Left with a void: the new Mennonite memorial in Ukraine

Posted on November 30, 2009 by doradueck

Monuments often bear witness to those who are missing, but the design of the granite monument unveiled to “Soviet Mennonite Victims of Tribulation, Stalinist Terror and Religious Oppression” in Zaporizhia, Ukraine on October 10, 2009 is particularly poignant about absence. Designed by Paul Epp, it consists of three life-size silhouettes: a woman, a man, and two children. The base is meant to represent a mantel upon which we keep pictures of those who we want to remember, says Epp, except that here “we are left with a void, with all of what that can represent.”

The International Mennonite Memorial Committee for the Former Soviet Union, has erected a number of memorials in the former Soviet Union, but according to a report of the event by Anne Konrad, this is the first one within the former USSR to memorialize all Soviet Mennonites.

Mennonite memorial (photo credit: T. Dyck)

Committee co-chair Peter Klassen (left) said, “This monument bears enduring witness to the suffering of many thousands who cannot speak for themselves,” and co-chair Harvey Dyck (at mic) said, “The story of 30,000 Soviet Mennonites… chronicles a tragic past and opens us more fully to the suffering and heroism of Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, peoples of Siberia and Central Asia and people around the world.”

My grandparents were among those fortunate to escape what World War I and then the Russian Revolution unleashed, not to mention World War II and the long terrors of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. But as was the case in so many families, others in their family were not. The difference in the fates of those who left and those who stayed were often literally the difference between life and death.

I can’t get my head around how arbitrary it all sometimes seems, except to engage in the linked theological practices of thanksgiving and lament, but let me raise to the void of the new memorial just a few faces and names that belong there.

Tina Woelk and children, 1917

My grandmother Helena (Harder) and her family came to Canada. Her older sister Tina (Woelk) did not. Here is Tina with her 9 children, photographed at the burial of her husband in 1917. The oldest son, David, third from the left, was murdered in the political turmoil of 1919. As for the three boys on the right: Jakob reached Germany during the Second World War and did not return to Russia; Gerhard disappeared in that same war; Kornelius simply disappeared. Helena, second from the left, died of cancer in Siberia in 1956, Siberia being shorthand for the family’s exile to the work settlements of the north. Peter, on the left, died in Karaganda, that name shorthand for exile to the coal-mining southeastern region.

This is about all I know about these relatives of mine, told by the daughter of Katharina (standing at her mother’s shoulder), who grew up in the Soviet system and eventually, after the Cold War ended, moved to Germany with her husband.

So many empty spaces, children and youth without descendants. Just faces on a photo and names on a scrap of paper.

Crossing the Disraeli

Posted on November 25, 2009 by doradueck

It wasn’t exactly the Rubicon, but crossing the Disraeli Bridge last winter on my first day back to work after a year and a half away seemed momentous. It was a very cold morning and everything was slow, the car crawling through exhaust and spumes of smoke spilling out of chimneys like foam, and there ahead of me, our small city’s small cluster of high-rise towers. One of those dark, tense mornings, the roads clogged and everyone cautious, and enough time to “feel” the progress of dawn, from deep blue to milky blue sky, trees thick with their bare branches against it.

I was exhilarated that morning in spite of the traffic — about being alive, and warm in the car, and thinking how much I love this city and listening to songs nominated for a playlist of 49 best Canadian songs to present to incoming president Barack Obama (K.D. Lang’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Alleluia,” for example, and Ian and Sylvia’s “Four Strong Winds,” and a song by Blue Rodeo). And yes, going back to work after retiring once, now that I’d decided I’d do it. “It’s only a year,” a friend reminded me.

Winnipeg sits on land as flat as a chopping block, but the Disraeli rises to cross the Red River, and marks the “hilly” spot for me where I can see downtown and remember my city-love. This year, it was also a kind of halfway marker from our house in North Kildonan to the offices of the MB Herald.

Driving back at day’s end the bridge was a marker homeward, and had I been in some horse-drawn conveyance, I suppose that’s where the reins would drop and Black Beauty would know the way alone, and probably pick up the pace to boot.

Now, re-retired, it’s a true crossing back. Then: editor; now: writer. And no matter what Madam Editor said in her last post about writers still being needed, on this side of the Disraeli, wariness over editors returns. Will they want it? Like it? Change it?

We definitely need each other, editors and writers do, but the priorities are different and there may be a power struggle, or nervousness at least, until you know one another well. I’ve had mostly good experiences, but there was that story that came to me in its published form with its verb tenses changed, and that experience of re-reading something of mine in print and thinking, my lands, I must have been asleep, that doesn’t sound like me, only to discover it wasn’t me but the editor. On the basis of such few and flimsy episodes I’ve become one of those writers who drives editors crazy, insisting she has to see the revisions (please). Most good editors, if they do anything substantive, show them anyway. Then again, what’s the definition of substantive? (Naturally, you do want the errors and foolishness caught.)

But before I engage in too much writerly insecurity, I’m taking a rest — to read and catch up on housework (and blog of course). I was already complaining to some writer friends that the inspiration to work at my (interrupted) short stories appears to be absent. The same friend whose advice helped me above, had some for this side of the Disraeli. “Of course the inspiration isn’t there yet,” she said. “That comes AFTER the rest.”

33 years ago today

Posted on November 13, 2009 by doradueck

I don’t generally write much about my children, nor about the mothering role — especially now that the three of them are grown and I’m off-duty. I figure it’s not their fault their mother is a writer, which often means using what happens personally for the work of words, but I try to leave them out of it. They can tell their own stories.

But “mother” is a role/name/fact that’s a huge part of my life, and today I’m celebrating the day it began. It all started 33 years ago today when the little fellow, pictured left at 3 months, was born. (He gave permission to post the photo.) I don’t think you can ever imagine at the time what it will be like to be bound up with another person for the long haul the way a mother is, but you discover it — through joy and difficulties — as you go, and I can say this for sure, the child who started it and his two siblings who followed (whose baby photos I will post on their own birthdays, if they let me) have definitely, definitely been worth it all. (Especially now that I’m off-duty.)