Pilgrims of the Prairie tells the story of Ukrainian Baptists who refuged in America to escape persecution from the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church. The author came to the US with his parents when he was about 14 years. He originally wrote the manuscript in Russian. It was translated into Ukrainian and published in 1957 as Na bat’kivshchyni i na chuz︠h︡yni: z istoriï ukraïnsʹkykh pioneriv u Nort Dakoti (In Fatherland and Stranger’s Land: a History of Ukrainian Pioneers in North Dakota). The translator added an “Introduction” and footnotes.

The book primarily relates the story of those Ukrainian Baptists who settled a colony roughly 40 miles long and 15 miles wide in the area of McHenry, McLean, and Sheridan counties in North Dakota. Dubovy relates their struggles in the new land, with nature, shysters, and more (including their confusion with the German and American Baptists). He tells of their religion, though he does not go in depth into their theology. One striking account to me is the following:

“Liudwig Novak, an old man of seventy-five or eighty years, tall, with a beard white as snow…always walked with a big staff and carried a Russian edition of the Bible in a sack on his back. It was big, weighing nearly twenty pounds, and bound in thick leather covers. He never parted from it. People used to ask him, ‘What do you have in that sack, Grandad?’

“And he would answer, ‘Life and death.’” (p. 52)

Translator Bloch writes, “…the book…testifies to the excellence of a people who, through force of circumstances largely uneducated, yet had the courage to stand up under persecution and to make efforts to better their lot, even to leaving their native place for the fearful unknown” (p. xii).

Recommended. ( )