One of the first things that struck Dvo?ák about Iowa was its emptiness. If he had come looking for the cheerfulness of home, what he found was this expanse of prairie, this sea of grass and grain that went on forever. “It is wild here,” he said, “and sometimes very sad.” In the bigness of it all, he felt further from home than ever, but, when taken with a closer view – when chatting with the people, when playing organ at St. Wenceslaus, when walking in the fields in the early morning – he felt restored by a deep belonging. Iowa had for him that immense nostalgia, sad and hopeful all at once, when the familiar and the alien mingle, as when we revisit the childhood streets where our friends are no more, or when we return all alone to the site of some joyful memory.
But Dvo?ák quickly made friends here; the town was populated almost entirely by other Czechs, immigrants who came from the “poorest of the poor” in the old country. If he was struck by the lonesomeness of the place, he soon found also the welcome that he had come in search of. He was delighted by Father Bily, the parish priest, and by all the wonderful “granddads and grannies.”