Shirley Werner

Unexpectedly. When the time came for me to distribute the narrative I'd written, I realized that Smashwords was the ideal venue. The writing won't be lost and won't languish in some obscure place. Anyone can get access to an author's work, and it can be given away for free if the author wants. It's wonderful that readers can download the text in any format that suits them and can tweak their preferences so that the text looks the way they want it to. And Smashwords has excellent technical standards and quality requirements.

I wanted to preserve the extraordinary story of my grandfather's immigration to the United States, but I didn't simply want to gather and record the vague anecdotes that I probably misremembered from my childhood. So I set out to document what could be documented, to gather the facts that could be found, and to ask questions of people who knew. This quest put me in touch with some extraordinary people and scholarship and opened up a historical perspective that fascinated me and that answered many more questions than I had even thought to ask.