. Now travel with her on that "Pilgrim's Progress" adventure, which must have seemed to her that she missed a turn or a cutoff somewhere along the way. Ten the Hard Way is a journey you won't want to miss, but is best experienced from an easy chair.