The Icelandic Canadian - 01.09.1981, Blaðsíða 44

42
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
AUTUMN, 1981
town Baltimore. Wikenhauser plans to re-
tain four male puffins and four females in
his exhibit.
Although the delightful little puffins
command major attention at Glen Oak, an-
other Icelander is resident in the zoo, too.
Tinna of Rosegill, a 10 year-old Icelandic
horse, a small but powerful breed, has lived
here for several years. During spring and
summer Tinna gives rides to the young folk
that crowd through the zoo, set in a beautiful,
wooded residential area of this central Illi-
nois city.
But ask Wikenhauser and his assistants,
where their hearts really lie and they’ll tell
you, with the puffins. For Wikenhauser,
that’s not hard to see why. After all, he’s
practically the only parent the little Ice-
landers have ever known.
—Courtesy of Icelandair.
BOOK REVIEW: Crystalline Lives On A Canadian Island
SOME SILENT SHORE
A novel by Sigrid Johannesson, 178 pages, Sunrise, $10.95
During the last quarter of the 19th cen-
tury, many Icelanders immigrated to
Canada, settling around the small town of
Gimli on Lake Winnipeg’s southwestern
shore: most Americans of Icelandic descent
have ties with this area. Sigrid Johannesson
(Mrs. Herschel E. Woltzen), who moved
with her husband and family from Peoria to
St. Louis 11 years ago, is of this Icelandic
descent; and her mother, now in her 90s,
still lives in Gimli where young Sigrid grew
up. Understandably, then, Johannesson’s
remarkable first novel, “Some Silent
Shore,” was initially issued in Gimli amid a
flurry of excitement, and several copies are
on their way to Iceland.
“Some Silent Shore” gets its title from
Sir Samuel Garth’s 1699 poem. The Dis-
pensary: “To die is landing on some silent
shore/Where billows never break, nor
tempests roar.” It takes place during the
Depression between May 1933 and June
1934, focusing on the cruel winter hardships
endured by the few inhabitants of Matheson
Island, three miles offshore from Gimli. For
a month each fall as the lake freezes over
and each spring during the tumultuous thaw,
the islanders are completely isolated. These
are times of death and re-birth, and Johan-
nesson superbly captures the stark loneli-
ness and the binding sense of community
through individual lives and the crises
which test them.
Johannesson insists that although the
setting is authentic the novel is not auto-
biographical nor are the characters real.
They are, she says, amalgamations of
people she has known; and, indeed, they
have the effect of being remembered and
reshaped through the mature woman’s com-
passionate understanding. The central figures
are the Paulson family — Jon, Stephanie,
and their daughters, Christy (12), Johanna
(10), Lara (6), Margrit (3) — who corres-
pond basically to Johannesson’s own family
unit. (Christy, surely a reflection of the
young Sigrid, is the object of some tender
fun-poking.) The beginning finds the family
in Winnipeg. The stock-market crash has
wiped out Jon’s savings and threatens “The
Paulson Fisheries Limited,” which he has
built up from one boat. Jon is a strong,
silent, proud man; but it is Stephanie, the
mother, whose beauty, courage and quiet
understanding sustain them as they sell their
comfortable home and settle in a one-room