Left with a void: the new Mennonite memorial in Ukraine

Posted on by
4

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.

From the movie “Precious”

Posted on by
Reply

Precious, an abused and confused 16-year-old, barely able to read or write, pregnant with her second child, is enrolled in an alternative school with several other girls, each of whom is to introduce herself by name and her favourite colour and something she does well. At first Precious doesn’t want to say anything, but she listens to the others and then hesitantly raises her hand and says her name and that she likes yellow. Although she doesn’t think she does anything well, she finally acknowledges, at the coaxing of the teacher, that she can cook. Then — 

Precious: I never spoke up in class before…

Teacher: How does that make you feel?

(Pause)

Precious: … Here. It make me feel… here.

“The rise of rhythm”

Posted on by
2

A fundamental shift has taken place in music over the last half-century, Christine Longhurst writes, in a viewpoint piece in the Nov. 16 Canadian Mennonite called “The rise of rhythm.”

Longhurst explains that music is made of three main elements: melody, harmony, and rhythm, and that western music throughout its history has seen a shift from one to the other of these. Now it seems, it’s rhythm’s turn. And it’s “not just a passing fad,” she says. Those who have grown up in the new musical environment — well, they feel at home in it. And, in terms of the church and its worship, “the increased focus on rhythm has changed the very nature of congregational singing in many churches.”

Longhurst goes on to say that this changes melodies, and makes congregational singing more dependent on instrumental accompaniment.

I found Longhurst’s analysis helpful — clarifying for me, in fact, what may be the underlying issue in the “worship wars” of so many churches, though, as she also says in her article, we often talk about contemporary worship music and its differences with earlier music in other terms. And I agree with her, that  if rhythm-based styles are the “soul music” of our culture, “adding some rhythm-based songs ” to our worship is “both an opportunity and an obligation.”

In our congregation, it’s not so such much “adding” as accepting the pretty much wholesale shift. I’ve noticed that pleas to include “hymns” usually result in rhythming-up some of the hymns of yesterday or selecting the upbeat, lighter, and sometimes sillier ones of the past, whose texts may be as vacuous as the texts of contemporary music ocasionally are. Which really has the effect of undercutting the argument.

Canadian Mennonite editor Dick Benner’s comments on Longhurst’s piece in his Nov. 16 editorial come out very much at the place I’m at: sadness over the loss of the voice, or better said, voices — in harmony — but recognizing a shift has taken place and definitely determined to keep open to that. (To be a nonresistant older person, in other words! And if I get really lonesome for the sound of the trained singing voice, I can always put on our record — a.k.a. a really big CD — of Peter Koslowsky singing German hymns, or some of the choir albums we own, which are gorgeous soul music for me.)