Swedish author Ola Larsmo had never heard of St. Paul’s historic Swede Hollow until his family made their first visit to Minnesota in 2006.

The vanished community of poor immigrants, tucked in a deep wooded ravine on St. Paul’s East Side, so entranced Larsmo he’s written a novel, “Swede Hollow,” set in the settlement that was burned by the fire department in 1956 after the last residents had been moved.

Today the area is a quiet, leafy city park, a place Larsmo describes as seeming to “exist outside time.”

Larsmo’s award-winning family saga, a bestseller in Sweden in 2016, is published now for the first time in English by University of Minnesota Press, known for championing Nordic literature. The translator is Tiina Nunnally, whose many translations from the Scandinavian language include Vidar Sundstol’s Minnesota Trilogy and “The Complete and Original Norwegian Folktales of Absjornsen and Moe,” both from UMP.

In a phone conversation from his home in Uppsala, 40 miles north of Stockholm, Larsmo talked about how happy he is to be returning to the Twin Cities this week to launch the novel, his first to appear in an English translation. A critic and columnist for Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, Larsmo has written more than 20 books. One of his country’s leading historical authors, he is past president of PEN in Sweden.

“This all started when we went to Minnesota so my wife, Rita, could see old friends at the reunion of her class at Edina High School, where she was an exchange student in the 1970s,” Larsmo recalled.

“During that trip we explored for two weeks, including going to Duluth. On the way home we stopped at the American Swedish Institute where they had this exhibition called Swede Hollow. I was absolutely fascinated. This was a blank in Swedish history. My question was, ‘Why had nobody told me anything about this before?’ ”

Bruce Karstadt, President/CEO of Minneapolis-based American Swedish Institute, has become friends with Larsmo since the author’s first visit to the ASI. He remembers Larsmo’s interest in the exhibit that led to his book. It included artifacts, videos and photos about the arrival of Swedes and where they settled in the Twin Cities.

“Ola kept returning to this image of Swede Hollow, a blown-up photo, a classic image of the Hollow with a crude bridge going over the creek with an outhouse perched on top of the bridge directly over the creek,” recalls Karstadt, who is Honorary Consul General of Sweden for Minnesota.

After Larsmo and his wife returned from that Minnesota trip 13 years ago, he wrote three other books. But he couldn’t let go of the Swede Hollow story.

“It kept sitting in my head and wanted attention,” he says. “We went back to Minnesota — we both love Minnesota so, no problem — and spent two summers doing research at the Minnesota Historical Society. I talked to people, visited the Hollow, found out as much as possible but it was hard to find substantial facts. Finally, I had to sit down and write. We tend to get disconnected from reality if we don’t write our stories. I had to get it done.”

Another important player in this Swedishness is University of Minnesota Press regional trade editor Erik Anderson, who’d had Larsmo’s novel on his radar as early as 2013. Anderson has personal and professional interests in publishing “Swede Hollow” because he admired the book and because his ancestors lived in Swede Hollow.

The publishing deal was sealed in 2017, around the time Larsmo came to help launch an ASI exhibition, “Migration, Identity and Belonging,” which included text excerpts from the Swedish edition translated into English for the first time.

MEET THE KLARS

Larsmo writes vividly about his characters’ lives in the Hollow, which had no running water or electricity and rudimentary plumbing. Trains ran along Phalen Creek and wood smoke was in the air. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, more than a thousand new immigrants, mostly Swedes but also Irish, Poles and Italians, gathered in this makeshift collection of shacks that is considered one of the oldest and poorest settlements in St. Paul.

Some well-to-do citizens thought the Hollow was unsanitary and disease-ridden; they looked down on the newcomers. A story in the St. Paul Daily Globe newspaper, reproduced in Larsmo’s novel, describes the residents as “a rude, simple people.”

Into this ravine come Lasmo’s characters, Gustaf and Anna Klar, their sickly son and two daughters, after having survived a fire on Ellis Island. The couple carries a terrible secret that caused them to leave Sweden searching for a better life. But times are hard for these folks, who can look up and see lights from the Hamm brewing family’s 20-room mansion high on the hill.

Gustaf Klar is a quiet, hardworking man who suffers from bouts of black despair. A skilled shoemaker, he is refused work at the local factory because it is closed to all but Germans. He has to settle for being a day laborer for Great Northern or Northern Pacific Railroads, climbing rickety stairs out of the Hollow in the worst winter weather without warm clothes.

The Klars are befriended by bright, energetic Inga, who ventures into the new life fearlessly and helps frightened Anna, who clings to her home in the Hollow.

“My characters develop by themselves or they don’t. Thoughts grow or move or they don’t,” Larsmo said. “Inga came out of nowhere and is pivotal. I didn’t intend that. She’s a bit bossy. She just stepped in and took over in a way.”

The Klars and their friends lead harsh urban lives that include infant deaths and workplace accidents. In one vivid scene, one of the Klar daughters is injured when the needle of an industrial sewing machine is driven through her hand. Two men go to prison and one abandons the woman who gives birth to his child. Revealing Larsmo’s reputation for advocating social justice, he includes in the plot a mine explosion in Virginia, Minn., where one of the men goes to work, and a failed strike in the Minneapolis flour mills.

What saves the novel from gloom is the sense of community shared by people who spoke many different languages. And it isn’t a spoiler to reveal that one of the Klar daughters becomes a skilled typist who eventually climbs out of the Hollow into a middle-class life.

THIS ISN’T MOBERG

Although “Swede Hollow” sold 60,000 copies in Sweden, Larsmo says he got some criticism from readers who did not want this kind of story. They compared “Swede Hollow” unfavorably to the ultimately feel-good saga of Karl-Oscar and Kristina Nilsson, protagonists of Vilhelm Moberg’s classic series “The Emigrants,” which all Swedish school children know.

“When my book was published some people were a little upset,” Larsmo acknowledges. “They thought I was blackening the memory of Swedish migrants. It wasn’t at all like that. I really did my best to give a good life to them (the Klars ) and their children.”

He points out that Moberg’s characters, celebrated annually during Lindstrom’s (Minn.) Karl Oscar Days, arrived in America in 1850. That’s a half century before “Swede Hollow” is set.

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American Swedish Institute’s Karstadt says: “Ola has done a remarkable job in telling an undertold story in his novel. It’s not fair to compare his book to Moberg’s. Of course people want heroic stories, but I think it is valuable for us to be mindful of these stories of miserable conditions and the human condition that formed the experiences of more people than is often remembered. This may help us in developing empathy for what is happening today in the experiences of migrants and refugees who are seeking a new life just as the Swedes were.”

AN HEIR OF THE HOLLOW

For Erik Anderson of University of Minnesota Press, “Swede Hollow” is an homage to his forebears. He has Swedish connections through his parents, Philip and Karna Anderson, both of whom grew up in the Twin Cities.

Anderson’s father is a retired college professor who was president of the Swedish-American Historical Society in Chicago and a member of the American Swedish Institute board. He’s also a friend of ASI’s Karstadt. Anderson’s mother’s relatives emigrated in 1886 and moved to Swede Hollow. She gave Larsmo access to family photographs and their genealogical research.

“We had family who lived in Swede Hollow for almost 20 years, a number of generations, until 1904,” Erik Anderson recalled, pointing out that this helped him understand the universality of migrants’ experiences.

“I’ve known about Swede Hollow since I was growing up in Chicago,” he said. “It was fascinating to me, growing up relatively comfortably, that generations earlier a part of our family was living in Swede Hollow. All of Ola’s novel rings true to me. I have meetings with other authors at Swede Hollow Cafe (on East Seventh Street) and a lot of their books are about immigrant stories. It’s powerful to work with these communities, such as Hmong refugees, sitting up the hill from the place where some of my family found footing in this country.”

Swede Hollow has inspired an opera, a successful play performed at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and a recent immersive performance piece staged last month in the park.

“This is fascinating,” Larsmo says. “The whole theme of American Swedish migration was dormant for some time and it came awake. I can’t explain it, this growing interest in Sweden and the U.S. It’s lucky my book landed in the middle.”

Book excerpts copyright 2016 by Ola Larsmo. Translation copyright 2019 by Tiina Nunnally. Use by permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

Ola Larsmo’s Twin Cities events:

Wednesday, Oct. 9, American Swedish Institute, 2600 Park Ave., Mpls.

1 p.m. — Larsmo talks about his book in the Afternoons at ASI series. Free with museum admission, no registration required.

— Larsmo talks about his book in the Afternoons at ASI series. Free with museum admission, no registration required. 7 p.m. — Minneapolis launch of “Swede Hollow,” including a talk, reading and Q & A by Larsmo, book signing and reception. Includes performance of an aria from McKnight composer Ann Millikan’s opera, “Swede Hollow,” featuring baritone Lukas Jaeger and Mill City String Quartet. $20. (Register by calling 612-871-4917 or go to z.umn.edu/LarsmoASI)

Thursday, Oct 10, East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier St., St. Paul. (Free and open to the public)

4:30 p.m. — Walking tour led by Ola Larsmo and Peter Rachleff, East Side Freedom Library co-executive director, beginning at the library with carpools to Swede Hollow, walking back to the library (about two miles).

— Walking tour led by Ola Larsmo and Peter Rachleff, East Side Freedom Library co-executive director, beginning at the library with carpools to Swede Hollow, walking back to the library (about two miles). 6:30 p.m. — Reading by Larsmo at the library.

“She stood on the half-finished porch, shivering in the chill of the evening as she looked out over the Hollow. She paused for a moment before setting off up the hill to Inga’s house. The lights in the ravine down below were like tiny autumn leaves on the surface of a deep well. She felt as if she were seeing everything for the first time. In the blue dusk along the creek the windows, set apart, glowed yellow, one after the other. Smoke rose up through the dark behind a wall of shimmering lights. She breathed in through her nostrils, which closed up with a sharp smell of iron. Down where the Irish lived, a dog barked, obstinately and unceasingly.”

— From “Swede Hollow”

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Literary calendar: David LaRochelle signs ‘See the Cat’ in White Bear Lake “Today, Swede Hollow is a strange, overgrown park with no trace of human habitation, a place that humans seem to have left behind. I’m not the only one to be fascinated by the peculiar silence in the Hollow. But the silence there is stretched taut over a chorus of voices from the past. I have tried my best, and with great respect, to summon a few of them.”

— From Ola Larsmo’s author’s note in “Swede Hollow”