The translator Marie Halun Bloch writes in the Introduction -"In the great surge of immigration to North America at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries Ukrainians from both Russia and Austrian empires were a prominent element. Some of those who came crowded into factory and mining towns of northeastern United States. Others lured by cheap and even free land, travelled onward to settle on farmland in the West and Midwest.
Among the latter were large groups from East Ukraine in the Russian empire, who were adherents of the so-called "Stundist" religious sect. They had come not so much to escape poverty and landlessness at home as religious persecution.
A large number of these immigrants at length found their way ...to.. North Dakota, where they settled on land in the vicinity of Max and Minot ... Not only was the vast American prairie reminiscent of the steppeland of home, but even more important for these Ukrainian immigrants, they wre also free at last to worship in a accord with their own conscience.
.... Early in the 1950s, ... Andrew Dubovy ...set writing what he knew of the Ukrainian community and what his father had recounted to him of the early days of the sect in Ukraine. ... His manuscript was" published ... "in Toronto, Canada. In 1957 this press published the book in a edition of 2000, under the title (in Ukrainian) In Fatherland and Stranger's Land.
One of these copies came into my hands a few years ago. As an American writer of Ukrainian origin ... I was impressed by the drama of Dubovy's story and the excellence of his narrative.
Though there are many works on various immigrant groups in the United States, very few are concerned with Ukrainian immigrants. ...
In view of this, Dubovy's work is especially valuable for its particularization of the immigrant experience in the United States, illuminating ... the unique set of circumstances that prompted the emigration of an obscure though large Ukrainian group. Thus the book adds a valuable tessera to the mosaic of American history, particularly its religious history and that of the West. ..."
