In Search of Susanna (Singular Lives)

Calling In Search of Susanna an auto/biography is at once accurate and ambiguous. "Susanna" is three different persons brought together from a European past and an American present. Susanna Simmerl Youngblut is the ancestor who, having birthed an "illegitimate" daughter in her native Luxembourg village, emigrated in 1857 to Iowa. Her great-great-granddaughter is Suzanne, the autobiographer and mother of Rachel Susanna, now a pre teenager. One strand knitting the trio together is the fact that Suzanne Bunkers is a single-that is, unmarried or "natural"-Minnesota mother. Along with other members of an extended family, all three Susannas have shared Iowa and Minnesota homeplaces; the Roman Catholic faith, with its devotion to the Virgin Mary; and a staunch self-sufficiency, the full extent of which the youngest Susanna has yet to claim as her birthright. Yet their common story is truly autobiography. For Suzanne Bunkers, a teacher of English and women's studies at Mankato State University, has made it. She presides at its center. Around her is built a family history within social and cultural circumstances uniting two rural worlds 4,500 miles and a century or more apart. Throughout, Bunkers' emphasis is upon women's identities, capacities, histories, destinies. Where men figure in this bold narrative- as in chapter 3, "In the Name of the Father" -they are seen through the eyes of mothers, wives, lovers, relatives-women who are themselves breadwinners and homemakers, teachers and students, travelers and communicants. "Home" in its widest sense has women at its heart.