Westward. Encounters with Swiss American Women

Linda was born in 1935 in Wabern, four years after her sister Annemarie and eight years before her brother Hans-Beat. (1937)

Linda was born in 1935 in Wabern as their second daughter, four years after her sister Annemarie and eight years before her brother Hans-Beat. And it was quite a sensation a few years later that Mr. Geiser, a primary teacher in the canton Bern, was able to move with his family into a small one-family house in Spiegel near Bern – in the midst of World War II. “Even more sensational was the fact that I had several uncles in America. As a child I would check on the map where Dover, Ohio, was, the place where my uncles Ernst, Werner, Charles, and Willy lived. In school I bluffed about having relatives in America. I remember how the others tapped their foreheads – ‘she is nuts!’ These brothers of my father had not emigrated for religious, but economic reasons; the small farm in the Jura was too small for the large family.”

Religion had no relevance in the teacher’s house, but “it was very relevant with Grossätti and Grossmuetti, grandpa and grandma, in the Jura. Grandfather was rather liberal and did not wear an Anabaptist’s hat. Yet I rarely ever saw my grandmother without her blue apron dress. Though she wore it with buttons, not with pins as Anabaptist women still do today in Pennsylvania. And of course we grandchildren had to accompany them to chapel on Sundays. I remember how bored we were and how we secretly chuckled when the text was too bombastic for us. After chapel there regularly was braided bread and tea for everyone at the grandparents’ farmhouse. The Anabaptists came with their horse drawn buggies from all directions – everything was simple and modest. My current relatives in Ohio, the children of my late uncles, now have a much more modern lifestyle, they are ‘apostates’ as it were.”