Category Archives: Mennonite

What we want to do for the Mennonite women of Bolivia

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Back in November, I wrote, here, about a file I’d opened while I was at the MB Herald but ran out of time to complete, on the sexual assault of numerous women in one of the conservative Mennonite colonies of Bolivia. I’m glad to report  that the story got written, nevertheless — a fine overview by assistant editor Karla Braun which appeared in the January issue. It picks up on what had seemed to Abe Warkentin, founder of Die Mennonitische Post and long-time advocate for the needs of Low German Mennonites, a “deafening” silence in the face of the situation, and his plea that it be more actively addressed.

It’s also evident from the article that there are divergent views about — and approaches to — conservative Mennonite groups by the various people who relate to them. These differences have their own long history, theological underpinnings, and ways of speaking, even “bad blood” between the parties at times, which the article doesn’t get into in any detail. I don’t intend to now either, except to say that these differences have clearly complicated Mennonite response to the story and perhaps accounted for much of the silence around it.

Recently, however, an inter-Mennonite committee formed here in Winnipeg to do one thing. We want to hold a service of prayer and lament for our Mennonite sisters in Bolivia who have been sexually assaulted. We recognize that any response one makes carries a bias and, regardless of diverse views on Old Colony life, this is ours: we want to express our love and compassion for, and solidarity with, these women, and to pray for healing and justice and hope in this situation.

I invite my readers in Manitoba to participate in this event, on February 7, and to let others know about it. Please see the Events page for more details, or the press release that follows from Abe Warkentin. We’re continuing to gather as much information as we can, although, as the release states, new information is difficult to confirm. Continue reading →

The commitment of Peter J. Dyck

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Peter J. Dyck. Photo credit: MCC

 

Peter J. Dyck (1914 – 2010), well-known in Mennonite circles for his work with refugees in post-World War II Europe and beyond, died in Scottdale, Pa. last week, at 95. 

He almost died as a child, in 1921, of typhoid and hunger because of the famine in Russia. Thanks to food assistance provided by the newly formed Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), he survived, however, and with his family was able to immigrate to Canada.

The memory of that food aid would later motivate him to serve with MCC in England during the war. After the war, he and his wife Elfrieda (Klassen), who was equally involved in their dynamic partnership, moved to the Netherlands to direct a huge relief effort. They also organized and led the transport of some 5,500 Mennonites in four ships to new homes in South America.

The couple worked with MCC and the Mennonite church in various capacities throughout their lives, but it’s the events associated with the refugee work that will probably remain most closely associated with their names. Certainly those stories of rescue and resettlement, full of drama and pathos, formed a significant part of my sense of how the world had unfolded during the brutal and turbulent years just before my birth. I’m not sure how they came to me, but it must have been through Mennonite periodicals, speakers, and books. Books like Helen Good Brenneman’s But Not Forsaken, and later Barbara Smucker’s excellent children’s novel, Henry’s Red Sea, about one of the most dramatic of the events, the movement of former Russian Mennonite refugees through Russian-occupied territory by train to reach a ship waiting to take them to a new homeland. Peter Dyck too was a great storyteller and did a great deal of public speaking, and with Elfrieda, co-authored a fascinating account of their postwar experiences, Up from the Rubble.

Yesterday, in the sharing time in church, one of the women in our congregation recalled with gratitude Peter Dyck’s life and service. She was three years old when her family crossed the ocean in one of those groups overseen by the Dycks. She also reminded us – as an encouragement to the younger generation – that Dyck was in his 30s when he was doing the work that made such a difference for her and so many others. I don’t know how aware the Dycks were at the time of the historical significance of their gathering and re-location of refugees. Perhaps they sensed it, but were probably mostly just busy giving their best intelligence, energy, and fortitude to their assignments.

Somehow it all begins to seem very long ago, and with the passing of Peter Dyck even longer. So I too commend Peter (and Elfrieda, who died in 2004) Dyck to our memory and the events of that era to our attention. I think there’s still a great deal to learn from those times, especially from watching ordinary people work out their commitment to compassion and service in complicated environments, and doing this, not only because they’ve been helped themselves, but also because that’s what Christian disciples do in a needy world.

* A report of Dyck’s death and fuller bio can be found at the MCC website, here. The article includes an invitation to share personal memories. Some have already appeared, to further round out and bless the legacy of this man.

The power of commemoration

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I’m coming back today to the topic of memorials and commemoration, which an earlier post about the new Mennonite memorial in Ukraine raised to my mind.

Back in the 1990s, when I returned to university to do a Master’s degree in history, cultural history seemed in the ascendency, and within cultural history, histories of commemoration were “hot.” I read books such as Michael Kammen’s Mystic Chords of Memory and and Jonathan Vance’s Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War, and learned about the work of Eric Hobsbawn, Maurice Halbwachs, and Michael Foucault, discovering the possibilities around the forming and contestation of meaning, around memory and myth. It was fascinating stuff. I learned smart new words like “hegemony” and “liminal” and enjoyed using them, at least as long as I was hanging around the university with those who knew them too.

But seriously, it was exciting, thinking in so many previously unconsidered directions at once. I’m just now looking through a pile of research notes I kept for a paper I wrote during that time, on Winnipeg’s celebration, in 1927, of the Diamond Jubilee of Canada’s Confederation, and I have to say, it makes me homesick to be studying again.

CPR memorial (Dueck)

 

I learned that commemoration is never neutral. Vance’s work on how World War I would be remembered, for example, had me driving around Winnipeg taking photographs of some of the monuments erected in memory of that war, and as the CPR memorial of an angel lifting a “fallen” soldier  indicates, there was clearly a Christian narrative imposed on that bloody conflict, for the purposes of comfort in the face of such a useless waste of lives, no doubt, but also in the service of the glorious nation-building project.

Whether in the long and multifaceted process of public remembering of a war, or a single event celebrating an anniversary, or a set-in-stone monument, we make choices in commemoration. We involve various purposes, power, and politics. Sometimes in commemoration there’s a subversion of dominant mythologies, sometimes a reiteration or underlining of them. Past, present, and future interact in various ways. 

Mennonite memorial, Ukraine (T. Dyck)

 

So, the new Mennonite memorial. What’s it all about? 

This question should not be assumed to be critical. But it should be considered as a question. 

The story of the Mennonites in the former USSR — the story of everyone in the USSR, in fact — is certainly a story of missing persons. I like what the monument says about that. Nor is it hard, as my brief musings over one photograph in that earlier post demonstrated, to put my family’s own “missing persons” into it — personal history meeting public history. 

The monument stands in a former central Mennonite village, in a park surrounded by buildings erected by Mennonites and still in use. It draws attention, according to the news release, to “the human costs of a totalitarian system and tells the larger story of tyranny, suffering and oblivion.” 

The commemorative text’s use of “Blessed are those who mourn,” from the Sermon on the Mount — which is often considered at the heart of Mennonite understandings of faith — opens any number of lines of reflection.

But who is it really for? Why there? Why for Mennonites? Because they’re gone?

What will Myrna Kostash think, she of the biting “Lord, History Falls Through the Cracks,” published in Rhubarb (Fall 2008):

So, when the time comes for the melancholic Ukrainian peasants to rise up against their masters and take back the land, the Mennonites will say they are lost….

…I have thought of you [Mennonites] as salt of the earth, growing out of it like the infinitely renewing limbs of willow from which we weave our fences. But yours is a story of flight and the roots spread shallow: you have to be able to get up and go when you feel the pressure, the danger; you have to be able to shake off the dirt as though this earth were not beloved. Maybe that’s what it means to be Ukrainian instead: to be everlastingly of this homeplace.

You left and we grew back. You are utterly gone. No one remembers you….

Land. You had it and we didn’t.

Now we’re back, in a small way, with humanitarian and spiritual programs (examples: The Mennonite Centre, and MBMSI Ukraine.) With tourists. With a monument. 

Kostash reminds that the land was Mennonite for only 128 years when the Revolution came. “A blink of the eye: that’s how long it had been Mennonite.”

What do we think of this memorial for a blink’s-long sojourn?

It’s low to the ground; it’s in a park. Surely children, curious and delighted, their cries of play ringing in Ukrainian, are going to climb into those spaces — if they can get away with it — and fill them with laughter and hope and the future. Will that be a welcome subversion of our own memorial?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.