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The Ticket

What's It About?

Before sailing across the Atlantic under someone else’s name to start a new life in America, Karl Kessel’s father-in-law had some foreboding words for him: “Do you believe your dreams are worth the price that you and your family will be forced to pay?”

That question becomes central to the conflict in The Ticket (Green Spring), a historical novel based on author Karen Schutte’s own ancestors’ emigration in 1906. As I turned the pages, Karl and his wife Katja go through eight children, five decades and two world wars. At the end, was it really all worth it to leave their heritage behind for the New World?

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a history book. Schutte is a fiction writer; she excels at plunging us into the hopes and sacrifices of the relatives many have forgotten about, the ones that stare blankly through grainy black-and-white photographs. They sit stiff, their clothes look odd, and how did they even survive without electricity?

The Ticket attests again and again to their shared humanity by forcing me to feel the story as the characters did. I experienced Karl’s every jolt of anxiety as his ship left the European port without his wife and children. On the dock, a “few persistent souls [watched] as the formidable black hull of the ship slipped into oblivion.” Karl’s plan is to get his own land to farm, something denied to him by his German customs. Then he would send for his family.

He uses his friend’s ticket to enter America. The immigration officer on Ellis Island is surprised but doesn’t stand in Karl’s way — he only remarks that Karl had a good friend. Security would change drastically as the century wears on, and this ticket would become both his salvation and greatest regret.

Karl purchases a tiny home, nails planks over the dirt floor and puts in his own windows. He adds extra rooms with adobe bricks and blueprints from the Sears Roebuck catalog. He purchases tickets for his family and builds his fortune up, determined to prove his doubting (and abusive) father wrong and make something of himself.

However, no dream is achieved without collateral damage.

One of my newest favorite characters in literature is Katja Kessel, the “woman behind the great man” who achieved his American Dream. She picks crops on her hand and knees while pregnant. She cooks innumerable meals on low supplies for her work-weary family, does the mountain of dishes, and then cooks again. She spends a full day scrubbing sweat out of clothes in a wash tub, and, in the winter, bangs the frozen shirts against the walls to soften them up.

Her and the children go without breaks to build Karl’s vision of a perfect life. But as the family becomes more Americanized, they adapt and rebel in surprising ways. Katja’s development as a character is incredibly rewarding to see.

As much as the family wages war against the earth for survival and wealth, they also turn against each other. I recognized my own family in them, the way in which one choice radiates outward and has consequences for generations.

My grandfather was born on the boat from Bratislava to Ellis Island in 1920. His brother was turned away for being blind during the harsh examinations that disqualified anyone who was ill, disabled or otherwise unable to work. My grandfather lived The Ticket in his own way, learning a new culture and fighting in WWII just as Karl and Katja’s son Johnny did. In so many ways, The Ticket is my story.

As a people, we are constantly asking who gets to be American. Many of us are caught between old traditions and languages and new, optimistic futures. The Ticket teaches us about ourselves, and emboldens us to get back up again when we fall.

The Ticket is available for purchase.

Learn more about Karen on her Author Profile page.

 

The Ticket by
Genre: Book Club Network, Fiction
Publisher: Langdon st Press
ISBN: 9781936183740
Lee Pelletier

Lee Pelletier is an avid reader of children's books, science fiction, and anything in French. She graduated from the University of Iowa.

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