Nails trimmed, ready to work

Posted on July 21, 2023 by doradueck

Clothes hung or put into drawers, desk arranged, nails trimmed (I need skin on the keys, not click). I’ve reached the writing retreat part of my road trip adventure and am settled into my monk-like room in the Scholastica building of St. Peter’s Abbey, Muenster, Saskatchewan, ready for a week of (self-directed) work. I drove from Dauphin this morning, past one glowing yellow canola field after the other, and here and there a Ukrainian church (though I neglected to note which towns they were in).

The days between the conference and commemoration of the Russlaender migration on the weekend and today were interesting. Monday I did a bit of a mini-pilgrimage to houses we lived in during our years in Winnipeg. I placed a small stone, from a collection of Helmut’s, at each to mark remembrance and gratitude. On Tuesday Bonnie and I enjoyed brunch at Pine Ridge Hollow and for supper I joined my niece Daniela and her family in Steinbach. I spent two nights and the day between with my cousin Barb, also in Steinbach. Robins entertained us as we ate on her patio, but mostly we sat in her sun room and read from the diaries of our late Aunt Margaret Harder. She was a teacher, also very involved in Elmwood MB Church (the first woman to preach there, etc.), and left about 20 notebooks from some 20 years, basically a page per day. She was a wonderful aunt to her nieces and nephews, and Barb and I were both inspired by entering her past world in this way and noting her ongoing and intentional expressions of thanks. That evening two other cousins and their daughters joined us for rhubarb dessert and catching up all round.

photo by Rena Rauch

When I left Steinbach on Thursday I felt so “full” — in a good way — of my history and heritage that I wondered how to shift from that into the work of fiction this week. It occurred to me that my friend Rena in Dauphin would be a gift for exactly that, for she is part neither of my family nor the Russlaender story, but someone I met through a writing event in Winnipeg some years ago. She had refreshments waiting on a table under the trees, and it was a perfect transition as we conversed about our projects.

And now I’m here, in this quiet red brick and pine-treed place, and I’m really really really looking forward to the next seven days! I’ll check in again at the end of it.

Stories and songs

Posted on July 16, 2023 by doradueck

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.

History Cram

Posted on July 14, 2023 by doradueck

I arrived in Winnipeg yesterday evening under a huge dark cloud that loosed a bit of rain, but not much of it apparently, despite how menacing it looked.

My friend Bonnie, where I’m staying, surprised me with a delicious supper of pickerel. My favourite fish!

Today was the first day of the conference The Russlaender Mennonites: War, Dislocation, and New Beginnings, part of a larger commemoration of the arrival in Canada of the first Mennonites of the 1920s migration (some 20,000) from Russia. (Hence Russlaender.) It was crammed full of history papers — 14 presentations in all! These are a-swirl in my brain and I’m too tired to sort them out. I may share some bits at some point, but not tonight.

What I enjoyed most were the interviews with two writers of literary books about the Russian Mennonite experience that bookended the day: Sarah Klassen with her recent The Russian Daughter and Sandra Birdsell with The Russlaender. I think it brilliant to feature literature together with history. (David Bergen will be up tomorrow with his new book set in that experience.)