Today, Martin Luther King Day, I am reminded yet again of how uneasily our blended nation holds its diversity. Shortly after the time frame of my novel (1880s), researchers were hired to create tests “scientifically proving” that 80% of immigrants from Southern Europe were “cretins,” genetically prone to criminality and depravity. And yet we are all immigrants or descendants of immigrants and all of us have been at some time strangers in a new land. A review of When We Were Strangers, just posted on Bookworm’s Dinner asks, and one must ask, how far we have come in our discourse and actions in the last two centuries.
Pamela Schoenewaldt, historical novels of immigration and the search for self in new worlds: WHEN WE WERE STRANGERS, SWIMMING IN THE MOON, and UNDER THE SAME BLUE SKY (all HarperCollins).
pamelaschoenewaldt.com 
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