Son of Old Jules

Book excerpt: Mari Sandoz immortalized her irascible father in Old Jules. Now her brother, Jules Sandoz, Jr. fills out the story of their family life, dominated by Papa, in western Nebraska in the early l900s. A frail boy who clung to the skirts of his German grandmother, Jules Jr. had to learn lessons of survival early. He was beaten up by his schoolmates and did not speak English well, but with his brother James he helped feed the family by hunting and trapping. Eventually he found the strength to stand up to his father. Son of Old Jules offers fresh glimpses of other family members, most memorably of Mary, his hardworking and stoical mother and of Mari, who de-clared her independence by becoming a schoolteacher and marrying and then divorcing a local swain. Some of the Sandhillers who figured in Mari's books appear here too, including a succession of immigrants whom Papa Jules recruited as settlers. By the early twenties, when these memoirs end, Jules Jr., newly married, had gone into farming for himself Corroborating and fleshing out the story of the family told by Mari Sandoz, Son of Old Jules was written "to give a more balanced view of the settler period." Jules Sandoz, Jr. recorded his memories in the last years of his life, and after his death in 1980 they were edited and organized into book form by his youngest sister, Caroline Sandoz Pifer.