Book Reviews 

Fiction, Folklore and Poetry 

David Elias, Sunday Afternoon. Coteau Books, 2004. Pp. 
257. Paper, $19.95 

David Elias's first novel Sunday Afternoorz returns to the landscape 
of his earlier short story collections Crossirzg the Line (Orca, 1992) 
and Places of Grace (Coteau, 1997). In "Hidden Places," a story 
from the first collection, Elias describes the Mennonite West Reserve 
through the eyes of a young boy gazing down from an elevated spot in 
Manitoba's Pembina Hills: 

Two hours later they were standing in a clearing, high above 
the valley floor, looking out to the east. It had been a tough ride 
up, but the view today was worth it. The villages below were 
so many green islands on a blanket of yellow and black. 

You could s e e  Rosengart and Blumenfeld, Reinland and 
Nuehorst. Far off, at the horizon, were the white oil tanks of 
Gretna. That was almost thirty miles. 

To the south, across the line, the arrangement was different. 
Instead of large green clusters, there were smaller patches of 
green, scattered evenly across the plain, each one standing 
apart. (Crossing the Line 17-18) 

In three simple paragraphs Elias establishes the valley setting of 
his stories and contrasts the Mennonite village culture on the Manitoba 
side of "the line" with the single-family farm culture "across the line" 
in North Dakota. He also sows the seeds of themes that are picked up 
in later stories such as "Dickie Del*ltsen": 

His place was all by itself out in the country, where only two 
kinds of people ever lived: those that were too rich to live in 
the village, and those that were too poor. Rich people had a 
fancy place with a garage attached to the house instead of a 
barn, and windows out front big enough to see right into the 
living room where people sat loolting back out at you. 



232 Jounml ofMera~onite Studies 

Poor people had a place thrown together from scrap lumber or 
buildings dragged out of the village before they got torn down, 
a place where a few scrawny hogs and chickens scrounged 
around in the dirt and kids played outside all day, hungry and 
half-naked. (Places of Grace 73-74) 

This is the West Reserve in the 1950s straddling the time between 
World War Two and the cultural shifts of the 1960s. 

In Sunday Afternoon Elias combines the setting, themes, and many 
of the characters from his short stories and fashions them into a novel 
that takes place on one Sunday afternoon during lnaddoch schlope, 
the traditional nap and procreation time for couples in the Mennonite 
villages. However, the time is now tlze early 1960s: the Cold War is 
at its height, John Glenn has rocketed into space, missiles a r e  being 
installed in silos just across the line, and the world's tallest television 
tower has been erected not many miles away, and so not everyone 
in the village of Neustadt is sleeping or procreating on Sunday 
afternoon. 

Stock Mennonite village characters, developed to three dimensions, 
stir in various restless states: Abe Wiebe, the gentle excommunicated 
soldier; Steven Zacharias, the sensitive teenager growing into a poet; 
Martha Wiebe, the spinster who looks after her widowed father and 
her bachelor brothers; Dickie Derlisen, the mildly retarded boy; the 
gruesonzely disfigured Martens brothers; the sharp-tongued Zacharias 
sisters; the village preacher who unwittingly awakens sexual pleasure 
in his wife. The valley in the shadow of the Pembina Hills becomes a 
mythical place squirming with sensuality, unknowingly anticipating a 
miracle. 

Elias doesn't flinch from writing about the darli side of Mennonite 
village life and he shows the reader extremes of cruelty in the actions 
of characters such as Dickie Derlisen's stepfather and the teacher 
Agnes Thiessen. The novel shows characters struggling to keep their 
creative spirits from being stifled by the almost Eden-like nature of the 
valley-those who escape temporarily find themselves drawn back to 
the valley and the village and even the church. At the same time the 
village is involved in forces both darli and light that will change the 
people and the commuizity forever. 

Surzday Aftel-noon is a fabulous novel (in the old sense of the word, 
related to fable) and I daresay that Elias has spent time with the works 
of Robert Kroetsch, especially What the Crow Said and Seed Catalogzie. 
Elias uses the details of eveiyday village life and the gossip that goes 
with it to create myth and characters who do mythical things. However, 
Elias doesn't reveal the fabulous nature of the novel until the reader 
is completely enthralled by the sensuous setting and the compelling 



characters and their conflicts; the miraculous nature of the ending 
may disappoint the reader who prefers a realistic ending growing out 
of characters' literal actions. Elias has a background in philosophy and 
his novel, as well as being very funny at times, takes the reader into 
philosophical argument. But more than the miraculous conclusioi~ of 
the novel, it is the reader's rich Sunday afternoon in this Mennonite 
village in the valley in a particular moment that makes this novel one 
that deserves to be read and enjoyed widely, including by the non- 
Mennonite literaly world currently enthralled with Miriam Toews's A 
Conzplicated Kindness. 

For those of you who have been watching the East Reserve vs. West 
Reserve literary scoreboard for the past 20 odd years, I'd say Sunday 
Afterlzoo~z is a significant addition to the West Reserve's numbers. 

Al-min Wiebe's most I-ecent novel, Tatsea, won the McNally-Robirzson 
Boolc of the Year Award and The Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. 
Tatsea is reviewed i n  this issue. 

Armin Wiebe 
Winnipeg, Manitoba 

Jean Janzen, Piano in the Vineyard. Intercourse, PA: 
Good Books, 2004. Pp. 74. Paper, $9.95 (U.S.). 

Jean Janzen is a California poet who has published five previous 
books of poems. Her work has been included in several anthologies, 
and she contributed several hymn texts to Hymrza1:A Worship Book. In 
this latest book she explores themes she has explored before but which 
she shows no sign of exhausting. 

The first section, "Broken Places," explores the many ways in 
which our lives fracture. The title poem in the section underlines the 
inevitability of both pain and our persistent efforts to alleviate it: "All 
of us shipwrecked, / clutching what we can" (20). There are echoes 
of the Psalms in some of these poems. "April Storm," for instance, 
speaks, as many Psalms do, of an overwl~elming, unnamed sorrow. "In 
Janualy" ends by calling on God to deal with the unjust- in this case, 
gun manufacturers. 

Here, as elsewhere in the book, Janzen writes as someone secure 
enough in her faith to lament and complain. When she expresses doubt, 
it is not a rejection of faith but a doubt that wants to believe. That was, 
for me, one of the remarkable things about this book: the fact that its 
viewpoint is so orthodox, so anti-modern. The existence of God is not 



234 Jounzal ofMeizlzo~zite Studies 

questioned, nor does the poet feel any need to apologize for her faith. 
The presence of God is simply accepted, an assumption that underlies 
evelything Janzen writes. 

The cycle of garden poems that opens the second section is concise 
and vividly sensual. Garden images- common in Janzen's wol-k- offer 
multiple ways of engaging themes of birth, growth, sexuality and death. 
They also provide a natural way to express the connection between 
the sensual and the spiritual, an ongoing theme in Janzen's poetry. In 
"January," the pruning of rosebushes recalls the narrator's cutting 
off her braids at the age of twelve. "April" and "May" are, perversely, 
associated with death. The other poems in this section did not have 
quite the same impact. It's not that they aren't good in themselves, just 
that they are not as compact and powerful as the garden cycle. 

There is light and darkness in these poems, and Janzen embraces 
them both. She communicates an intense love for her surroundings in 
language which is full of color and texture. She is especially good at 
evoking the particular atmosphere of each season - the way summer 
heat, for instance, turns the air "thick as plastic, / ripe to the verge of 
rot and split7' (29). 

The third section is a short group of poems based on family stories. 
There are some vely effective poems here, among them "Seeing It," 
which demands that victims of torture be remembered for who they 
were, not just for how they died: "To write it so that you can see that 
Daniel / is not a blur, but wears scuffed shoes, / striped stockings, and 
a cap over blonde / curls" (45). Then there is "Borrowing the Horse," 
in which the courtship of Janzen's parents is turned into a luminous 
faily tale: 

She was the darling 
of the village, and he 
had only his good looks, 

a sheaf of papel; 
and three books, which he 
lay down before he picked up 
the reins of the borrowed horse. (48). 

The final section is about beginnings, about anticipating the new and 
unknown. It describes dreams of a wilderness that we enter "without map 
or tools" (61) and it characterizes death as a passage into an unfamiliar 
countly. The last poem begins with an epigraph by Charles Wright: 
"Every true poem is a spark, and aspires to the condition of the original 
fire, arising out of the emptiness" (72). This poem, and by implication the 
entire section, expresses a desire to see that spark rise up. 



Book Reviews 235 

Reading this collection, I found myself drawn into Jean Janzen's 
landscape and, especially in the third section, into the lives of the 
people she poi-trays. This is accessible, profound poetry that celebrates 
the presence of the spiritual in the world of the senses. 

Joanne Epp 
Winnipeg, Manitoba 

John Weier, Stand the Sacred Tree: Journeys i n  Place 
and Memory. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2004. Pp. 256. 
Paper, $18.95. 

In his latest work, Winnipeg writer John Weier has set himself a 
challenging task: to visit a number of countries (Iceland, Holland, 
Syria, Denmark, and Canada), and observe the inhabitants, both human 
and avian, in an attempt to find connections between them. The result 
is a book that is self-revealing and engagingly honest. 

In the Preface to Stand the Sacred Tree, Weier explains that the 
idea for his book comes out of an earlier work, Marshwalker. In 
Marslzwalker, Weier undertook a Thoreauesque observation of the 
Oak Hammock Marsh near Winnipeg. He states that his original 
purpose was "to explore wilderness, the wild places, where plants and 
animals grew more or less unattended" and "especially to catalogue 
the lives and movement of birds." His focus gradually expanded to 
encompass other interests, experiences, and personal obseivations. 
I11 the wake of the publication of Marshwalker-, Weier was invited to 
visit the abovementioned countries, and he decided to "take [his] Oak 
Hammock expedition out into the world." The result is a combination 
of travel writing, memoir, and Weier's personal observations on family, 
marriage, birds, the environment, religion, and a host of other concerns 
and interests. 

The book is presented in a fragmented, sometimes breathless style 
("Peculiar today how we travel, how we treat the earth around us. 
Location. How we rush into it. Through it. At one hundred kilometres 
an hour. Or seven hundred. Gone! before we realize we've arrived."). 
Rather than providing a linear accounting of separate journeys, Weier 
interweaves the threads of his jouweys. This approach often allows 
him to make interesting connections between vaiying experiences, but 
at times his use of repetition ("I wanted to know about Willow Island, 
about his experience of Willow Island, the nature of the place, the wilds 
of Willow Island. David, how did you come to know Willow Island?") 
can be distracting. 



Overall, the reader will come away with few penetrating insights 
about the countries Weier visits, but perhaps this was not the intention. 
As Weier himself disarmingly points out, "these narratives won't 
actually tell you a great deal about Syria, about Holland. [...I They 
show you instead the contemporaiy traveller, his reactions to place 
and people over a veiy limited time. A few hours. Days. Sometimes 
over a few weeks." Weier and his wife, Mary, have many of the usual 
concerns of travelers: they worry about how much they are spending, 
about whether they are being culturally sensitive, about language and 
cultural differences. There is a quixotic air to Weier's writing, and 
readers may at times find themselves woriying about his safety. In his 
quest for bird sightings, he wanders about in war-torn Syria wearing a 
pair of binoculars, despite warnings from the Canadian embassy and 
concerned Syrians. In a scene in Damascus, he impulsively approaches 
a group of armed Syrian soldiers: "I hadn't planned anything. [. . .] Some 
impulse must have directed me. When I stepped close to that soldier 
under the palm frond-a boy, really, all three of them boys-I bent 
my long body and bowed down. I crowded into the shade beside him, 
draped my arm over his shoulder. A few centimetres from his nose 
to mine under that thin palm frond. A soldier and his black machine 
gun, I and my bare head, all ill the shade of a palm branch. He laughed. 
That young man laughed. There hadn't, in fact, been any doubt that 
he would." 

Weier seems much more comfortable in his observations of birds 
and other natural phenomena than he does when he describes his 
interactions with local citizeniy. His account of a sojourn in Iceland 
and, in particular, his encounters with the "dazzling Icelandic horses," 
brings to life the singular beauty of the Icelandic landscape and is one 
of the most interesting and rewarding parts of the book 

Weier's real subject, however, is himself, and he devotes much of 
the book to his interior journeys. One of the strengths of the book is 
in Weier's recounting of Maiy's struggle with breast cancer and the 
resulting breakdown of their marriage. In these observations, Weier 
writes compellingly, unsentimentally and with great candour about the 
cracks that can develop in a relationship in times of stress. 

Stand the Sacred Tree will be of particular interest to readers of 
Weier's other books and to those looking for a very personal take on 
the travel memoir. 

Barbara Simler 
White Rock, BC 



Book Reviews 237 

Carrie Snyder, Hair Hat. Toronto: Penguin, 2004. Pp. 
213. Softcover, $24.00. 

In this collection of linked short stories, Carrie Snyder writes with 
powerful subtlety. The central theme of Hail- Hat is loss in its many 
guises: a young woman gone missing from the streets of Vancouver; 
a baby given up for a adoption; a mastectonly; various forms of rob- 
bely, betrayal, and sudden death. In the context of these losses, the 
characters' deepest griefs and secrets are skillfully revealed through 
sinall gestures and casual comments. In "Harassnlent," for example, 
the narrator's decision not to leave his usual six-cent tip at a coffee 
shop reveals the inner demons that make him slightly threatening 
to others, though he himself is unaware of it. And in the middle of 
"Yellow Cherries," the narrator lets drop one simple, chilling sentence 
that splits the stoly wide open, tingeing its every detail wit11 horror. 
Snyder has a talent for investing ordinary objects with meaning - a 
dil-ty shower curtain, a stolen CD player, and a child's teddy-bear chair 
all carry a rich, metaphorical resonance that's introduced with a light, 
deft touch. The only object in this book that seems overburdened with 
significance is the hair hat of the title. 

The collection's title refers to a character who appears in evely 
story, a man whose hair has grown into the shape of a hat. As a unifying 
central image, the hair hat fails. It is impossible to picture (despite the 
little cartoon illustrations), and its presence in evely story begins to 
seen1 forced, even gratuitous, distracting the reader from the strengths 
of Snyder's writing, which needs no such gimmicks to succeed. The 
hair hat man is perhaps intended as a structural device to tie the stories 
together, but the stories are already convincingly connected by theme, 
narrative structure, and characters who know each other. Ultimately, 
by promising inore than it delivers, the hair hat disappoints. When we 
finally meet him, the hair hat man's explanation is anticlimactic: "I 
wanted to do something different, to feel different" (178), he says. We 
learn that his hairstyle is a response to devastating loss, but the reason 
behind this bizarre response remains a loose end. 

The strongest stories in the collection are "Yellow Cherries," about 
a young girl's fall from innocence; "The Apartment," about a lonely 
landlady's need to invade her tenants' privacy; and "Tumbleweed," 
about a mother's attempt to ignore the pain of her failing marriage. In 
each of these stories, Snyder touches on human failure with grace and 
compassion, drawing her characters with swift, telling strokes. The 
strongest story of all is "Personal Safety Device," narrated by Jenny, 
a young college student who discovers that the boy she likes has been 
charged with a series of rapes. Her reaction to this discovely reveals 
her conviction that she's been left out of evelything. In the stoiy's 



238 Jounzal of Meizizoizite Studies 

comic opening scene, Jenny meets a salesman who tries to interest her 
in his product, the "personal safety device" that comes with a battery 
pack and convenient carlying case, and can be purchased for a mere 
$19.95 a month. There are several levels of irony at work here. Jenny's 
awkward unattractiveness has been a kind of built-in safety device 
that has kept her out of the rape suspect's range. On another level, her 
self-centeredness "protects" her from getting close to anyone. Near 
the end of the story, she is humiliated after tripping and falling in front 
of the other students, but as she rises, assisted by ubiquitous hair hat 
man, she realizes that no one has even noticed: 

Everyone else had turned away, dispersing. They were 
lousy with previous commitments: telephones ringing, email 
unwritten, notes unstudied, friends guffawing, teachers 
flirting, beer to drinlr, girls to rape, lies to tell. They could not 
care less about my clumsiness, my efforts and attempts, my 
foolish, foolhardy falls. (56) 

Snyder's insight into the human ego is often, as here, surprisingly 
unpleasant: 

Jenny's ultimate epiphany is undercut by her bitter self-pity. 
I11 a book that features loss as its central theme, the personal 
safety device may make a better central image than the hair hat. 
With its easy payment plan and batteries included, it serves as 
an ironic reminder of our vulnerability and the futility of our 
attempts to protect ourselves from loss or harm. 

Catherine Hunter 
University of Winnipeg 

Nathan Dueck, king's(mk7-e). Winnipeg: Turnstone, 2004. 
Pp.69. Softcover, $15 Cdn. 

In a first book from a young Mennonite writer one usually finds at 
least a few poems dealing with some aspect of Mennonite experience. 
There is none of that here. Neither is there any trace of the autobio- 
graphical or confessional material that often appears in a young poet's 
first book. It's as if Nathan Dueck has skipped the first book altogether 
and gone straight on to his second. 

Seen in the wider context of Canadian poetly, however, Dueclc's 
book fits in. l c i ~ z g ' s ( m 6 1 - e )  is a long poem (perhaps a prose poem) 



Book Reviews 239 

rather than a collection of poems. While admittedly an ill-defined 
form, the long poem has been prominent in Canadian literature since 
the nineteenth century. And the long poem as imagined biography1 
autobiography is also a well-established genre that includes works like 
Stephen Scobie's And Forget My Name: a speculative biography of bob 
dylan and Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy tlze Kid. 

kiizgls(mere) is an imagined life of William Lyon Mackenzie King, 
Prime Minister of Canada in the 1920s and through the Second World 
War. The title is a pun, of course: Kingsmere, in the Gatineau Hills of 
Quebec, was the site of Mackenzie King's summer home; but ~7~27-e 
refers to his mother Isabel, to whom he was extremely devoted. Many 
more puns follow (perhaps a few too many on the name Willy), as 
well as much alliteration and word association. It's playful, restless 
language that takes Mackenzie King's stoly, tosses it around, turns it 
upside-down and shakes it to see what falls out. 

Dueclc draws on historical sources to create a fictionalized portrait 
of a man who is even stranger than most people thought. Mackenzie 
King was known during his lifetime as a mild-mannered, slightly dull 
bachelor, and after his death as a closet eccentric who communed 
with the spirit of his dead mother. The Mackenzie King in this book is 
passionate, lustful, sentimental, anxious, and at times immature. He 
has a relationship with his mother that goes beyond devotion, and loves 
his dog as if it were a son. As one of the back cover blurbs says, Dueck 
mythologizes an already mythic character and makes him larger than 
life. 

Not much of what's in here looks like poetry. The text is composed of 
newspaper columns, fragments of dialogue, faux scripture, the text of 
a comic strip, letters and diary entries, among other things. Mackenzie 
King's voice is prominent, but we also hear his mother's voice, as well 
as her mailman's, the voice of Mrs. Wriedt, the medium, and the voice 
of a hospital nurse with whom Mackenzie King falls in love. 

Poet Rob McLennan describes a long poem as "sequences of 
fragments that hold faster than any adhesive." This book feels like it 
shouldn't work - the component parts are just too widely disparate 
-but it does. The parts don' t make much sense individually, but they 
gain meaning from being placed together. The text turns into a collage 
of found objects that, when viewed from the right distance, resolves 
itself into a discernible shape. While it's hard to find individual lines 
that demand to be quoted, the book nevertheless gives an overall 
impression of coherence. 

One has to ask, of a new book about someone well-known, does this 
add something valuable to what we already know about Mackenzie 
King? I think the answer is yes. Dueck doesn't contribute any new 
knowledge of Mackenzie King, but he doesn't intend to. What he does 



do is take a well-known story and give it the new form and flavour that 
make it his own. 

I t  took me a while to grow accustomed to Dueck's style, and I'm 
not sure I've warmed to it even after several readings. Still, I can't 
help admiring what he accomplishes here. Nathan Dueclc is a writer 
to watch. 

Joanne Epp 
Winnipeg, Manitoba 

Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness. Toronto: Alfred 
A Knopf Canada, 2004. Pp. 246. Hardcover, $29.95. 

Perhaps the greatest kindness one can do Miriam Toews' most 
recent novel is not review it at all but simply continue the nation-wide 
conversation that's been provoked by the voice of Nomi Nickel, the 
16-year-old protagonist and narrator. Typically, a reviewer comments 
dispassionately on intricacies of plot, layers of meaning, integrity of 
character development, multiplicity of themes, and depths of symbolic 
richness. None of these elements is readily evident in A Comnplicated 
Kindrzess. Most striking in this novel is its voice, a strident, bleak teen- 
age voice that makes dispassionate obseivation nearly impossible. Every 
review I have read focuses on the voice--or evades it by commenting on 
other reviews. The people I've spoken to about the novel do the same. 

The conversation began for me even before I'd read the novel. 
Non-Mennonite colleagues and friends kept asking if such a funda- 
mentalist, isolated Mennonite community was realistic and did I know 
about shunning. Mennonite friends were similarly eager to enter 
the dialogue begun by Nomi-precocious, depressed, and desperate 
Nomi, determined to s c h p u t  (mock) her way to freedom from the 
self-righteous, surreal town from which her sister and her mother 
have already, separately, vanished. Nomi offers what seem like random 
explanations and bits of stories, linked by her idiosyncratic patterns 
of association, and she pleads with us to understand. Like the school 
counselor she visits briefly and unproductively, we risk not hearing 
her need for clarity and security if we focus too closely on the bad-girl 
image she projects - the ultra-good-girl behavior of her early years 
having brought only guilt and fear. 

Many who read the boolc with immediate delight find it humourous: 
"wickedly funny" is a favorite label. I, on the other hand, agree entirely 
with a Mennonite friend who described it as, "possibly the saddest 
boolc I've ever read." It's not that I didn't get the Mennonite jokes; 



Book Relrielvs 241 

I understand Low German. Indeed, having grown up in a Mennonite 
community as fundamentalist, if not quite as ingrown, as Nomi's, my 
childhood self was just as terrified as hers of the Rapture and of Hell. 
Perhaps I identify too closely with both Nomi's fears and the hollow 
laughter that attempts to purge both bitterness and anger. 

The novel's uneven tone triggers such completely disparate 
responses. It edges too close to caricature to be a believable and 
compassionate examination of a tragic situation (family dysfunction 
and disintegration; a father's emotional and mental instability; a best 
friend's depression; a boyfriend's rejection), yet is far too painful and 
realistic to function as satire. Nomi's preoccupations veer wildly from 
the trivial to the profound, just as her language swings between the 
annoyingly incorrect ("me and Travis") and the surprisingly articulate: 
"The other day," Nomi explains early in the novel, 

I found [my mother's] passport in her drawer [ . . . ] I wish 
I hadn't. [ . . . ] I sat on my dad's bed and flipped through 
page after empty page. [ . . . 1 Just the ID information and 
my mother's black-and-white photo which, if it were used in 
a psychology textbook on the meaning of facial expressions 
would be labeled: Obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful. (21) 

In that regard, Toews has accurately registered a teenage mind with 
its uncertain expression and even more uncertain self-knowledge. The 
voice is appropriately fragmented, struggling to make itself heard and 
to find coherence in a situation that makes no sense. 

A voice like Nomi's makes demands that not all readers are prepared 
to meet. I found the complete immersion in a teenage perspective claus- 
trophobic, particularly on the first reading. On subsequent readings, I 
could see that Nomi actually addresses two audiences - the general, 
real, presumed non-Mennonite reader, and the English teacher to 
whom Nomi feels she has to explain herself. Much of my initial tedium 
was replaced, on a second reading, with genuine sympathy, but I still 
resist the novel's uneasy mix of bleakness and grim amusement. The 
chaos and claustrophobia of adolescence are exquisitely rendered but 
yield only a limited aesthetic effect. 

For readers like me, the novel's chief strength is in its brief 
moments of devastatingly accurate perceptions of life and theology 
in East Village: "It's hard to grieve in a town where everything that 
happens is God's will," Nolni explains at one point. "It's hard to know 
what to do with your emptiness when you're not supposed to have 
emptiness" (173). Elsewhere, with one brief sentence, she dismisses 
the dubious relationship between isolation and goodness: "Somehow 
all the problen~s of the world manage to get into our town but not the 



242 Jotinla1 of Meiliaoitite Studies 

strategies to deal with them" (52). She herself is apt testimony of the 
truth of that conclusion. 

Edna Froese 
St. Thomas More College 
Saslcatoon, Saskatchewan 

D o u g l a s  I s a a c ,  P a s t ,  P r e s e n t :  T e n s e  ... O t t a w a :  
BuschekBooks 2004. Pp. 95. 

Douglas Isaac invokes his muse - whom he addresses as "meine 
Ohma"(9) - in order to gain the insight necessaiy to "divine the clan 
histoiy that befuddles me"(l0) and to "relive our people's struggle," 
before asking her to see "what a wretch I have become" (11). How 
Mennonite can you get? It 's all there - the obsession with the family 
stoiy, the fascination with the Anabaptist stoly (especially the gory bits) 
and the self loathing for never being good enough to live up to those 
stalwart souls who suffered long before helwe adopted a comfortable 
position in front of the computer. 

There is an awful lot of naming going on. Wretch is not the only 
name the poet calls himself; he is also: 

"a contortionist in avoidancelof confrontation" (23) 
"Such a spoiled male child"(24) 
"an undecided" (36) 
a Black sheep", "Prodigal son" (only the first two of a six 

point list) (47) 
an "Insufferable self-centered egotist"(courtesy of his 

grandfather, Peter P., who haunts the book) (48) 
a "HYPOCRITE" (SO), a "bad boy" (50) 
"Mien lcleinet jungtje" (courtesy of Ohma) (51) 
"Doglass7'(by his g r a n d f a t h e r )  (52 a n d  every i n s t a n c e  
subsequently) 
"I, the author" (56) 
"ethnic" (57) "ETHNIC MENNONITE (Light)" (59) 
"child of darkness and death"(58) 
"this nun-ator" (by Peter P) (60) "the narrator" (63) 
"l~npotent gmrzdson" (67) 
a "dilettante, acting glib and tough (71) 
"simnply a clzronicler/ here, a n  occasional apologist"(73) 
"a real man" (75) 



Book Reoienrs 243 

"a Phoenix" (75) 
"saga-weaver" (79) 
11~ir7zp1y 17zadlas the rest of us" (82) 
"slightly mad, visionaly, manic/depressive" (89) 
"a poet"(90) 

Unfortunately, although he is a poet, he is not yet a good one. This 
poet draws attention not only to himself but also to the text, which, after 
the 2oth century, we readers know cannot be trusted. In case we're not 
quite sure what we're reading, Isaac lets us know, drawing attention to 
the text, his story, describing it variously as: 

"ancestral history"(32) 
"epic" (32'43) a mock epic narrative (49) 

"machinations" (40) 
"fabulations" (58) 
"decoizstructirzg this" (61) 
"My saga" (63) 
"coizfessioiz" (63) 
"mythic, a mere conceit poetic" (68) 
"a history fabulated" (70) 
"tlzis tale (75) 
"Another in the inventory of fictions"(76) 
"revelations/ I bring"(77) 
"this narrativeW(84) 
"this poem" (89) 

There is a feverish energy in Isaac's desire for recounting: 
Menno; Buekels; Claas Epp; his association with revolutionaries; his 
metamorphosis into a Phoenix forcing sex during a Russian Mennonite 
bacchanal- all propel the bad-boy image, "playing soccer solitaire 
with the head/ of a young virgin. Her golden tresses/swirl, crimson 
rooster-tails in mire" (39). Excluding only his venerable "Ohma," 
women generally fare poorly in this narrative, as do most of the men. 
In this stoly, there is really no one we can root for. 

This work is prosaic, even within the relative leniency of the narra- 
tive long poem. Poetry, even narrative poetly, is tight as a sharply made 
bed and convincing. Isaac's offers messy post-modern bedclothes, 
another re-telling of sometimes Anabaptist, sometimes Mennonite 
history, and some rooting around the family tree. He begins by asking 
his ohma for insight and concludes with what he has seen. 

I have witnessed child-hookers not 
taking Jesus as their saviour, but using 



244 Jotn-nal of Mem~ozdte Studies 

hallways to do their johns (respected 
members of the bench, financiers, poets). 

I've bleached works for junkies 
trembling too much to tie the tubing 
on - oh yes Olzrna - I've seen it all 

But what he's seen is not in this poem. And that's the problem and the 
hope. Isaac could let the ego stand, drop the dated post-modern pose 
and the false humility, and show us, instead, what he's seen. 

Victor Enns 
Winnipeg, Manitoba 

Lorraine Janzen, Learning to see in the dark. Toronto: 
Wolsak and Wynn, 2003. Pp. 78. 

"This is the shape of love, the heft and hew" - a promising opening 
for what turns out to be a middling collection of poetry, the first by 
Lorraine Janzen, a writer who teaches English at Nippising University 
in Nortl~ Bay. 

Despite occasional flashes of illumination, what's missing here is 
the rhythm of poetly, the economy of language that invites a reader 
into a writer's persuasive realm. In the section titled, "The Discovely 
Poems," the image of the sidewalk jump-rope over the dust of people 
"carrying a cultural memory" (17) names Mennonites' displacement 
of aboriginals and induces forms of white guilt, but it makes for poor 
poetry. This section includes some of the most prosaic writing of the 
collection, though it makes the interesting point that Mennonite faith 
hinged on the discovely of language, the power of words, with the result 
that they were "martyred over metaphors, insisting on symbols / to the 
lastn(18). 

T11e ambiguous line breaks, early on, disrupt the reading ("Like 
a beaultiful .. ., or "dis/covering") but thankfully these seem to fade 
away midway through the collection, as does occasional silliness like 
the paradox, "Inevitable. Unexpected" (26). 

"Always wear a slip, or things my mother taught me" (30) is a tribute 
but it isn't poetry, sliding, as it does, into greeting card sentimentality. 
After two relatively strong stanzas with concrete, though familial-, 
images of canning, we come to the admonition, "To take pleasure in the 
moment" (32) and end with a list of lessons; the emphasis on woman's 
wisdom concludes with "the love to carly on." 



Book Reviews 245 

I love pie and dug right into her "Pie Poems," one of the best pieces 
in the collection. The extended metaphoi*, though, runs into trouble. 
Pastly can only take you so far before it falls apart in your hands and 
when we get to "Doing and doughing / all of your days" (44), we've all 
had enough. 

We dress for Sundays. We've all been to church. Alleluia, what a pew. 
She nails the afternoon remembering "the grief / of lace doilies and 
cyclamen and African violets" (25) in "Sunday Best," which resonates 
for anyone who has been to church and to grandma's of a Sunday. 

The work generally seems to improve a s  it moves along to 
"graveyard tunes" (53). Of death in "Dead Secret," Janzen concludes, 
"Some things are better left busied. / Light a candle and leave." Good 
work surfaces in "Seasonal cycle," particularly in the third "Lady Of 
the Lakes" movement where "The sudden scent of summer mint / 
bringing sweetness to all this light"(73) manages to be both startliilg 
and fresh. 

Overall, though, there is a looseness of language in this work, a 
slackness of purpose that invites our attention to wandel-. It seems, in 
this collection, that we've left the old countly, bringing with us long 
narrative lines that can, by now, only be spoken in English and are 
difficult to turn into poetry. Cariying a narrative in poetry is always 
hard work; ultimately, in this collection, the stoiy is not enough. 

Victor Enns 
Winnipeg, Manitoba 

Armin Wiebe, Tatsea. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 2003. Pp. 
249. Paper, $18.95 

Will every reader of this wonderful book express surprise at 
Armin Wiebe's departure from his earlier worlc? Wit11 The Salvatiorz 
of Yasch Siernerzs, Murder irz Guterzthal, and The Secolzd Corning of 
Yeeat Shparzst, Wiebe has developed and sustained a reputatioil as 
the comic genius of souther11 Manitoba Mennonite life. Tatsea takes 
us far from Wiebe's trademark antics, sets us down in 1760, in the 
midst of Dogrib life in what is now the Canadian subarctic, and tells a 
story that threatens tragedy far Inore often than it celebrates comedy. 
Ultimately, though, this is an extraordinary stoiy of life-affirming love 
and a representation of Dogrib life before encounters with Eui-opeail 
technologies wreaked irrevocable cultural change. 

The novel begins focused on Tatsea, a strong-minded young Dogrib 
woman constrained, for the first time in her life, to the menstrual hut 



246 Journal ofMe?t?zo?tite Studies 

when what she really wants is to steal away to go swimming. The nar- 
rative promptly shifts to introduce the other main character, Ikotsali, 
the fi-og-faced man who is a remarkably adept hunter possessed of 
legendaly dream power; the hero of one of the group's central survival 
stories; and, incongruously, an outsider amongst his own people. The 
narrative promptly explains that incongruity by describing Ikotsali's 
physical defects, his small size, his hunched back, and the congenital 
skin condition that covers his face with oozing boils. 

When Iltotsali rescues Tatsea's father from certain death, he earns 
the right to take Tatsea as wife, a situation that gives him great pleasure 
but mortifies Tatsea, repulsed as she is by the sores on his face. When 
she gives birth, however, she finds herself drawn, against her inclina- 
tion, to Ikotsali's unfailing gentleness and the surprising pride and 
interest he shows in their girl-child. At this relatively lyrical point, 
the narrative takes off: early on a summer morning, after Ikotsali has 
left to collect birchbark and Tatsea has departed some little distance 
to bathe and swim, their camp is attacked by a group of Enda (Cree) 
raiders who kill and scalp eveiyone they find. They take Tatsea as 
their lone captive but not until after she has managed to hide her baby 
daughter high in a tree. 

The rest of the novel is the story of the lovers' -for they become more 
thoroughly lovers in their separation than they have ever been before 
- struggle against extraordinaiy odds to be reunited. The narrative 
shifts regularly from Tatsea's story to Ikotsali's, juxtaposing their dif- 
ferent situations: Tatsea the captive of first one group of Enda and then 
another till she arrives at an English f ~ ~ r - t r a d i n g  fort; Ikotsali struggling 
to keep their baby daughter alive and to find his wife. Throughout, 
Tatsea and Ikotsali are linked by dream visions of one another. Indeed, 
Wiebe's skillful use of magic realism respectfully evokes traditional 
dream power and intensifies the gripping adventure that unfolds. 

Of all this wonder-full story's magical elements, perhaps the most 
poignant is its representation of a male member of a male-dominated 
society so determined to keep his baby daughter alive that he nurses 
her himself and in the process, forms an unbreakable bond with her. 
At one point, having found another group of Dogrib people, Ikotsali is 
directed to a young widow, a nursing mother who generously agrees to 
feed his daughter: 

Ikotsali shuddered with joy and with sadness when he placed 
Tatsea's child i n  Dagodichih's arms and helped the huilgly 
mouth find the overflowing breast. 

But Tatsea's daughter refused the noisy widow's milk, howled 
relentlessly until she was inside Ikotsali's shirt again, sucking 



Book Rel~iems 247 

ravenously while her father dripped warm fisli soup from the 
hollow swan's-leg drinking tube. (101) 

Like Rudy, the other Wiebe famous for his depictions of encounters 
between First Nations people and Europeans, Armin Wiebe credits 
a variety of documentary sources. My particular familiarity with 
Samuel Hearne's A Jour-rzey from Prirzce of Wales's Fort multiplied 
my pleasure at this novel's twenty-first chapter, since Tatsea becomes 
there the remarkable young Dogrib woman whom Hearlie and his 
party discovered in Janualy 1772 surviving alone on the Barrens. Lilie 
Rudy Wiebe as well, Armin Wiebe invites the possibility of censure on 
the grounds of cultural appropriation, but I am not the right reader 
to issue that criticism: I was thoroughly drawn in to this delicately 
sketched and compelling stoly of devotion, fidelity, and endurance, 
both in the material, observable, world and in spiritual realms outside 
of time and space. 

Kathleen Venema 
University of Winnipeg 

Julia Kasdorf, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yodev, Amish 
American. Telford, PA: Pandora, 2005. Pp. 280. Paper, 
$34.95 Cdn. 

Julia Icasdorf's biography of Joseph W. Yoder (1872-1956), author 
of Rosanlza oftlze Amislz (1940) - which the Melznorzite Encyclopedia 
identifies as "a semifictionalized biography" - is a welcome and engag- 
ing study of a popular American Mennonite writer and his time. Fixing 
Traditiorz: Joseph VI! Yoder; Amish Arnericalz is volume 4 of Bluffton 
College's C. Henry Smith series, which, according to series editor J. 
Deiiny Weaver, is intended "to publish interdisciplinary and multi- 
disciplinaly scholarship for the service of the church." To be sure, 
as Weaver says, Joseph W. Yoder has been "virtually an unklzown" in 
ArnishIMennonite circles - apart, that is, from some 425,000 individuals 
who have, since 1940, bought (and presumably read) his Rosamza. As a 
gigantic figure on the landscape of popular North American Mennonite 
literature, he cannot be ignored. 

Julia Kasdorf remarks in her preface that she came to the life of 
Joseph W. Yoder "as a poet and writer," believing at first that he could 
show her "how a person can become an author and also remain part 
of the Mennonite community" (13), how a person born into a minority 
culture might "become an artist without breaking ties with his place 



and people of origin" (13). As often happens in an archive-based 
project such as this, Kasdorf's research led her well beyond this 
initial question to the explication, for example, of Yoderls embrace of 
muscular Christianity, "a literary, religious, and social movement" that 
"sought to develop strength of character through sport" (67); his career 
as a musician, singing teacher and college recruiter; and his decision, 
in the late 1930s (when he was almost 70 years old) to write and publish 
a book that would "tell the truth" about his people, the Amish (152). 

This volume will attract readers who are curious about Yoder as well 
as readers attracted by Kasdorf, herself a prominent poet in American 
Mennonite circles. All will find much to savour here. Kasdorf as poet 
is discernible in the book's compelling preface and epilogue, where 
she presents, as contextual bookends to the Yoder narrative, her own 
experience as a minority-culture writel: As author of the biography 
itself, Kasdorf the poet stands apart, her absorbing and easy-to-read 
biographical text driven by available fact and anecdote. 

Even though Yoder's intriguing stoly occupies over two hundred 
pages of the text, the man himself remains surprisingly elusive. We 
learn enough about his activities to wonder what motivated him to 
live as he did, but Kasdorf's remarks finally reveal little about what 
actually drove this man, who seemed to love drawing attention to 
himself; who lived for eighteen years with a male friend (John M. 
Hooley) and his wife; who married for the first time at age 60; and who 
became "increasingly shrill" (232) and "obnoxious" (197) in his later 
years. Near the middle of her study Kasdorf observes that even though 
Yoderls life was "thoroughly documented in published memoirs and 
through preserved correspondence," he "left no traces of his eighteen- 
odd years of living with the Hooley family" (119). This observation 
would seem to invite further probing, but Kasdorf, here as elsewhere 
in the text, resists exploring further, and offers no speculation about the 
nature of the YoderIHooley relationship, except to remark in passing 
that it went through a "period of turbulence and uncertainty" (124) 
before the household split up. 

The story of Yoder's wife, Emily Lane, who lived with Yoder for 
the eight years immediately preceding the publicatioi~ of Rosanna, is 
also shrouded in mysteiy. Here, too, Kasdorf refrains from adequately 
problematizing an apparently huge gap in her story. She introduces 
Emily merely as "a striking, white-haired woman who wore 'stylish 
clothes" (134), relnarlcing that she was an "independent, forward 
thinking" Presbyterian who "supported temperance and women's 
suffrage" (135). Nowhere does she probe the role Yoder's wife might 
have played in the controversial, proto-feminist activities of his later 
life. If Yoder lived with Emily until his death in 1956 (Kasdorf reveals 
nothing about Emily's fate, so the reader has no ltnowledge of when 



Book Reviews 249 

she died), she would have spent 24 years as his companion. But she 
occupies only three paragraphs of text. 

These two instances - Yoder's life with Hooley and with Emily 
- demonstrate the challenges of a work such as Kasdorf's. Like any 
biographer, Kasdorf was limited in her research by the number and 
nature of her sources. (I remember my husband Paul and I driving her 
to Aylmer, Ontario in March 1995, to interview David Luthy at the Old 
Order Archive there - Kasdorf 's only Canadian encounter, which yielded 
little.) Although her many interviews and substantial work in archives 
garnered an enormous amount of fascinating material about Yoder's 
public life, the man himself remains, in large measure, a mystely, and 
the deeper currents that might account for his life remain unplumbed. 

As for the volume itself, I would have wished that more attention 
had been paid to ensuring textual exactitude: many typos in the work, 
along with syntactical and other errors, unnecessarily undermine the 
best efforts this series and this volume represent. The brief caption 
for the illustration on page 53 (one of several veiy interesting and 
illuminating photographs in the text), which begins with Yoder's father 
Crist being referred to as "Christ" and includes other glitches as well, 
is an example of the technical errors that pepper the book. 

Joseph W. Yoder's Rosanlza of the Anzish remains an Amish/Men- 
nonite best-seller. Kasdorf's study is a significant and captivating 
contribution to the burgeoning North American literature by and 
about Mennonites. One of the revelations of Kasdorf's study -- that 
Yoder's life story resists conforming to any straight-forward binaly 
reading of the relationship between a minority-culture writer and his 
world -- serves to inform our understanding of Mennonite literaly lives 
and literary texts in general. I hope others will take up the challenge 
Kasdorf throws out in this substantial exercise. May we see many 
more studies of Amish/Mennonite writers and the diverse cultural 
landscapes they inhabit. 

Hildi Froese Tiessen 
Conrad Grebe1 University College 
University of Waterloo 

Ervin Beck, MennoFolk. Studies i n  Anabaptist a n d  
Mennonite History, No. 43. Scottdale PA: I-Ierald Press, 2004. 

Ervin Beck, former Professor of English at Goshen College, has 
compiled essays based on years of study into a single book examining 
the folk traditions of modern Mennonites. Most of his material concerns 



250 Jol~nlal of Meizizonite Studies 

the (Old) Mennonite Church community of Swiss-German origin, with 
a smaller amount from Amish and Hutterite communities. The topics 
are wide ranging, and include folk tales, jolces and songs, as well as 
material culture such as painted glass and family record plaques. 
This range of material provides an introductory oveiview to topics 
previously neglected, in the hope that more interest will be generated 
in this type of study. 

The book will provide surprises to some readers. The old folk 
tale of Menno Simons' evasion of capture on a carriage can also be 
attributed to a host of other religious leaders in different countries at 
roughly the same time. This story is part of a larger corpus of tales and 
jolces regarding Mennonites' ambiguous relationship with the truth: 
they were, it turns out, once considered inveterate liars, cheats, and 
triclcsters. 

At times Beck could have gone further and deeper in his analysis of 
follc tales. In one old story Menno is interrupted in his preaching by the 
authorities. In his haste to escape he falls into the barrel of molasses on 
which he was standing, and is covered in the substance, which would 
have left an easy trail for his pursuers. To remedy the situation, "all 
the women in the front row each took one long lick of molasses off his 
hosen [leggings]. And that explains why Mennonite children in Holland 
to this day have a sweet tooth" (92). Beck rightly attributes this tale to 
the trickster tradition, but says nothing of its metaphors of authority 
and gender, sexuality, or progeny. 

Besides older folk tales, the author includes modern social phenom- 
ena such as urban legend, protest songs, and Relief Sale festivals. This 
raises a number of issues that are important in Mennonite studies, but 
for which there is no general agreement in either popular or academic 
discourse. Do modern Mennonite groups constitute ethnic groups? 
Certainly they did at one point, and the Amish and Hutterites are still 
considered as such among scholars. Ethnic groups are defined by both 
boundaries (maintained by the group and by outside forces) and inner 
cohesion (or understanding) in reference to dozens of criteria like 
language, politics, food, music, etc. Mennonites may thus be considered 
ethnic at certain times under certain conditions, when individuals may 
feel a desire to be so affiliated. Ethnicity then takes on a role in personal 
identity formation. Beck's collection of stories and interviews makes 
the argument that even though many mission oriented Anabaptists 
may feel that "Mennonites should not regard themselves as ethnics," 
the shared nature of their traditions constitute something of an ethnic 
coherence. Certainly the debate is still open. 

Another issue raised by the book as a whole is the importance of the 
"mundane" in historic or social studies. Beck claims Mennonite folk 
studies in general have been ignored by scholars and the public alike 



Book Reiienls 251 

because of their mundane nature, but that such studies can be quite 
revealing about cultural values as they relate to religious values. For 
example, in a chapter on "Inter-Mennonite ethnic slurs," it becomes 
obvious that differences between Mennonite communities run deeper 
than theological arguments. Boundaries are maintained by colloquial 
and slang oral practice. Mennonite folk traditions a r e  important 
because they are a part of daily life, and it is in the choices and practice 
of daily life that Mennonites have traditionally expressed their faith. 
Analysis of the mundane in Mennonite life will deepen an understand- 
ing of the interface of Mennonite theology and social interaction. 

Roland Sawatzky 
Mennonite Heritage Village 
Steiilbach, Manitoba 

History and Memoir 

Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death 
in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge, M A :  Harvard 
University Press, 2004. Pp. 463. US $29.95 

Karel Berkhoff, Associate Professor at the Center for Holocaust 
and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, has written a remarkable book 
about human agony and survival in the Ukrainian heartland occupied 
by German soldiers and civilians during World War 11. With exhaustive 
exploitation of available archival sources in Ukraine, Germany and 
Canada, he has given us a stellar example of Alltagsgeschichte. This 
type of histoly depicts life on the local level or describes the evelyday 
struggle for survival by Ukrainians, Jews, Russians, Ethnic Germans 
and other minority groups, including Mennonites, in the "Dnieper 
Ukraine." Nearly every endnote cites several primary sources in 
Ukrainian and Russian archives in the native language. This approach 
might suggest a pro-Ukrainian bias, but the broadly conceived thematic 
chapters demonstrate even-handed treatment of highly controversial 
issues. Sensational familiar events like the Massacre at Babi Yar do not 
inhibit systematic coverage of an ethos of destruction that pervades 
the entire Reichskommissariat Ukraine, which becomes a landscape 
of genocide in several ways. 

The two preliminary chapters, sketching the Soviet Ukraine at the 
time of the German invasion and the realm of the Reichskommissariat, 



252 Jounlnl of Menilonite Studies 

are adequate, although a fuller discussion of the political, diplomatic 
and theoretical background would have helped the non-specialized 
reader to understand the events on the ground during the period of the 
occupation, 1941 to 1944. The following chapters are more analytical 
than narrative and take the form of empirical accumulation of facts, 
events and attitudes leading to separate interpretive conclusions. They 
analyze the holocaust of Jews and Roma, prisoners of war, life in the 
countiyside, urban conditions, the artificially produced famine in Kiev, 
popular culture, ethnic identities and political loyalties, the practice 
of religion and piety, deportations and forced migrations. A general 
chapter entitled "Toward the End of Nazi Rule" describes the role of 
Soviet partisans, the "struggle against gangs" (anti-partisan activities 
of the SS), the brutal anti-Polish actiolls of Ukrainian nationalists and 
the violent reactions on all sides in the wake of the German retreat. 
There are surprises in nearly every chapter. 

Readers will not be surprised to learn that "the vast majority of 
non-Jews ... just stood by and watched" as the holocaust unfolded. 
Many will be reassured to read that among Ukrainians "the Baptists 
and evangelical Christians seem to have helped Jews the most." 
Some will question the following conclusion: "with regard to ethnic 
Germaiis, there are contradictory reports on their views of Jews, but 
evidence that any of them saved, or tried to save, a Jew has not been 
foul~d." (87-8). The German administration kept the collective farms 
intact and in the end made them even more exploitive, thus turning 
the initially friendly peasantiy against the occupiers with a vengeance. 
The massive depopulation of the cities and the lack of social solidarity 
is hardly surprising in the light of the deliberate starvation policies. 
This policy was designed to turn the Ukrainian population into servile 
supporters of the German Hen.e?zme~zschen and their Volksdeutsche 
allies who received material privileges. When evaluating ethnic 
identities and political loyalties, Berkhoff provides his readers with 
the biggest surprise of all. He asserts that "the Nazi regime had nearly 
no effect on the mental outlook of those who survived, thus rejecting 
the two prevailing schools of thought, one holding that the invaders 
solidified the Soviet peoples support for Stalin's dictatorship and the 
other one which believes that the peoples in Dnieper Ukraine became 
more conscious of nationhood. There was a modest religious revival, 
but it was limited to a continued conversioll to the Evangelical branch 
of Protestantism begun in late tsarist times. Berkhoff believes that "the 
widespread disinterest in the orthodox church and religion in general 
. . . changed little under the Nazi regime" (252). This assumes that the 
religious restoration in Mennonite villages recorded by memoirist 
like Jakob Neufeld and Anna Sudermann were subsumed under his 
categoiy of Evangelicals. 



Book Reviews 253 

Since Berlthoff's dissertation took form under the supervision of 
Paul Robert Magocsi at the University of Toronto, whose much broader 
work on the history of Ukraine gave proportionately more space to the 
Russian Mennonites, it is curious that the author of this book gives them 
rather cursoly uncritical treatment. Depending on somewhat outdated 
secondary sources and a single thin memoir, Berkhoff completely 
ignores a substantial secondary literature on Mennonites in Ultraine. 
He has mined the resources of the Ukrainian Center in Winnipeg but 
failed to explore any Mennonite archival collection. 

The picture of Himmler at Halbstadt reviewing young Mennonite 
recruits for a Waffen-SS Cavally Division with only minimal identifica- 
tion, as Mennonite pacifist youth volunteering to fight for HitlerYs 
imperium, is more than misleading. Similar pictures were published 
in Menrzorzite Li$e (1986) and there certainly has been no paucity of 
discussion by Mennonites of their falling from grace symbolized by 
the Halbstadt episode and the friendly attitude of Mennonite villagers 
toward the representatives of the Third Reich. In short, the Men- 
nonite experience of the occupation is not placed in the historical and 
ethnographic context the picture demands. Berlthoff has also missed 
an opportunity to mine two important recent books that impinge on 
the Mennonite experience, namely Michael Fahlbusch, Wisserzschaft 
irn Dierzst der rzatiorzalsozialistisclzerz Politik? (1999) and Andrej 
Angrick, Besatzzirzgspolitik zirzd Masserzmor-d (2003). The latter's 
examination of the murderous course of Einsatzgruppe D through the 
southern Ultraine reveals the presence of a young Mennonite police 
officer who was a deputy commander of Einsatzkommando 12. He 
was an aspiring teacher from Muntau in the Molochna and joined the 
NSDAP (the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) and the 
SS as early as 1931 in Danzig and the Security Service (SD) in 1936. 
He was responsible for organizing major massacres of Jews in Crimea 
and the Caucasus regions and is mentioned in a postwar Soviet war 
crimes trial at Krasnodar, first noted by Alexander Rempel, the son 
of a Russian Mennonite elder. Karel Berkhoff's picture of Mennonites 
under occupation in Ukraine is far from complete. 

Gerhard Rempel 
Jupiter, Florida 



Ruth Brunk Stoltzfus, A Way Was Opened: A M e m o i ~  
Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2003. Pp. 365. 

In this delightful book, readers hear the fascinating life story of 
Ruth BrunR Stoltzfus in her own unique and powerful voice, almost 
as though hearing it face-to-face in her living room. Through many 
personal quotes and journal entries, readers encounter this pioneer 
Mennonite woman minister's engaging personality. Ruth's steadfast 
faith in God, her zest for life, her deep love for family and her quick wit 
come through palpably in each chapter. In the end, one is impressed 
with the stalwart character of this woman, born of tall and strong Brunk 
stock (28). 

For this reason, the title A Way W a s  Opened strikes me as particu- 
larly unfitting for the unfolding events revealed within its pages. The 
passive voice of this title misrepresents the active role Ruth repeatedly 
took in finding ways to express her ministiy gifts. Ruth gives God 
credit for opening doors in her life saying, "God made a way when there 
wasn't any way for a woman to use the gifts the Spirit had given for 
public ministry" (14). Yet the stoiy Ruth tells makes abundantly clear 
that she was no passive partner in this process. This woman, driven by 
a deep sense of inner call, actively imagined doors of opportunity and 
found numerous ways to test if they would open for her. For example, 
after Ruth imagined a radio broadcast for women she and her husband 
proposed her idea to a United Church of Christ minister who had 
connections in the radio business. Ironically, in letters to her mother 
and her sisters, Ruth described this turn of events as "the opportunity 
that has been thrown right in my lap" (85). 

This savvy woman knew in her 1950s context that being too asser- 
tive was inappropriate for a respectable Mennonite woman. Later 
in the 1970s, she "prayed to God for strength to woi-lc for necessaiy 
change [to enable women's speaking ministries] with caution and with 
charity" (215). At various points, Ruth's memoir includes the critique 
she received from some men that she came across too strongly and 
threatened male leaders. It certainly is not the voice of one who pas- 
sively waits for a way to be opened for her who writes, "I answered that 
I refused to strive to be incompetent, and that men would have to grow 
up" (229). A Way W a s  Opened clearly reveals that many times, God 
and Ruth Brunlz Stoltzfus made a way where there was no way. Does 
the book title indicate that this ninety-year-old Mennonite minister 
still has to be careful not to come across too assertively in her church 
community? 

No matter the reason for this title, I recommend this memoir to 
anyone interested in the histoiy of Mennonite Church life between 
1915 and the present time. Pastors and teachers should recommend 



Book Reviews 255 

this book to Mennonite young people who have no experience of a time 
when Mennonite women were not allow to serve as ordained ministers. 
The painful and amazing stories of pioneer Mennonite women pastors 
must be heard and remembered. Ruth's memoir reveals the nitty-gritty 
of the controversy over women in ministly in her Virginia Conference 
context 

While not a scholarly work, this book provides historians of 
Mennonite histoiy a significant window into the lives of Grant and 
Ruth Brunk Stoltzfus and an important chronological account of their 
ministries. Historians of Mennonite theology, like myself, will be disap- 
pointed that this memoir does not disclose more fully the substance of 
the theology Ruth embraced and proclaimed through the years. What 
specific beliefs about malelfemale roles and relationships did she 
communicate to her largely female radio listeners in the 1950s? What 
sexual theology did she and Grant articulate through their Christian 
Family Service millistries started in 1958? While snippets here and 
there reveal something of Ruth's theology, a substantial picture is not 
given. 

Historians will find in this memoir a perspective on the well- 
known George Brunk I through the loyal heart and loving eyes of 
a daughter. Rut11 acknowledges her father was involved in church 
controversies (35) and indicates she was aware as a child that some 
people did not like her Papa. She never tries to argue that her father 
would have approved of ordaining women for ministly saying "we 
must be accurate in our words about him" (276). However, historical 
evidence would prove her own words inaccurate when she claims "my 
father.. .never said anything about the covering being a symbol for a 
woman's submission to her husband" (349). Nonetheless, historians 
will find Ruth's comments about the George and Katie Wenger Brunk 
family of keen interest. This autobiographical account of the strong 
female church leader produced by this family sheds new light on 
their stoiy. A Way Was Opened is a worthwhile and intriguing read. 

Brenda Martin Hurst 
Eastern Mennonite University 



256 Jounlal of Menlzoizite Studies 

Lawrence Klippenstein a n d  J a c o b  Dick, Mennonite 
Alteinative Sewice in Russia: The Story ofAbram Diick and 
His Colleagues 191 1-1 91 7. Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press 
and Herald Press, 2002. Pp. iv, 163. Paper, $20.00. 

Harvey L. Dyck, John R. Staples and John B. Toews, 
edited, translated, and introduction, Nestor Makhno 
and the Eichenfeld Massacre: A Civil War Tragedy in a 
Ukrainian Mennonite Village. Kitchener, O N :  Pandora 
Press, 2004. Pp. 115. Paper, $14.00. 

The years between the end of the Tsarist regime and the Communist 
Revolution continue to haunt the collective memory of Russian Men- 
nonites. The World War I period and the following Civil War in Russia 
were most traumatic for Mennonites there. If we were to extend the 
period to include the 1930s and 1940s, there seems little doubt that 
Mennonite suffering during the first half of the twentieth century 
equaled, perhaps exceeded, the suffering of the Anabaptists in the 
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The two booklets, published by 
Pandora Press, deal with two important historical developments. One 
deals with the Mennonites who served their country before and during 
the war, at the end of Mennonite life in Tsarist Russia. The other deals 
with a most horrible beginning during the revolutionaly period, namely 
destruction and death at the hands of lawless men. Both publications 
thus trace the beginning of the elid of Mennonite colnlnunal life in 
Russia as it had existed for some 130 years. 

In a sense Klippenstein and Dick's Melzizonite Altenzative S e ~ v i c e  
in Russia still expresses a degree of optimism and some hope for 
the future. Russian Mennonites entered the war with a willingness 
to serve their countly that had become their homeland. As a pacifist 
ethno-religious group, while wishing to remain true to their historic 
peace tradition, they willingly put their resources and lives on the line 
by caring for the wounded at the fronts, on Red Cross trains and in 
hospitals. Two of the Mennonite papers at the time urged their readers 
to take their service to Russia seriously. Editor Abram Kroeker wrote 
in the Friede~zsstimme just before the was: "Do we not owe it to our 
government and Russian neighbours to show that if a war ... broke out, 
we would be ready to serve the interests of the Fatherland [Russia], and 
to help the needy" (22)? Similarly, D. H. Epp, editor of Der Botschafter, 
wrote: "We need to show that we have kept the promise of faithfulness 
made to out forefathers ... our confession forbids us to spill blood, but 
binding wounds we hold to be a sacred duty" (22). 

Lawrence Klippenstein, who did his doctoral dissertation on 
Mennonite pacifism and state service in Russia, provides a helpful 



Book Reviews 257 

introduction in this book to alternative service (1-39), and Jacob Dick 
provides some stories from personal experiences of his father, Abram 
Diick, who served his countly in forestly and medical wol-k in the years 
1911 to 1917. 

The numerous black and white photographs in this book (43-163) 
tell us much about the Mennonite boys, Tjeadels, as they were called. 
These young men donned uniforms with shining buttons, they rode 
horses like soldiers--although they were not army men--they posed 
gladly, it seems, for photographs to be sent home, and their mustaches, 
which most of them wore, made them resemble Tsar Nicholas I1 whom 
they proudly sewed. 

When the war ended these Mennonite young men returned to their 
homes, farms and businesses, experiencing not only feelings of betrayal 
by the country they had served, but also violence, the scourge of civil 
was, banditry, murder, and the end of a life as they had known it. 

This tragedy is recorded in Nestor Makhizo and the Eichenfeld 
Massacre, published as part of the Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Stud- 
ies Series of the University of Toronto, with general editor Harvey L. 
Dyck and associate editor John R. Staples. The booklet is dedicated to 
the 136 Mennonite victims who were massacred by Nestor Makhno's 
men on October 26 to 27, 1919, in the Niliolaipole volost, Ukraine. On 
May 27,2001 descendants and friends of these murdered men, women 
and children gathered at the Eichenfeld/Dubovka site in Ukraine to 
remember these people's cruel fate. They placed a memorial stone in 
the form of a traditional Mennonite coffin--sculpted by Paul Epp--thus 
symbolically giving them a proper burial they had never received. 

In true Mennonite communal fashion, the commemoration and the 
production of the booklet included a number of participants, both Men- 
nonite and Ukrainian. The stoiy of the massacre is told by scholars and 
witnesses who were interviewed. Some eyewitness accounts, written 
originally in German in earlier publications like the Meizizonitisclze 
Rundschau (1926), were translated into English for this publication. 
Interviews of older Ukrainian people were conducted by Svetlana 
Bobyleva and colleagues (79-89). They retell stories of their parents 
and grandparents. Abram Kroeker's account of the killing of tent mis- 
sionaries (72-26), and Peter Letkemann's list of 136 names of victims 
underline the gruesomeness of the massacre. The moving homily at the 
site by John B. Toews, included here (96-101), speaks of "forgiveness 
and reconciliation and future friendship." 

While both Mennonites and Ukrainiails leave no doubt that the 
victims of the massacre had not deselved their fate, there are those, 
especially on the Ukrainian side, who "believed that Mennonite self- 
defense groups [Selbstsclzutz] had provoked retaliation by firing on 
Makhno's forces"(80). Mennonites themselves, "as a mainly religious 



258 Jouii~al of Menizoitite Studies 

community," according to the editors, "viewed Makhnovite butchely 
equally as the scourge of God, as recompense for their moral failings" 
in Russia. "But whether interpreted as deserved or not, suffering 
triggered a powerful revivalist, penitential mood among Mennonites 
that shaped their outlook for decades to come" (36). 

Indeed, questions and statements concerning the painful experi- 
ences at the time range from "We have sinned!" to "What would we 
have done in the face of rape and murder?" Some Mennonites still 
feel that armed resistance against the Makhno bandits was the right 
response. Others, at the time and later, believed that the formation of 
Selbstschzitz was a betrayal of the Mennonite peace principles. The 
memorial service at Eichenfeld/Dubovka, with its emphasis on peace 
and forgiveness is, no doubt, an appropriate response to violence. 

Harry Loewen, 
Kelowna, BC 

Adolf Ens, Becoming a National Church: A History ofthe 
Conference of Mennonites i n  Canada. Winnipeg: C M U  
Press, 2004. Pp. 258. Paper. 

Long time professor of history and theology at Canadian Mennonite 
Bible College (now University), Adolf Ens, provides readers with a 
detailed yet veiy readable account of the Conference of Mennonites 
in Canada's (CMC) almost century of existence (1903-1999). This is 
a wide-ranging story, but Ens organized the book-commissioned by 
the Heritage Committee of the former CMC-around the theme of 
churchly evolution toward national status and identity. In this sense, 
the volume provides background for understanding the 1999 formation 
of Mennonite Church Canada (MC Canada), the primary, though not 
direct or exact, successor to CMC. 

Ens begins with the settlement of Bergthaler immigrants in Manitoba 
and the coalescing of the Rosenorter Geineinde in Saskatchewan-two 
groups that initially formed the Conference of Mennonites in Central 
Canada, as the body was first known. Conference membership swelled 
with the arrival of thousands of additional Mennonite newcomers in the 
1920s and 1940s and spread east and west. Beginning in mid-centuiy, 
mission churches incorporated some First Nations people into the con- 
ference, and by the 1970s congregations consisting of Asian immigrants 
were joining. Ens also provides background on the so-called Swiss 
Mennonites of Ontario that became CMC members in 1995 as a result 
of inter-Mennonite conference integration in eastern Canada in 1988. 



Along t h e  way, E n s  describes t h e  expanding and changing 
understandings of home missions and overseas service, the emergence 
and consolidation of Bible schools, and various attempts to support a 
church periodical. Chapter 5, which recounts events during 1954-1971, 
portrays some of the most profound changes. These developments 
included language transition to English and new patterns of polity. 
Ens' analysis of polity matters is especially insightful, whether he 
is describing the break-up of multiple-meeting-place Gemeinde into 
stand-alone congregations, or the shift in centralized leadership from 
repeatedly reelected committee members to appointed and salaried 
executive staff. 

The book includes photographs, provincial maps, and a number of 
short primary source excerpts or anecdotes as sidebar illustrations. 
Appendices reproduce the 1904 constitution text, provide CMC 
leadership rosters and meeting chronologies. A series of nine tables 
(with extensive footnotes) reports information on each congregation 
admitted or withdrawn from CMC. 

As the title indicates, this is a history of the conference; in that 
sense it is primarily an institutional history, rather than, say, a social 
or theological one. For example, the bureaucratic restructuring that 
replaced the Board of Christian Service with the Congregational 
Resources Board becomes the opportunity to reflect on the changing 
ways CMC engaged peace and social issues. And while the CMC story 
intersects with the institutional histories of the provincial conferences 
and congregations, on the one hand, and the continental General 
Conference Mennonite Church and inter-Mennonite Canadian entities, 
on the other, Ens keeps the focus on CMC. This is appropriate, though 
readers less familiar with these other bodies may sometimes find all 
the organizational connections confusing. 

Becomirzg a Natioizal Church grew out Ens' close reading of primary 
sources generated by or for CMC. Perhaps predictably, this clear 
strength also becomes something of limitation, since the things that 
dominated those primary sources-position papers (Referate) in the 
early decades, programs and budgets in later years-drive the narra- 
tive, and context ends up being a bit thin at places. 

Helpful in the opening chapters, for example, was Ens' broader 
discussion of early twentieth-century Mennonites and politics, which 
drew on his previously published work. In contrast, toward the end 
of the book, I wished for more analysis from Ens on the emergence 
and meaning of national church status and identity. On the one hand, 
this national evolution seemed natural, given the distinctive features 
of the Canadian social environment and the frustrations inherent in a 
binational relationships dominated by U.S. agenda. At the same time, 
the move toward becoming a national church seemed almost haphaz- 



260 Jountal of iMeltlzoltite Studies 

ard. Perhaps the process was as unreflective as it appears here, but 
I wondered if narrative reliance on board minutes and delegate votes 
gave a more ad hoc feel to the s t o ~ y  than a less immediate perspective 
might have offered. 

Ens has written an informative book that will serve not only academ- 
ics, but also pastors and lay members of Mennonite Church Canada as 
they live with the legacies of CMC polity, priorities, and practices. 
It call also serve as a guide for MC Canada as that body continues 
to explore the implications of being a national church in relation to 
its own domestic neighbours and to a parallel U.S.-based Mennonite 
denomination. For that mattel; members of Mennonite Church USA 
would do well to read this book to understand better the background 
of their denominational sibling and to reflect on the meaning-new for 
them-of national church status. I hope all these audiences will give 
attention to this book. 

Steven M. Nolt 
Goshen College 

Edith Elisabeth Friesen, Journey Into Freedom: One 
Family's Real-Life Drama. Winnipeg, Man.: Raduga 
Press, 2003. Pp. 242. $34 Cdn. 

Justine D. Neufeld, A Family Torn Apart. Kitchener, O N :  
Pandora Press, 2003. Pp. 241. $26 Cdn. 

Over the past three generations scores of Russian-Mennonite 
refugees have recorded dramatic and moving stories of how they 
suffered persecution and violence in the brutal era that began with the 
Russian Revolution and continued through the Stalinist decades and 
World War 11. Through strong faith, courage and often miraculous luck 
these survivors were able to escape tyranny and terror and begin lives 
in a freer world. Many victims, of course, remained behind forever. 
These published memoirs are valuable as social histoly adding to the 
Mennonite stoly. Vicariously, we can experience with these survivors 
their unwavering faith and almost superhuman determination to 
overcome all obstacles and get on with their lives. 

For those who survived, their escape from violence and death 
opened up a freedom they had hardly dared to dream about. That is the 
persistent theme of Edith Friesen's Journey Iizto Freedonz, the story 
of her Dycli family which, after years of displacement, deprivation 
and brutal treatment, finally managed to emigrate to Canada after 



Book Reviews 261 

World War 1%. Their story is told as a "conversation" by the four 
Dyck siblings-Anne (the author-editor's mother), Lydia, Jol~ll and 
Martha-who were separately interviewed but whose comments have 
been spliced together to form a four-voice "interview" interspersed 
and enriched by Friesen with relevant historical slcetches and dramatic 
"imagine this" vignettes. This makes for an innovative format that 
works well most of the time but occasionally becomes a trifle artificial 
and repetitious. 

The Dyclcs were not a typical small-village Russian-Mennonite fam- 
ily. Raised in the urban setting of Nikopol, they were mostly unaware of 
their Mennonite identity, although they were staunch Christians. Grow- 
ing up in a city gave them a degree of sophistication-"street smarts", 
if you will. After losing their father in the witch-hunt thirties, they 
were left with their mother to fend for themselves. Anne, the eldest, 
became the acting head of the family as they scrabbled to lceep from 
starving. Through a series of almost incredible miracles they managed 
to survive and finally got to Germany, where they faced brutality afresh 
from advancing Russian troops. On one occasion mother Dyck and her 
three daughters were saved from being raped when the mother fell 
to her knees and began praying loudly in Russian, something she had 
never done before. As Anne says: "Her prayers must have frightened 
the soldiers because they ran away and left us alone." 

Although Friesen's book is skilfully crafted with various narrative 
techniques, she pushes her central theme of "freedom" to the point 
where it becomes somewhat tedious and confusing. Each chapter 
begins with three or four epigraphs on freedoin by writers ranging 
from Aristotle and Cicero to Einstein and Nelson Mandela and many 
more in between. These quotations describe and define so many dif- 
ferent kinds of ''freedom" that the reader will be more perplexed than 
enlightened by them. After all, when all is said and done all "freedoms" 
are fragile and incomplete and threatened by restrictions and the 
brutal facts of life. 

Justina Neufeld's A Farnily Torn A p a r t  deals essentially with the 
same tragically chaotic world as Friesen's book, but her stoly is told in 
a vely different way. Neufeld tells her touching--often harrowing--stoly 
in a direct, personal manner that ranges from simple narration to highly 
suspenseful and stirring stories artfully told. Justina was the youngest 
of ten children in the Neufeld family, with eight brothers and a sister. 
Father Neufeld was arrested during the Stalin purges and never seen 
again. Some of her brothers were conscripted into the German army 
later, and the whole family was scattered across half of Europe. Teen- 
aged Justina was sent to France to stay with her brother Gerhard and 
his wife, who were living there as refugees. She was never to see her 
mother again, as she and sister Anna were captured and sent back to the 



262 Joni-nal of lMennonite Studies 

Soviet Union. Two of her brothers courageously went bacli voluntarily 
so as to be re-united with the families they had left behind. 

Justina, like so many other Russian-Mennonite refugees, was 
rescued by those heroic and indefatigable MCC workers Elfrieda and 
Peter Dyck and sent to the U.S., where she was able to go bacli to school. 
An excellent student, she graduated from high school in record time 
and went on to college, where she earned a degree in nursing admin- 
istration and eventually an M.A in gerontology. But her good fortune 
in creating a fine new life for herself has not obliterated her past, 
especially the loss of her parents and several siblings. Having gone 
back to Uliraine several times to search for traces of her lost world, she 
closes her book with the confession: "What I lost cannot be found by 
going bacli. A small chamber in my heart remains empty" (236) Here 
again "fi-eedom" remains incomplete and tied to a bitter past. 

These two graphically told family odysseys are well worth reading. 
While they don't have quite the historical scope and diversity of such 
recent books as David Rempel's A Mennonite Family in Tsarist Russia 
and the Soviet Union (1789-1923) and Harry Loewen's collection 
Road to Freedom, they must be regarded as among the best of the 
Russian-Mennonite memoirs in English. Both books are vivified and 
personalized by appropriate family and scenic photos. Friesen's book 
merges different experiences and points of view into a comprehensive 
and affecting family history. Neufeld's story, by virtue of being told by a 
single narrator, achieves a gripping emotional intensity as she explores 
her inner self in the light of her own astonishing experiences and those 
of her family. 

Books like these remind us once again that our enduring Mennonite 
heritage has been forged in the fires of persecution and suffering over 
the centuries, and that it has again and again been revitalized by the 
unyielding faith and triumphant hope of those who survived to tell 
their stories. 

A1 Reimer 
University of Winnipeg 

Rudy P. Friesen with Edith Elisabeth Friesen, Building 
on the Past: Mennonite Architecture, Landscape and 
Settlements in RussialUkraine. Winnipeg, M B :  Raduga 
Publications. 2004. Pp. 752. 

Building on the Past is a massive catalogue of Mennonite archi- 
tecture in Russia. Winnipeg architect Rudy P. Friesen has expanded 



Book Reviews 263 

his previous effort, Into the Past (1996), to 752 pages. Based on his 
experience as an architect, his many travels to Ukraine and historical 
research, Friesen sets forth a comprehensive survey of Mennonite 
buildings and settlements in the former colonies. 

Friesen reigns in the breadth and diversity of his subject by 
organizing the data according to region and type (13 colonies, plus 
estates, urban centres, and forestry camps). He also creates a system 
of evolutionary phases of architectural development in the Mennonite 
settlements. This helps to define trends and places individual buildings 
in historical context. Viewing architectural change as "evolution", 
however, creates the impression that such shifts occur by themselves, 
inexorably and inevitably. This tends to 1-emove the builders and users 
from the architecture. Friesen's overlapping architectural phases 
include: Settlement (1789-1835), Progress (1835-1880), Flowering 
(1880-1914), Disintegration (1914-1999)' and Recovely (1999-present). 
Such categories are incomplete, but help to give a general sense of at 
least the author's understanding of the material. Loaded terms like 
"Progress" and "Flowering" are not particularly helpful, however, and 
these phases could also be interpreted as "expansion" and "decadence" 
respectively. 

Historical context is provided through a balanced presentation 
of Mennonite histoly and introductions to each colony chapter, as well 
as a history of each village presented in the book. This histoiy raises 
many questions and provides departure points for vasious readings or 
future studies of the built environment. How does the rise of Mennonite 
institutions in Russia after 1880, such as large schools, orphanages, 
and hospitals relate to the changing nature of the household and vil- 
lage community at that time? To what extent were these institutional 
buildings monuments to the wealthy patrons who planned and paid 
for their construction? Were Johan Cornies' reforms of Mennoilite 
domestic buildings followed in their entirety, or was there resistance 
and individual experimentation? How were labour activities and social 
interaction controlled in factoly and institutional settings, and how 
did this reflect class or ethnic distinctions? It was not Friesen's task 
to answer these questions, but they do arise from the abundance and 
detail of the material. 

Friesen's approach is that of an architect, with particular attention 
paid to stylistic influences (i.e. the "eclectic" late-1800s Russian 
approach, followed by the first "modernn movements such as Jugendstil 
and Art Nouveau), building materials, and decorative detailing. This is 
greatly supplemented by over a thousand images, which include recent 
and historic photographs, floorplans, and reproductions of historic 
advertisements. This mass of images threatens to overwhelm the 
book, but the layout design succeeds in balancing the visual material 



264 Jo1~17zal ofMennonite Studies 

with the text in an organized fashion. Photographs of tombstones, 
factoiy interiors, brickwork, window details, floors and gates all help 
to provide a more intimate sense of place, around which Mennonites 
made the daily decisions of their lives. 

Mennonites were evidently fully engaged in materiality, despite 
claims to the contrary, and like all societies used the built environment 
as symbolic setting for social inculcation. Factories, institutions, 
and estate mansions communicate power, wealth and permanence, 
and stand out in stark contrast to the poor villagers and peasants in 
the surrounding areas. There are parallels here with architectural 
developments of Mennonite churches in Canada and communities in 
Paraguay. As with many architectural studies, the homes and gathering 
places of the poor are not well represented, although this is partly due 
to poor preservation and a lack of written accounts associated with 
these buildings. Vernacular architecture can provide a great deal of 
information concerning social values and ethnic interaction, but again 
this would be beyond the scope of this present work. 

B~iildilzg OIZ the Past is ultimately a survey that helps to make sense 
of variety: one begins to understand the complexity and changes in 
Mennonite life through material culture. Urban and rural worlds 
contrast, simplicity is overwhelmed by the ornate and decorative, and 
the public and private take on a myriad of forms based on status and 
function. The book is essential for Mennonite historians and those 
interested in Russian Mennonite life, and will function as a handbook 
for anyone touring the former colonies. 

Roland M. Sawatzlcy 
Mennonite Heritage Village 
Steinbach, Manitoba 

Karl Koop, Anabaptist-Mennonite Confessions of Faith. 
The Development of a Tradition. Kitchener, O N :  Pandora 
Press, 2004. Pp. 178. Index. 

Koop has offered a clear and insightful study of a neglected aspect 
of Mennonite histoiy with the identity of the contemporaly Mennonite 
church in mind. But the conditions he proposes in order to make this 
coherent tradition useful carry significant implications. In the preface, 
he sets forth this argument: 

By moving beyond the early Anabaptist beginnings and 
giving attention to the Mennonite confessions of faith of the 



Boolc Reviews 265 

early seventeenth centuly, we can recognize an identifiable 
and coherent Anabaptist-Mennonite theological tradition. 
My conviction is that this tradition is an important horizon 
for viewing the past, and can be a point of departure for 
theologians, church leaders, missionaries and ecumenists 
in t h e  Anabaptist and Mennonite traditions who seelc to 
understand their own theological heritage, and who endeavor 
to articulate their convictions in the coiltext of the church and 
the world. (9) 

Koop studies three Confessions of Faith from the seventeenth 
centuiy: "The Short Confession" adopted in 1610 by the Waterlander 
Mennonites; the "Jan Cents Confession" adopted in 1630 by the Frisian 
and High German Mennonites; and the "The Dordrecht Confession" 
adopted primarily by the Flemish Mennonites in 1632. 

As Koop turns to the study of history, he has in mind present chal- 
lenges facing the Mennonite church. He asks about the role of doctrines 
and confessions in the Mennonite church, whether they are necessary, 
whether the writing of confessions belongs to a truly Mennonite or 
Anabaptist tradition or not, and how confessions can be embraced in 
a way that does not cause church splits. Koop maintains that writing 
confessions has always been part of the Anabaptist-Mennonite ti-adi- 
tion. It seems appropriate to continue to compose Confessions of Faith, 
and prudent to learn from past experience how to keep Confessions 
from dividing the Mennonite church. 

According to Koop, the three confessions reveal broad agreement, 
despite certain points of difference. After discussing the way the three 
confessions treated the various doctrines, he identifies several distinc- 
tive notes they shared. He lists human capacity to choose between 
good and evil, personal regeneration expressed in daily discipleship, 
the voluntaiy gathering of the I-egenerate, communal iilterpretation 
of Scripture through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Baptism upon 
confession of personal faith in Christ, accountability within the Church, 
a life of peace, refusal to swear oaths, and the life and teachings of 
Jesus as the moral foundation. (148) Koop also spealcs of three themes 
identified in all three confessions, namely, the importance of human free 
will, ethical responsibility, and mutual accountability.(l48) Important 
as these were, they did not form the heart of the Confessions. Rather, 
they provided a lens, or perspective which helped to shape the heart 
of the confessions, namely, belief in God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, 
salvation, the church, the sacraments, the moral life, church discipline, 
and teaching 011 the Last Day. Koop characterizes the differences 
among the three groups as relating to "the relationship between inner 
and outer reality," or the "tension between personal regeneration and 



266 Jounlal of MelIennonite Studies 

a more external and communal emphasis."(ll4-15) These differences 
were a matter of emphasis and did not take away from the development 
of an "identifiable and coherent tradition." 

In the end, Koop offers the Mennonite church two considerations 
if it is to appropriate this theological tradition for the present. The 
first is the importance of unity and the second is a recognition of the 
development of tradition. The tradition that Koop presents as cohererzt, 
was, he stresses, not uniform, for the convictions held commonly by the 
three confessions were not identical. There is a right way and a wrong 
way to 'use' confessions: one results in splits and the other values 
unity. The model that Koop holds up is one in which "...the confessions 
were not optional documents that could be taken lightly.. .(but) were 
considered secondaly to the Scriptures and subordinate to the unity of 
the church."(l48) He warns against allowing confessional statements, 
doctrines and even concern for moral integl-ity to break up the church, 
since "...an ecclesiology faithful to the biblical account assumes the 
priority of a unified c h ~ r c h . ' ~ ( l 4 9 )  

Diversity existed not only alnong the three confessions, but also 
across time, between the seventeenth century confessions and the 
sixteenth centuly Anabaptists. Koop argues that this change is the 
result of a developing tradition, revealing both strengthening as well 
as decline. Koop presents the moves to a more orthodox doctrine of 
the incalmation, and away from the ban as positive. The growth away 
from the sixteenth century Anabaptists explicit theology of suffering 
and martyrdom might represent a decline. Koop suggests that in a 
"...context of prosperity and acculnulation of wealth, Europeans and 
North Americans might do well to recall and learn something from the 
martyrs, who were able to let go of their earthly possessions, and who 
were willing to completely submit themselves to the will of God. For 
a recovery of this martyr tradition the confessions of faith may not be 
vely helpful.. ."(l51 I don't know if I agree. Perhaps, meditation on the 
confessions which recall the whole heart of the faith are what will keep 
alive the tradition of obedience, submission and faithfulness, which 
could mean martyrdom - but usually just suffering. The confessions 
might provide a more profound basis for submission to Christ in new 
settings, than the niemoly of martyrdom alone. 

Koop's two points regarding unity and development are significant 
for their origins and their implications which lay and point beyond the 
Mennonite Church. Indeed, Koop ends by noting the necessity of an 
ecumenical orientation (152) and a regard for the experience of the 
church over the years. The notion of the development of tradition is 
a departure from the initial Anabaptist and Protestant impulse. Koop 
presents it as a discovery due to post-modern awareness, making the 
sola scriptura slogan sound naYve. If sola scriptura and the Anabaptist 



Book Reviews 267 

zeal for a pure church a r e  both problematic then there is good reason 
to look for some healing of 500 year old ruptures. O r  put differently, it 
is significant to hold these two 'foreign' values as essential for making 
the Mennonite tradition that Koop identifies as one that might "give 
support to the church in the current context."(148) The incorporation 
of these two new values represents not just a minor adjustment but 
a major turning point. In working to identify a Mennonite tradition 
to support the current Mennonite church, Koop has strengthened the 
impetus for ecumenical conversation and bridge-building. 

Rachel Reesor-Taylor 
Winnipeg, Manitoba 

Ted E. Friesen. Memoirs: A Personal Autobiography of 
Ted Friesen Altona. MB: Ted E. Friesen (Available from 
Mennonite Books, winnipeg, MB), 2003. ' ~ p .  180. Cloth, 
$19.95. 

Memoirs are a very instructive type of writing, revealing unknown 
things about people. They are, of course, bits that the writer chooses 
to share publicly, the "lighted" sides of one's life, though "dark" sides 
are often included as well. They offer a person's own perspective, and 
sometimes a self-analysis. 

This volume illuminates the life and work of someone widely 
known in Mennonite and other circles. Ted Friesen grew up in Altona, 
Manitoba and ultimately chose to remain there -- with his wife, Linie, 
and the children, Eric, Tim and Paul -- even when many others, family 
members included, moved on. An introductoly section about early 
life, schooling, and social setting, the story proceeds by decades, 1930s, 
1940s, and so on. Always personal experiences are put into context, 
giving this autobiographical account a broader framework of meaning 
and significance. 

This memoirist illustrates very dramatically how one can gain a 
well-balanced perspective on the larger world even while remaining 
part of a relatively small local community. Even though Ted was not 
able to finish high school and pursue post secondaly education as he 
had hoped, other avenues such as wide reading, interacting with people 
outside the community, undertaking an intense pursuit of cultural 
interests far beyond the town, and simply extensive traveling, attend- 
ing concerts and visiting art galleries, brought a strong awareness of 
the outside world and the good things it had to offer. The decade of 
the 1940s and World War I1 added the experience of conscientious 



268 Joul-nal of Meinloi~ite Studies 

objection, even as other family members took a different direction, as 
shown in the recent National Film Board production, The Pacifist Who 
Went to War. 

By the 1950s Ted had become well established in an internation- 
ally active printing firm, known today simply as "Friesens" of Altona. 
It brought with it a very busy life. His personal interests in music, 
art and literature, already fostered in his parental home, were also 
maturing quickly by then. His father, D.W., passed away early in that 
decade, and soon after that sad event, D.W. Friesens and Sons, owned 
and run by the brothers, Dave, Ted and Ray, appeared on the scene 
as an expanding, retooled business organization which would take 
its place on the business stage with vigour and very considerable 
success. 

The author also tells of his venture into the larger field of church 
work, accepting membership in the Board of Christian Service for 
Conference of Mennonites in Canada, and the Canadian Mennonite 
Relief Committee. He also became involved in the founding of the radio 
station CFAM in Altona and that experience added to the fabric of his 
life. Further amplification of this important communications venture 
must await another volume! 

With the 1960s came the grieving of the loss of mother, Sarah 
(Klippenstein) Striemer Friesen, a widow when she married D.W., 
and a "consummate homemaker." That decade also saw the loss a 
still-born child, Madeleine Ruth, and the death also of father Peter B. 
KI-ahn, a widely respected teacher. The decade brought three further 
public arenas of great interest and participation - Mennonite Central 
Committee (Canada), Mennonite Historical Society of Canada and the 
Altona Mennonite Church, which was founded during these years. 
Each remains vely close to Ted's heart to this day. 

Then came a fiftieth birthday for both Ted and Linie, anniversaries, 
much more travel and church work, some writing and publication with 
boolcs on the Altona Mennonite Church, his Johann Klippenstein "line" 
(related to this reviewer) , the village of Grigorievlca in present-day 
northern Ukraine which once had been a home village for the Krahns, 
some worlc with videos and films, plans for retirement, and finally these 
memoirs also. 

Ted's has been a full and productive life, and my brief sketch of his 
booli can only hint at its rich details! Ted's concluding statement, "I 
have no special gifts", is a most modest summing up for a man named 
Altona's "Citizen of the Year" in 2000. His very extensive libraly of 
Mennonitica, art and music and his rich collection of personal papers 
are among the legacy from which others will benefit. 

This volume, now given to others for their libraries, includes a fine 
selection of photos, and is excellently published by the "home firm", of 



Boolc Reviews 269 

course. Memoirs such as these will surely inspire others to undertake 
similar venture, that is, to leave a legacy through which maiiy people 
can be blessed and greatly enriched. 

Lawrence Klippenstein 
Winnipeg, Manitoba 

Lucille Marr, T h e  Transforming Power of a Century: 
M e n n o n i t e  Central C o m m i t t e e  and i t s  Evolution i n  
Ontario. Kitchener, O N  and Scottdale, PA: Pandora 
Press (co-published by Herald Press), 2003. Pp. 390 with 
bibliography and index. Paper, $38.00 Cdn, $36.50 U.S. 

In the early 1990s David Worth, newly appointed director 
of Mennonite Central Committee Ontario (MCC) felt institutional 
memory slipping away. E. J. Swalm and Ross Nigh, both Brethren 
in Christ (BIC) pastors and prime movers in inter-MennoniteIBIC 
activities passed from the scene. C. J. Rempel, first director of the 
MCC office in the 1940s, was in his mid-seventies and in poor health. 
Alice Snyder, Margaret Brubacher, and Maiy Harder, leading lights 
in the development of Ontario programs had all retired. Wortli had 
good reasons to be concerned. He convinced the MCC Ontario board 
to appoint a History Project Committee to preserve and "tell the stoly 
of the way we were then and the way we are now." This volume is an 
impressive result. 

Lucille Marl; a well-trained historian and co-pastor with her 
husband of the Mennonite Fellowship of Montreal, spent eight years 
reading the documents, interviewing maiiy leaders and participants, 
and writing what has to be one of the most interesting church agency 
histories. It is surely the best researched and written stoly of a regional 
or provincial MCC body. As such this is an important contribution to 
Canadian church histoly and of course Mennonite history. 

Mam tells the story of MCC Ontario in great detail. But she 
does not overlook the Ontario setting or relevant Canadian political 
developments. She highlights the evolving nature of inter-Mennonite 
structures beginning with the Non-Resistant Relief Organization 
established during World War I. In the 1930s the NRRO became the 
Conference of Historic Peace Churches. This conference convinced 
the government in Ottawa to provide alternative service for Canadian 
conscientious objectors during World War 11. The same body provided 
chaplaincy services for hundreds of young conscientious objectors 
in camps within the province and beyond. It was inevitable that the 



270 Journal of Meiulonite Studies 

Conference of Historic Peace churches would be one of the building 
bloclcs of what became MCC Ontario in 1964. 

Rightly Marr" seeks to hear women's voices, for the MCC s t o ~ y  is 
also theirs." Here again there is a pre MCC identity with the Ontario 
sewing circles who began cooperative work even before World War 
I. Their collecting and making clothing, blankets, preserving food 
provided resources for the several relief programs and for a time 
the Canadian Red Cross. During World War I1 sewing circle leaders 
established the Ontario Mennonite Women's Cutting Room preparing 
material for home based sewing. Soon they added a clothing depot and 
a food depot. These, too, became essential building bloclcs of the new 
organization. 

The role of MCC headquartered in Akron, Pennsylvania, was not 
incidental to Ontario developments. Under the energetic leadership 
of Orie 0 .  Miller and Ernest Bennett, MCC proposed establishing a 
Canadian office in Kitchener in December 1943. Ontario leaders were 
not sure about the expansion of this organization in such an assertive 
fashion into Canada even though they already cooperated with MCC in 
a variety of programs. Ontario women in particular took a number of 
cues on material assistance from the Ephrata, Pennsylvania material 
resource center. 

What made t h e  MCC move acceptable was naming a young 
Mennonite Brethren banker C. J. Rempel as director of the office. 
Rempel's successors, particularly businessman Edward Snyder and 
visionary Harvey Taves, increasingly directed the office's program 
toward Ontario and Canada issues. When MCC Ontario was formed 
the Kitchener office already at 50 Kent Avenue had its own Voluntary 
Service program, a teachers program in Newfoundland, a boys school 
known as Ailsa Craig Boys Farm (later Craigwood) and a local Men- 
nonite Disaster Service group in tune with civilian defense concerns of 
the Canadian government. If Taves's health had not been so precarious 
the MCC Canadian office would have been even more creative and 
assertive. 

The formation of MCC Ontario in 1963-64 was precipitated by 
the formation of MCC Canada. Marr candidly and deftly notes the 
dissatisfactions of western Canadians and with the Kitchener office 
and pressure from MCC Akron in determining priorities in Ontario. A 
critical issue was where relief monies should go: to the poor within the 
Mennonite household of faith or to the most needy people regardless of 
race or creed. It was "winds from the Canadian West" which forced 
"Ontario Mennonites to shift allegiance from their Pennsylvania roots 
to embrace the brewing 'Canadian Mennonite nationalism."' Strong 
voices in Ontario supported the new Canadian organization even though 
Harvey Taves and a number of Ontario leaders vigorously opposed it. 



Interestingly, just as Ontario agreed with reservations to the crea- 
tion of a MCC Canadian office, now with similar reservations, Ontario 
Mennonite and Brethren in Christ accepted the leadership of MCC 
Canada based in Winnipeg. In both cases the Ontario inter-Mennonite 
leadership turned these events into positive moments of growth in local 
activity while continuing to provide strong support for both Canadian 
and international program. 

In a review it is impossible to summarize the flowering of MCC 
Ontario since 1964. Harvey Taves's untimely death in 1965 at age 39 
deprived the Mennonite and Brethren in Christ community of one of 
its most forceful voices. Remarkably MCC Ontario quickly found new 
and strong capable leaders. Marr might have mentioned that these 
leaders not only made local programs prominent in the MCC system, 
but also supplied strong leadership in both MCC Canada and MCC 
International. She does include in the text names of many Ontario 
workers both in North America and abroad. Since Ontario Mennonites 
and Brethren in Christ have been vely generous in supporting MCC 
programs, it would have been interesting to chart contributions, 
particularly since 1944. 

I t  would be difficult for an MCC insider not to be enthusiastic 
about this book. The inter-Mennonite scene in Ontario has been at 
the forefront of the MCC movement in North America and beyond. 
It is no accident that the North American office of Mennonite World 
Conference is in Kitchener. Marr traces this interest and adds much 
new information about MCC. She understands well the ethos of MCC. 
With a "bottom up" approach, Marr demonstrates that MCC is indeed 
a people's movement of women and men, both young and elderly. She 
is not afraid to point out weaknesses along the way, particularly the 
organization's failure to recognize the leadership potential of women 
participants. She highlights the slow but sure change in this regard. 

I thought H knew the essential ingredients of the MCC stories. But 
Lucille Marr fills in more than a few gaps. This book is one of the two 
or three essential books for anyone, including any Executive Director 
of MCC International, wishing to understand the "transforming power" 
of this significant ministly. 

John A. Lapp, 
Global Mennonite History Project 
Akron, Pennsylvania. 



272 Jol~i71al ofMeititoitite Studies 

Donald Martin, Old Order Mennonites of Ontario: 
Gelassenheit, Discipleship, Brotherhood. Kitchener O N :  
Pandora Press (co-published with Herald Press), 2003. 
Pp., 381. Paper, $35 US; 37.50 Cdn. Index, bibliography, 
7 appendices 

Donald Martin is a member of the Markham-Waterloo Conference of 
Old Order Mennonites in Ontario, a group that separated from the more 
traditional horse-and-buggy driving Old Order Mennonites about sixty 
years ago. The two groups cooperate in some areas such as schools 
and the use of meetinghouses and share a common Old Order identity, 
histoly, and theological perspective. Martin's book is an important 
contribution to the scholarly literature on Old Order groups because, 
to my knowledge, it is the only systematic account of Old Order history, 
theology, and practice written by an Old Order lay historian. Although 
Martin's focus is on Ontario, he sets his story in the context of broader 
Old Order developments and relationships in the United States as well. 
Martin's work parallels the writing of Isaac R. Horst, a Canadian Old 
Order horse-and-buggy author of A Separate People (Herald Press, 
2000). Martin's work, however, is more systematic and historically 
grounded. whereas Horst's is aimed at a more popular audience. 

Martin's purpose for writing is "to portray the Old Order Mennon- 
ites," to outsiders in a "non-compromising and non-offensive way"(25). 
The material is organized into twenty chapters and an epilogue that 
focuses on Gelasselzheit, a concept which Martin stresses throughout 
the book. Indeed, the key argument of the book, is found in his first 
sentence of the epilogue: "The Old Order Mennonite community and 
the Anabaptist ethos of Gelnsselzheit are synonymous." Although 
Gelassenheit appears in Hutterite writings, Sandra Cronk was the 
first scholar to use the word in 1977 as a concept to understand rituals 
of submission and yieldedness in Old Order Mennonite and Amish 
communities. Martin is the first Old Order writer to use Gelasserzlzeit 
as his primaly conceptual category to organize historical material and 
interpret Old Order beliefs and practices. He argues that the ethos of 
Gelasse~zheit was the reason that Old Orders rejected outside cultural 
and theological influences such as pietism, fundamentalism, revivalism, 
missions, and individualism. Pietist scholars will not be comfortable 
wit11 Martin's pejorative view of pietism which he juxtaposes against 
Anabaptism based on his reading of Robert Friedmann. 

In addition to his historical analysis of the various Old Order 
schisms in Canada and the United States, two important chapters 
(8 and 18) focus on the distinctive features of Old Order belief and 
practice. In chapter 8 he identifies some distinctive beliefs-obedi- 
ence, brotherhood, Ordnuizg, communalism, leadership, and the "Old 



Order StandM-that characterize his tradition. Later in chapter 18 he 
describes Old Order practices related to worship, communion, counsel 
meetings, weddings, funerals, family, holidays, gender and technology. 
These chapters provide rich insights into the Old Order worldview and 
theological commitments. 

Unlike Horst's books, Martin provides more scholarly apparatus 
such as endnote references, a complete bibliography, several valuable 
appendices, and an index. The index however tends to focus on names 
more than topics and the topics that a r e  included a r e  somewhat 
random. There are entries for telephone, but none for technology, 
bicycles, auton~obile or car, despite the fact that the car was a major 
point of contention in several twentieth centuly Old Order divisions. 
The organization of the book follows a chroilological time line, yet is 
somewhat uneven, and not always clear The Groffdale Conference1 
Weaverland Conference division in Lancaster County (PA) of 1927 was 
seported as 1926 thrice on pages 150 and 151. 

Martin's wol-k is a welcome and important contribution to Old Order 
studies. And while its thorough scholarship makes for a significant 
contribution, it paradoxically is an aberration in a community char- 
acterized, historically at least, more by oral tradition and informal 
sentiments, than by abstract concepts and formal arguments. 

Donald B. Kraybill 
Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies 
Elizabethtown College 

Mil Penner, Section 27: A Century on a Family Farm 
(Lawrence K S :  University Press of Kansas, 2002). Pp. 
229. Cloth. 

This is a spendid book, written by a farmer with a deft and poetic 
hand, a vivid imagination, a keen eye for detail and a well-grounded 
memoly. It brings to life the world of Milford Penner, who, born in 
1929, spent his boyhood on Section 27-21-4W near Inman, Kansas. 
But it is much more than an autobiography. It renders the histoly of a 
Kansas farm family, a Mennonite family, despite the book's featureless 
subtitle. In the process it also presents a picture of change in agricul- 
ture among Mennonites. It outlines new farm technologies, changing 
concepts of community, shifting gendered worlds, and challenging 
inter-generational relations. As Penner notes, the aim of the book is 
to "recall values, customs and a way of life with close ties to the land" 
(XI. 



The book thus links the modern Mennonite farmer to the land. 
Numerous works suggest that the Amish and Old Order Mennonites 
have maintained a special relationship to the land and of these David 
Kline's Great Possessions is perhaps the best known. Penner's book 
casts aside this notion of 'old order' exceptionalism, showing how 
modern farmers too can have a love for the land, an affinity for nature 
and respect for the earth. These Mennonites smell fresh dirt also 
from the seat of a tractor, observe the northern lights from the balcony 
of a modern house, and see the flowers from a passing pickup truck. 
They are farmers who are concerned about environmental desecra- 
tion, despise the oil companies' many sink holes, wonder about the 
vulnerability of pulverized soil, grieve the disappearing bird types. 
And where they have been party to violence on the land they show that 
they can change their ways. Penner confesses his decades-long work 
in reshaping the land through irrigation projects, avenues in which 
"the bulldozer was my idol," and acknowledges the shortsightedness 
in which "conquest [was] the only value" (214). 

The book also illuminates the culture of the progressive Kansas 
Mennonite community. I t  details the complex interrelatedness of 
Mennonite faith and ethnicity. Although Penner chooses the obscure 
word 'Low Dutch' to refer to the more common 'Low German' or 
'Pautdietsch' dialect, his description of its cultural workings is highly 
convincing: when "Pop", for example, would repair a seized up 
combine in 100 degree Fahernheit weather he would "speak to devil in 
Low Dutch," swear words only if translated into English. He describes 
evelyday religiousness, sometimes critically: a minister visit young 
Milford before baptism, coming around at an inopportune time, and 
then after this "rite of passage" the minister never visits again. Culture 
comes in tone and shade and things not said: community members 
arrange for visits by exploratory telephone calls, speaking first about 
weather, and then haltingly they hint of their desire to visit. The family 
struggles with religious ethics: they wonder about working on Sunday 
and knows that immunity is assured when weather patterns threaten 
the crop or the land. Mil's pacifist impulses are tested in World War 11, 
and are predisposed by the racist reflection "that if I were guaranteed I 
could fight the Japanese and not the Germans, I could join the army. ..." 
(181); in the end he becomes a conscientious objector, although mostly 
because "Pop" declares Mil's "pacifism" for him. The socialization 
of children occurs not through the rules of autlloritative parents, 
but through "the combined influences of Sunday School, catechism, 
overheard adult conversation and lack of encouragement ..." (187). 

This book shows that autobiography can be highly affective in pre- 
senting Mennonite life in twentieth century Nortl~ America. Mennonite 
histoly too often is strong in identifying a community's institutions. 



Book Reviews 275 

Mennonite poetly and fiction are always adept at showing the pathos 
of artists caught on the periphery of the community. Mennonite 
sociologist differentiate the rural from urban worlds, variously lauding 
the former or the latter and questioning the authenticity of the other. 
Section 27 is a work by a member of the community who knows how 
rural and urban forces are intertwined, recognizes the incongruent 
features of life, and declines the dichotomies of other disciplines. I 
found the book refreshing in its perceptiveness, its candor, and absence 
of self-righteousness. 

Royden Loewen 
University of Winnipeg 

J o h n  R. Staples, Cross-Cultural Encounters on the 
Ukranian Steppe: Settling the Molochna Basin, 1783- 
1861. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2002. Pp. 
253. Cloth. 

At the recent international conference "Molochna 2004: Mennonites 
and Their Neighbours (1804-2004)," John Staples presented a paper 
entitled "Putting Russia Back into Russian Mennonite History." That 
certainly happened at the conference where more than two-thirds of 
the participants were non-Mennonite scholars. In this study of the 
settlement of the Molochna basin, Staples contributes significantly to 
this new and exciting era in Russian Mennonite research and writing. 
By focusing on this smaller geographic era he puts Russia back into 
the settlement experiences of Mennonite migrants during the first half 
of the nineteenth centuly. 

Until recently, much of the Russian Mennonite story was shaped 
by the memories of people fleeing from impossible life circumstances. 
Many of these documents reflected memories of an idyllic lifestyle 
amid a physical landscape isolated from the outside world and were 
permeated by a nostalgia for a lost world. Conversely there was also 
anger when that world was destroyed by the Bolshevik revolution. By 
focusing his study on the Molochna basin, Staples challenges some of 
the assumptions characterizing the works of amateur and professional 
historians who studied Mennonites in Ukraine. He reminds Mennonite 
readers that we were not alone on the Ukrainian steppe. There were 
others - Orthodox peasants, Nogai, German colonists and Doukhobors. 
He rnakes a convincing argument for the fact that Mennonites, instead 
of being uniquely privileged, started the survival race with other 
settlers from the same finishing line. None had previous agricultural 



experience in dealing wit11 the arid steppe, most of the settlers could be 
defined as peasants and all subscribed to traditional religious beliefs. 
Furthermore, all received similar incei~tives from the Russian state. 
Yet in the end, the varied settlers ran the race towards prosperity vely 
differently. 

For Staples, the drought of 1832-34 marked a turning point insofar 
as Mennonites altered the paradigm of their existence in the Molochna 
basin. Rather central to that re-definition were the often controversial 
reforins of the entrepreneurial Johann Cornies. For Staples, the 
Cornies era was not so much a symbol of secularization as an indication 
of an acrimonious but healthy dialogue within the Mennonite com- 
munity. Somewhat ironically, the quarrels of the late 1830s and early 
1840s generated both piety and prosperity. Ultimately, it generated 
a civil system alongside the traditional congregational structure. 
Both entities, though reminiscent of the medieval church-state, 
significantly benefited the Mennonite settlers in the Molochna basin. 
By participating in the life of the local congregation they strengthened 
their religious identity. Concurrently their role in the Mennonite state 
allowed for inventiveness and innovation. 

In contrast to the Orthodox state peasants, the Mennonites were in 
complete control of their land and their church. Orthodox peasant pas- 
sivity in the local church failed to generate a strong religious ideiltity 
nor did the state peasants have the freedom to change the established 
communal land system. In the end, similar starting advantages pro- 
duced vely different results. Initially, both Mennonite and Orthodox 
settlers were truly peasants and for a time, it seemed both would 
move beyond that categoly. Yet the Orthodox colonist regressed and 
again became a peasant while the Mennonite, according to Staples' apt 
phrase were "peasants in the process of 'de-peasantizing"' (p. 181). 

The author's arguments for his revisionist views are convincing. He 
writes in a crisp, non-partisan style and almost by way of understate- 
ment says "here is the evidence." Utilizing Russian archival material, 
he offers significant corrections to traditional views generated by an 
abundance of in-house Mennonite documents. Thanks to Staples' 
research and the ongoing energetic contributions of Ukrainian and 
Russian scholars, a new era is emerging in Russian Mennonite studies. 
Hopefully the study will signal the first of many books that expand our 
understanding of the multi-dimensional experience of the Mennonites 
in Russia and Ukraine. Staples is to be congratulated for a first class 
study. 

John B. Toews 
Regent College, 
Vancouver, BC 



Book Reviews 277 

J o h n  H. Yoder, A n a b a p t i s m  a n d  R e f o r m a t i o n  i n  
Switzerland: An Historical and Theological analysis oftlze 
Dialogues between Anabaptists and Reformers. Edited by 
C. Arnold Snyder. Translated by David Carl Stassen and C. 
Arnold Snyder. Introduction by Neal Blough. Kitchener: 
Pandora Press, 2004. Pp. 509. $46.00 Cdn, $39.00 US. 

John Howard Yoder is best known for his scholarly contributions 
in biblical theology, social etl~ics and peace studies. Several of his 
earliest scholarly works, however, were in the area of Reformation 
studies, such as his dissertation on Swiss Anabaptism, publisl~ed in 
1962, and a later study also on the Swiss Anabaptists, published in 
1968. Until recently, these studies by Yoder were available only in 
German-language publications. Thanks to the translation efforts of 
David Carl Stassen and C. Arnold Snyder, the English-speaking world 
now has access to these seminal writings, which have been combined 
into a one-volume work. 

The book is divided into two parts. Part I is a survey of the origins 
of Anabaptisin in and around Zurich with special attention to the 
dialogues and disputations (Gesprache) that took place between Swiss 
Anabaptists and Zwinglian reformers from 1523 to 1538. Part I1 is a 
systematic analysis of the dialogues. The book includes a preface by 
the editor, C. Arnold Snyder, which provides an assessment of Yoder's 
scholarship in the context of Anabaptist and Radical Reformation 
studies. Also incorporated is an introduction by Neal Blougl~, which 
maps out the central themes in Yoder's early work that would become 
integral to his more mature writings. 

A publication of this sort deserves some explanation. After all, 
Yoder's scholarship reflects the Anabaptist historiography of the mid- 
twentieth centuiy and thus represents a somewhat outdated viewpoint 
of Swiss Anabaptist origins. This raises the question of whether this 
publication is truly an event to be celebrated, as the editor of the volume 
claims. In continuity with the work of John Horsch, Harold Bender, 
and Robert Friedmann, Yoder's worlc clearly belongs to the genre of 
Anabaptist scholarship that sought to rehabilitate the Anabaptists from 
hostile mainstream historiography. Yoder did not only assume that 
the Anabaptists originated in Zurich in close geographical proximity 
to Zwingli. He also maintained that they stood in close tlzeological 
proximity to this reformer, and that the Swiss Anabaptists provided 
the "Anabaptist" template by which other Anabaptist groups should 
be measured. 

By the 1970s, this approach was superceded by empirical studies 
that emphasized the multiple origins of various Anabaptist movements, 
all with unique characteristics and none providing a template for the 



278 Jor~mal of Memlonite Studies 

rest. On the one hand, therefore, Yoder's work represents an older 
view no longer accepted by specialists in the field. Thus, some read- 
ers, conversant with the current state of Anabaptist historiography, 
will undoubtedly find Yoder's broad generalizations concerning 
Anabaptism unconvincing and even frustrating. Yoder would later 
learn from the revisionist historians and accept a broader definition 
of Anabaptism, but his WOI-lc does not yet reflect this insight. On the 
other hand, readers will find it difficult to dispute the thoroughness 
and comprehensive nature of Yoder's investigations. His ability to 
painstakingly sift through vast amounts of primaly source material, 
and his skill in finding larger patterns of meaning that cut across 
academic disciplines is remarkable. In this volume we discover 
Yoder's seminal thought that would permeate his later scholarship, and 
we see the extent to which his views on ecclesiology, christology, and 
histoly clearly derived from his early encounter wit11 the Anabaptists 
of Ziirich. The book should be of significant interest to historians and 
theologians of Anabaptism, and it will be essential reading for those 
seeking to understand the trajectory of Yoder's thought over a period 
of four decades. 

Somewhat enigmatic was Yoder's move away from historical studies 
as he was approaching the mid-point of his scholarly careel: After 
1974, he withdrew from active engagement with sixteenth centuly 
Anabaptist scholarship, and moved on to write in other disciplinary 
fields. Evidently the methodological sea change in Anabaptist studies, 
less than a decade after he had completed his second volume of the 
Anabaptist-Reformed dialogues, was inhospitable to his intellectual 
sensibilities. Even though, already in his dissertation, Yoder aclcnowl- 
edged differences among the various Anabaptist groups, it was "the 
Anabaptism that endured" that mattered and was worthy of historical 
study. The early Swiss tradition, along with Anabaptists such as Menno 
Simons, Pilgram Marpeck, and the Hutterian Brethren would continue 
to be essential material for ecclesiological and ethical reflection. 
Until the end of his career Yoder remained tenaciously consistent in 
his methodology and continue to privilege the kinds of questions and 
concerns whicli in his opinion mattered most. 

A central theme in Yoder's study is that the Anabaptists had an 
"inexhaustible will to dialogue." Ecumenical conversation, according 
to Yoder, was not simply a strategy to escape persecution, but emerged 
out of a particular theological epistemology and understanding of 
ecclesiology. While Yoder did not assume that truth emerged merely 
from the process of conversation-he held to epistemological norms-in 
his later writings he would emphasize the importance of testing one's 
own theology, not simply within one's own circle, but in conversation 
with others. A basic question that arises from this is whether the early 



Book Revieli7s 279 

Anabaptists were truly as dialogical as Yoder understood them to be, 
or whether his interpretation of Anabaptism in this regard was skewed 
by his own ideals. Further investigation into the nature of religious 
dialogue during the Reformation age will hopefully clarify the extent 
to which Anabaptists fi-eely chose to enter into dialogue as a conscious 
means of testing their own theological suppositions, and the degree to 
which they entered into dialogue as a matter of survival in the face of 
persecution. 

Karl Koop 
Canadian Mennonite University 

Sergei I. Zhuk. Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, 
Millennialisrn, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and 
Ukraine, 1830-191 7. Woodrow Wilson Center Press & The 
Johns Hopkins University Press: Washington, DC and 
Baltimore, 2004. Pp. xx, 457. $60.00, US. Cloth. 

This comparative study of sectarianism makes bold claims about the 
social, political, and cultural impact of Shalaputs, Stundists, Molokans, 
Mennonites, and related religious groups. Zhulc's main argument is 
that the social and cultural dislocation caused by colonization of the 
southern frontier, combined with the equally profound dislocation 
caused by serf emancipation in 1861, led to a religious awakening in 
southern Russia and Ukraine that is analogous to the radical reforma- 
tion in the West. While Zhuk's evidence, derived from regional and 
central archives in Ukraine and Russia, is intriguing, his uncritical 
application of social-science theories, and his equally uncritical use of 
sources, result in a book that has little scholarly value. 

Zhuk begins by describing "charter groups" of settlers in southern 
Ukraine. These groups play an important role in Zhuk's argument 
because they provided a base-line of sectarian doctrine with which 
subsequent immigrant groups interacted. A puzzling omission from 
Zhulc's charter groups is the Dukhobors. The Molochna region, where 
the Dukhobors lived from 1802-1845, is an important focus of the 
book. While the Molochna Mennonites, Molokans, Skoptsy, Khlysty, 
and Shalaputs receive close attention, the Dulchobors - the first large 
group of religious sectarians to settle in the region and the group that 
prompted the most controversy among Tsarist officials in the 1830s and 
1840s - are altogether ignored. 

Zhulc pays much closer attention to the Mennonites, but the results 
a r e  unsatisfying. Early Pietist influence in southern Ukraine is a 



280 Joun~al of Mennonite Studies 

vital component in Zhuk's account of the construction of Ukrainian 
and Russian radical sectarian identity, so the original sources of 
Pietist influence are fundamentally important to his argument. But 
Zhuk's claim that "during the 1820s, religious enthusiasm, influenced 
by 'Prussian Pietism,' took over all the Mennonite settlements of 
the Molochna," (157) is simply unsupported by the evidence. This 
example points to a central problem with Rz~ssia's Lost Reformation. 
Zhuk is uncritical of his sources, and worse yet, he sometimes seems to 
misinterpret those sources in the interests of his own argument. Zhuk's 
sole source on Molochna Mennonite Pietism in the 1820s is Delbert 
Plett's Golderz Years, but nowhere does Plett claim that Pietism "took 
over all the Mennonite settlements." Just as troublesome as this 
misinterpretation is that Zhuk apparently does not recognize that 
Plett's self-published study of a minority group within the Mennonite 
settlement is not, by itself, an adequate source for characterizing the 
entire community. 

Zhulc is equally uncritical of the sociological, anthropological and 
political theorists who appear so frequently in his book. Frederick 
Jackson Turner, Max Weber7 Michele Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Victor 
Turner, Arnold van Gennep, and James C. Scott are all called upon in 
support of various claims, but Zhuk does not question or interpret their 
theories in light of his own evidence; the theories are treated 
as paradigmatic, and touted by Zhuk as substitutes for sound archival 
evidence. A significant example is Zhulc7s allegiance to Weber's 
protestant ethic as an explanation for the emergence of capitalism 
in southeril Ulwaine. Weber's work is vital to the modern sociology 
of religion, but the protestant ethic has been repeatedly debunked in 
recent scholarship. If Zhuk proposes to rejuvenate this theory, he must 
at least address the controversy that surrounds it. Instead, in a chapter 
entitled "Peasant Theologians and the Protestant Ethic," Zhuk accepts 
Weber unquestioningly, offering in support, a series of accounts of 
sober7 industrious, economically successful sectarian peasants. This 
anecdotal evidence is not supported by quantitative socio-economic 
analysis that might prove or disprove it. 

Zhuk's eagerness to link his sectarian subjects to late-Tsarist politi- 
cal radicalism seems to contradict his Weberian arguments. He claims 
that the radical sects particularly appealed to poor Ukrainian peasants, 
helping to motivate then1 to participate in radical political movements 
in the 1880s and 1890s (64,363). While there may have been sufficient 
variety ainong sectarian groups to produce both prosperous capitalists 
and impoverished political radicals, Zhulc is oblivious to the apparent 
contradiction. 

In fairness it must be said that Zhulc's chapter on the convergence 
of religious and political radicalism is the best part of this book. 



Book Reviews 281 

Employing sectarian, official church, and police sources, he clearly 
documents this intersection of interests. Unfortunately (and despite 
the promise of the book's title) he does not pursue this stoly into the 
revolutionary years of the early twentieth centuiy, noting in passing 
that "evangelical peasants did not participate in the political struggle 
during the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917" (384). 

Russia's Lost Reformation does not succeed in mounting a convinc- 
ing argument that imperial Russia experienced a radical reformation 
in the late nineteenth century. Although Zhuk frequently points out 
similarities between events in Russia and the West, the comparisons 
are mechanical and unsatisfying. When Zhuk describes the evolution 
of Shalaput religious practices away from castration toward "more 
rationalized and abstract ideals" in the 1870s, he observes that "the 
Shalaputs moved in t h e  direction of religious enthusiasm, which 
was typical for all European Christian radicals, such as the first 
Anabaptists, early Quakers, Methodists, and Shakers" (113). This 
may be true, but is the similarity more than skin-deep? The Shalaputs 
emerged in the late nineteenth century, in far different circumstances 
than the early European Christian radicals to whom Zhuk compares 
them. The Shalaputs were in close contact with Mennonites who were 
experiencing their own religious upheavals - upheavals that clearly 
had nothing to do with the problems of the first Anabaptists. Zhuk's 
comparison could only have been valuable if he had explored the 
obvious differences, rather than commenting in passing on the obvious 
similarities. 

Zhuk is no more successful in his attempt to claim far-reaching 
influence for his sectarians. He maintains in his conclusion that 
"the Shalaputs, radical Stundists, and Maliovantsy . . . structured 
the popular oppositional discourse in imperial Russia" (399). This 
claim is not substantiated, and indeed Zhuk's own calculations 
would suggest a different story. When he attempts to quantify the 
number of Stundists in the Empire, he concludes that they made 
up just two percent of the population even in the regions where 
they were most populous (177). His appendices document just 
34,623 sectarians out of a total Russian population of almost 126 
million in 1897 (426). Still, he insists that the Stundists "influenced 
no less than one-third of the population" in some southern regions 
(177). How h e  a r r i v e s  a t  t h i s  f i g u r e ,  a n d  what he m e a n s  by 
"influenced," a r e  unclear. In the end there is little to recommend 
Russia's Lost Reformatiolz. Zhuk's central premise, that cultural 
and socio-economic dislocation cause religious radicalism, might 
well be right. His extensive knowledge of regional and central 
archives, and his equally extensive reading in social science theoly, 
offer the potential for important insights into this little-known stoly. 



282 Jour-nal ofMellltonite Studies 

Unfortunately, theoiy and evidence do not converge, and this potential 
has not been realized. 

John Staples 
State University of New York, Fredonia 

Peace Studies and Theology 

J. Denny Weaver, and Gerald Biesecker-Mast, eds., 
Teaching Peace: lVonviolence and the Liberal Arts. 
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Pp. 304 

Fernando Enns, Scott Holland, and Ann K. Riggs, eds., 
Seeking Cultures of Peace: A Peace Church Conversation. 
Telford, PA: Cascadia, 2004. Pp. 260. 

Two recent books on peace by Anabaptist scholars complement 
each other well. They inspire intellectual dialogue. Above this, they 
serve as impetus for taking the practical Historic Peace Church wit- 
ness into different contexts, namely post secondaly education and the 
universal church. 

The first book, Teaching Peace: Nonviolelzce and the Liberal Arts, 
edited by J .  Denny Weaver and Gerald Biesecker-Mast grew out of a 
conference by Mennonite colleges for new faculty. During the confer- 
ence and later at Bluffton College, Weaver invited the staff to rethink 
how nonviolence could undergird and influence each colleague's 
discipline. The book is an outcome of that discussion. 

The second book, Seeking Cultures of Peace: A Peace Church 
Conversation, is a compilation of selected essays presented during an 
international Historic Peace Church (Quaker, Brethren, and Mennon- 
ite) consultation, held in June 2001 in Bienenberg, Switzerland. The 
consultation occurred as a direct result of an invitation by the World 
Council of Churches (WCC) in 1999. The invitation asked the Historic 
Peace Churches to offer direction for the WCC's "Decade to Overcome 
Violence, 2001-2010: Churches Seeking Reconciliation and Peace." 
Seeking Cultures of Peace offers some of the Historic Peace Churches' 
most recent work on the subject of theology and peacemaking. 

The first two chapters of Teaching Peace both situates and 
frames the discussion of how nonviolence can play a formative role 
across academic disciplines. Biesecker-Mast's introduction lays the 
groundwork for a new foundation for Christian academics, namely by 



~ o o k  Reviews 283 

imitating an alternative and activist Christian Church as understood 
by the Historic Peace Churches. This becomes the baseline for how 
professors can engage their academic disciplines. By beginning with 
a worldview where violence and its consequences are not "natural", 
colleges and universities can offer academic instruction without 
accepting "violence-accommodating methodologies and pedagogies" 
as "fact" underlying the various disciplines (4). 

The second chapter provides the guiding definitions for the book by 
defining the terms nonviolence and violence. Social-ethicists Stassen 
and Westmoreland-White argue that before definitions can be offered, 
the questions, "What is violence?", and, "What is and what is not an 
acceptable use of violence?" need to be separated and answered. 
Succinctly, the authors review early definitions of force, coercion, and 
violence and offer their own definition; violence is "...destruction to 
a victim or victims by means that overpower the victim's consent" 
(21). No definition for nonviolence is given by the authors, instead 
nonviolence refers to the practices and initiatives of Just Peacemaking 
Theoiy, which is based on the biblical understanding of slzalom, and 
which Stassen has summarized from his early work. 

The remaining 22 of 24 chapters each apply nonviolence to 
specific academic subjects. Two examples are given below. David 
Janzen offers a way around the violent God of the Old Testament and 
the nonviolent Jesus in the New Testament dichotomy. Instead of 
privileging the New Testament above the Old or feverishly attempting 
to harmonize Old Testament texts to New Testament texts, Janzen 
promotes a Christocentric approach to reading violent Old Testament 
passages. In this approach obedience to Christ's nonviolent life and 
teaching is kept, a Trinitarian understanding of God remains consist- 
ent, and the character of God is no longer problematic. This is achieved 
by superceding authorial intent, which retains the entire Bible as 
authoritative yet highlights the nonviolent themes as those that most 
closely identify the character of God. 

Jeff Gundy, in a chapter entitled, "Literature, Nonviolence, and 
Nonviolent Teaching", explains that teaching nonviolently may be 
harder than teaching about nonviolence. In the first half of Gundy's 
essay, he describes how themes of violence and peace appear within 
classic literature and film. While the literature rarely promotes peace 
itself, it is however an excellent opportunity to examine texts from a 
nonviolent perspective. The second and more intriguing half of Gundy's 
essay reveals a nonviolent pedagogy, whereby Gundy argues against 
a top-down, bank-deposit style of teaching, using Stanley Hauerwas 
as his counterpoint. Gundy explains that teaching peaceably includes 
accepting students' as they come and appearing fallible by not having 
the answer to evely question. By exhibiting a confident, passionate 



teaching style that refuses to treat students as blank slates, nonviolent 
teaching can offer a life long example of how to live nonviolently, 
modeling the vely behavior that is studied in class. 

Seeking Cultur'es of Peace offers a more theological treatise on 
Christian peacemaking. The essays are written to the universal church 
as opposed to Christian colleges and universities. The book's sixteen 
chapters encompass the rich and varied cultures and faith traditions 
united under the Historic Peace Church banner. Of additional value 
is the Epistle from Bienenberg, a statement of peace convictions and 
suggestions and a study paper addressed to the wider church, created 
and signed by the participants. 

Two of three major groupings of essays are clustered under the 
themes, "The Gospel of Peace in Context: Shaping Identity", and 
"Building Cultures of Just Peace"; this compilation of essays boasts 
an international list of authors, a quarter of which are female writers. 
Similar themes inhabit both books, with author J .  Denny Weaver 
continuing his argument for a nonviolent atonement. Scott Holland, in 
his essay, "The Gospel of Peace and the Violence of God" addresses a 
similar question as does David Janzen in the previous book. Another 
theme is evident as well in the outline of an accessible peace theology 
that includes a high Christology to the wider church, while at the 
same time leaving room for other formulations for a Christian peace 
theology. 

The two books combined offer an impressive argument for extend- 
ing the Historic Peace Church witness into schools of higher education 
as well as the universal church itself. Either alone or together, Teach- 
ing Peace and Seeking Cultures of Pence would be welcome additions 
to any university library or serious student of Peace Studies. As 
conversation starters, these books have more than fulfilled their role. 

Korey Dyck 
Menno Simons College