"Portrait of a Homesteader" is a family history which, in its simple honesty, insight, and down-to-earth qualities, becomes the story of all the restlessly migratory Germans for whom Volhynia was merely a respite in the search for something beyond. It is captivating in its understatement, a work of love and admiration.Victor Gess takes you into the living rooms, kitchens, schools, churches, and farmyards of his ancestors, recording the thoughts and emotions, their conflicts and resolutions, their doubts and their dreams. They are families on the move, at first close-knit and slowly by wagon, through Poland and Volhynia, then increasingly as individual families and more rapidly by ship and train, to the wider, more open landscape of North America. In his father's gritty 220-mile bike trip from Success, Saskatchewan, to Wolf Point, Montana, the New World's mental landscape opens up to accommodate a single 22-year old seeking a homestead all his own, distant geographically but forever bound to the families who together brought him from Volhynia to this place.