These narratives spell the lives of my parents and grandparents: All were children when they departed their homelands, three of the four came alone and one was a babe in the arms of a solitary fragile young mother. Their origins, journeys, hardships, loves, and triumphs as they voyaged from one continent to another are in part memoir, in part biographies laced to historical facts.

One could simply view the subject starkly as a small set of case studies dealing with immigration and its effects upon the spirit and lives of people who undertake it. That view would be true as far as it goes.

But the narratives embraced here attempt to delve deeper. They are given as delineations that might enable others to visualize the stories of their ancestors and thereby loom their own immigration histories from the threads of their forbearers' lives.

Upon the basic facts and events of those lives, held firm, are images and reflections interlaced to create the patterns of an emergent design. Together, this warp and woof represents the substance, the fabric, of lives created in a new world.