The Great Depression

The Great Depression enters Lindy West’s family history through a wrenching decision: when her great-grandparents could no longer feed their many children, they sent eighteen-year-old Clara back to Norway to raise two of her little sisters. The economic crisis is recalled not as an abstract period but as the cause of a family separation whose effects reached into the next generation.

Family Separation

Clara had come to North Dakota as a child with a family that homesteaded there. During the Depression, she was sent away from that life and made responsible for two younger sisters on her own. One of those girls was West’s great-aunt Eleanor. The account gives no further details of the sisters’ years in Norway, but makes the separation itself central: West describes absent mothers as a force running through her mother’s side of the family.

The Afterlife of the Crisis

Eleanor’s later request that “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” be played at her funeral gives the family history a concrete, recurring expression of loss. The song does not erase the differences between the sisters’ experiences, but connects the childhood separation to a grief still legible generations later. In this recollection, the Great Depression’s significance lies in how economic hardship divided a family and left absence as part of its inheritance.