Free Letters From the Lost by Helen Waldstein Wilkes

your letters with great pleasure and await them impatiently, but please do not be angry with me if I just attach good wishes or even nothing to Arnold’s letters. We know each other well enough that surely you will not take it as indifference if I am sometimes simply not able to write. The inner unease and a certain restlessness that now characterize each day cause such an emptiness in my brain that I am sometimes incapable of putting two sentences together. It is a well-known fact that great stress usually attacks the human organ that is by nature inclined to be theweakest. In some, that organ is the stomach, in some the intestines, and in my case, the brain.
    Vera’s struggle leads her to speak twice in a row of the need for God’s help. Calamity and uncertainty are cruel reminders of our own limitations.
    Perhaps God will not abandon His own. I hope that this will be true for you, my dear Canadians. We are very aware of all the hardships that you will have to endure. We know how all the harsh, demanding labour will sap your limited strength. God will really have to help.
    ————
    UNLIKE HIS SISTER-IN-LAW Vera, Emil Urbach trusts his own powers of rational thought. Having spent hours poring over books, his typed letters are treasure-troves of information and well-intentioned advice.
    We always read your letters with great interest, but unfortunately we have not so far been able to imagine clearly your present life and circumstances. Even the dominant climatic conditions there will be markedly different from ours.
    It is hard to give you advice from a distance, because many things aren’t clear to us. Given the proximity of a larger city (Hamilton), you have a good market for agricultural products, and you are in the best part of Canada. Soil there consists of sand mixed with clay; the terrain is level and can easily be worked. Unfortunately, you don’t have coal, but you do have water power there. In the summer you won’t be too hot but in the winter it will be rather cold. The temperature in Toronto, for example, ranges from -20 in January to +33 or higher in July. The Great Lakes don’t freeze, but winter lasts 5 months.
    It is perhaps also advisable to proceed from small to large, getting a smaller farm next and managing it well and then undertakingsomething larger with the money earned and saved. For sure, a small landowner can’t do much; farming on a small scale isn’t worthwhile anywhere, and certainly not in Canada. Even before the present crisis, farming was already unprofitable here in Czechoslovakia. A small landowner was only able to survive by taking advantage of by-products like pig manure or by raising bees alongside profitable plants (poppies, mustard, sunflowers for oil, crops that attract bees while also providing fodder for animals.)
    Since you have a very real shortage of money, the best solution would be to build (under very strict conditions) a collective with people who have a stronger base of capital. You would get paid for your labour and in this way, you could obtain some capital. Of course this means slaving away. A large farm also involves greater mangement demands, whereas your part in a collective would be easier to manage.
    Even on the topic of location, Emil has advice to offer. He points out that land on the prairies is cheap in part because the weather is brutal, and that tracts of land on the Gaspé Peninsula could lead to sudden riches if they were to contain mineral deposits. The outraged voice of my father still echoes in my head. “
Wie stellt er sich denn das vor?
How does he expect us to follow these preposterous suggestions?”
    Emil’s well-meant words might have encouraged a more self-confident man. My father’s goal was modest: survival in this alien environment for which he was so woefully unprepared. Emil must have known this to be true, for the books that he sent are reminders of how little my father knew about farming.
    In the same mail, I’m sending you