Kathryn Scheibel’s Journey:
Ambition, Identity, and the Cost of Belonging
Kathryn Scheibel is just past twenty-one when Sparrow’s Song opens in 1917. She is a member of the community of Germans from Russia. She came to Nebraska as a school-aged girl in the early twentieth century, immigrating with her family to a fictionalized mid-sized Nebraska town inspired by a real town in south central Nebraska. Like many families in that community, her family built their lives through hard work, stubborn resilience, and deep loyalty. Kathryn loves her people and the world she grew up in, but she hates how the wider world treats them, denying them their dignity and treating them as if they belong at the edges.
As the book begins, she is working in a cigarmaking factory, which was a common job for women from the community of Germans from Russia in the town that inspired her fictional community. In that factory she witnesses cruelty and exploitation. She hates that her family and other members of her community are treated as other and denied the same opportunities and respect given to native-born citizens. Her desire is to make a better life for herself and her family. Although she loves her family and her community, she believes the best way to do this is through education, which she cannot afford, and through distancing herself from her ethnic heritage. Her family feels hurt and betrayed by this, and Kathryn feels that tension every day.
She knows she is capable. She knows she deserves more than the narrow future laid out for her. She is aware of her gaps in financial resources, polish, and access, but she doesn’t doubt her intelligence or her potential. When she leaves the cigarmaking floor and takes a job as a hired girl in a northside household, she does it as a way to escape the cigarmaking factory and as a stepping stone to achieving her goals. The family she works for is the family of a former classmate who is now studying at the university in Lincoln. Kathryn yearns for that same opportunity.
Becoming a student in the Army School of Nursing during World War I is Kathryn’s chance to achieve her goals. There is no tuition. Room and board are paid, as is laundry of duty clothing. Students are responsible only for travel to their assigned post, and they earn a small monthly stipend. This makes nursing school possible for Kathryn. Even though she is a successful student she experiences prejudice from some of the other students because of her social standing and because of the anti-German sentiment during the war but she perseveres.
By World War II, Kathryn is teaching nursing in a school that is participating in the Cadet Nurse Corps. The Bolton Act, the legislation that allowed for this program, includes nondiscrimination language that resulted in many schools of nursing being required to admit Black and other minority students for the first time. When two Black students admitted to her school are treated poorly by both faculty and other students, Kathryn realizes that prejudice doesn’t look much different in 1943 than it did in 1918, and she cannot sit idly by.
Sparrow’s Song explores the conflict between cultural preservation and rapid assimilation. Kathryn’s drive to assimilate comes from what she witnessed as a young immigrant, seeing her family and neighbors looked past and denied the opportunities and respect given to native born people. Her ambition grows out of a desire to claim equal standing for herself and for those she loves, not from any wish to leave her heritage behind, though she believes that is what is required to achieve her goals. This puts her at odds with her family, who see her choices as a step away from the traditions that have anchored them.
Threaded through all of this is the question of dignity. When we talk about dignity, we often think of it as something a person chooses — a way of living, a kind of self respect. And it is that. But dignity is also something people give or withhold from one another. It’s something we allow, or refuse to allow. Being treated as “other” or invisible hurts not only the person whose dignity is stripped away, but also the people who love them. Sparrow’s Song looks at that side of dignity.
The story explores the conflict between cultural preservation and rapid assimilation, and within that, the cost of assimilation. Kathryn has to decide whether she gave up too much to accomplish her goals and whether she can reclaim any part of what she lost.
