I forgot my phone at Bonnie’s house yesterday so have no photos to prove I attended the second day of the Russlaender conference! But I was definitely there, at my alma mater, the University of Winnipeg, for a day as rich as the first. It felt less compressed, because there were only three presentations per slot instead of four as had been the case during parts of in the day before. Once again, there was much of interest.

It struck me that though an academic conference, many participants and certainly many in the audience had their own stories and lineage to set into what they were hearing about the period under consideration: the emigration of some 20,000 Mennonites from Russia in the 1920s. For one example, Josephine Braun, a great-grand-daughter of Isaac J Braun of the somewhat notorious Friesen-Braun trial in Saskatchewan, presented her attempts to dig deeper into the life of a man whose story had been suppressed within her own family, as Braun was jailed for some five years and then deported back to Russia, with his wife and sons left behind to somehow manage in Canada. A fascinating story with much remaining mystery.

The question at the time of that decade in Russia was: leave or stay? In another paper I particularly enjoyed, on Friday, Colin Neufeldt presented a long list of reasons people had NOT to emigrate. Some 20,000 did, yes, and it was that decision and the reasons for it as well as subsequent immigrant adjustments to a new environment that these days are commemorating, but the large majority did not leave. Some wanted to but couldn’t for various reasons and others could have but didn’t, also for various reasons. Many, perhaps more than we realize, he suggested, wanted to participate in the creation of the world’s first socialist state. For those less privileged within the Mennonite community, there was the possibility of upward mobility in the new circumstances. Also, the New Economic Policy seemed for many an optimistic reconstructive step after the chaos of the civil war. And of course there were always family reasons: one member of a couple might wish to go but not the other, or there were elderly parents to consider and so on.

Last week, before coming, I happened to be looking at some pages of my grandmother Helene Derksen Harder’s diary, where she recounts in broad strokes the last years and months before their decision to leave and then the auction and flurry with papers/permissions and other preparations for the journey. She tells of instances of great fear as “guests”–her euphemism for bandits and soldiers–invaded the household, wanting food, horses, money, and so on. She tells of hunger, loss, tension, deprivation. She mentions the bravery of her old mother who helped them pack, realizing she might never see her daughter again. Now I want to search those pages more thoroughly for my grandparents’ particular motivation to leave–along with their three small children—their beloved homeland and parents for new and unknown future.

grandmother Helene Harder

grandfather Heinrich Harder

As mentioned already, it was the decision to leave, whatever the motivation, that the conference (as well as a train tour from Quebec City to Abbotsford these weeks) was commemorating and for me the most wonderful way to do it was yesterday evening’s Saengerfest. Choirs–adult, youth, children–singing songs old and new, and we in the “sold out” Centennial Concert Hall sometimes got to sing along too. It’s songs of lament and faith and hope that reach back to connect both the stayers and the leavers, that sustained those who suffered through the challenges of their decisions; it’s the songs that now mostly strongly connect me into that story and my heritage and into my own childhood and youth, that brought me to tears last evening.

I’ll end with mentioning just one small part of the festival of song. In Bach’s “Befiehl du deine Wege” (Entrust Thy Ways), conductor Henry Engbrecht had the choir begin each line together and then sing it individually, however slowly or quickly, and then at his signal end in harmony on the final note. It was the strangest and most astonishing cacophony of sound and then resolution, a perfect demonstration of the hundreds of individual stories we each set against the backdrop of historical events but drawing together as community then, as we hear one another, in harmony.