In my opinion, a book that takes me into another person’s world while also sending me off into my own (as I lift my eyes from the page) is a good book! So it was with Silentium: And Other Reflections on Memory, Sorrow, Place, and the Sacred (Wipf & Stock, 2017) by Connie T. Braun.

This collection of poetry and essays forms a memoir both of Connie’s mother, who fled Poland in the upheavals of the Second World War, and Connie herself, as we enter her childhood and powerful family bonds in B.C.’s Fraser Valley, and travel along to sites of family history. It’s memoir, yes, but a kind of “quest” or discovery literature too.

I experienced many resonances as I read: our common Mennonite heritage, our appreciation for the writing of Patricia Hampl, places H. and I also saw on a tour to Poland. And the surprise mention of Linden, Alberta, where I grew up! I was also taken into the differences, my immigration past being the 1920s arrival of my grandparents to Canada, hers a postwar arrival. Connie Braun has become one of the most significant Mennonite writer-witnesses to that particular period and those events. Continue reading →