CGR Vol. 26, No. 1 (Winter 2008)

The most fascinating stories I read as a child usually began like this: Once upon a time, long ago and far away there lived. There lived a little girl, an old woman, a boy and his poor widowed mother, the three billy goats gruff, a cruel stepmother – the phrase “there lived” immediately evoked the presence of flesh, heart and mind, characters engaged in a struggle. Their presence raised the possibility for adventure, betrayal, strife; there would be heroic endeavors, an evil to overcome. “There lived” promised an array of characters who were infinitely more exotic than the majority of people living around me in the predictable prairie landscape.

 My Mennonite grandparents and their extended family were similar to those exotic fairytale characters. They had once lived in a faraway land, long ago – twenty years ago by the time I was born – the land being what was then southern Russia; the town, Rosenthal in the colony of Chortitza. They had lived in the Byzantine land of Baba Yaga, the Frog Prince, and the little girl made of snow. A place, they often said, that was more beautiful than Manitoba. My Schroeder relatives, and my mother, twelve years old when she arrived in Canada, had lived most of their lives in the land of Fabergé eggs, where picnics were spread out on fur rugs and tea served from silver samovars. The country of the Tsars was a vastly richer experience, I imagined, than living in Morris, Manitoba, population 1,200, a town that had distinguished itself by installing a single traffic light on Main Street, and the hotel, and a neon sign: a chicken that pecked at a kernel of corn twentyfour times in a minute.

This difference was evident to me in the oversized cooking pots, pans, and kettles, the batches of noodles that were draped across chair backs and beds to dry on noodle-making day, the borscht or butter soup simmering in a pot that was large enough to take a bath in, the heaps of buns cooling on a table, the triangles of deep-fried dough to be dusted with berry sugar and served on a hot summer day with watermelon pickles whose cool rosy flesh shone out from jars in the darkness of a cellar shelf.

The exoticness of my Mennonite relatives was evident in their periodic gathering at an uncle’s place just outside of town; obviously well-to-do people, judging from the women’s be-ringed fingers and their husbands’ latemodel cars. They came from across the country to take part in the butchering of several pigs. Their early morning preparations began before the sun had risen. The kerchiefs covering the women’s hair, and their long aprons and rubber boots transformed them into peasants similar to those depicted in a painting I would come across in a book, Bruegel’s “A Country Wedding.” They became so-called simple people “in a state of utter contentment and gaiety,” according to a caption beneath the photograph of the painting.

As the day went on, their voices rose to a shrill of excitement while they worked around a tub of water carving flesh from the pigs’ heads, as they tended to the smokehouse churning out its woody odor, and rendered fat on a cook stove in a shed. I was old enough to recognize that the butchering was a ritual, a recalling of the past, the practice and passing on of what had once been necessary skills. None of my relatives looked as though they had ever missed a meal, and yet their deep hunger was palpable as they consumed crackles spread on bread. “Why don’t you just buy lard at the store,” I once suggested, testing the waters in my usual covert way. The comment was met with silent indignation; it was enough to have to suffer the presence of an interloper, not to speak of one who dared give voice to her own ignorance. “We use everything but the squeal,” an uncle proclaimed at the end of the pig-slaughtering day, as he usually did, and then the men would gulp down a small glass of vodka.

Years later I would write a story, “The Day My Grandfather Died,” in which the narrator – a teenaged girl – observes the celebration of her grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary and thinks that her grandmother, in her loose-flowing dress and with gold leaves intertwined in her white hair, looks like a fairy godmother who has the power to grant wishes. She would ask her grandmother to grant her the wish of happiness. But when the grandparents begin to fret over how much cake to cut for their guests, fearing waste, the girl’s fairytale image vanishes.

It came to me how their conversations always seemed to centre on food, the growing of it, the preparing of it and the eating…. [It seemed] to me their lives had been narrow and confining; even here, now, at a celebration, they were unable to step across the limits and celebrate.

She becomes angry and suggests to her grandparents that the leftover cake will not be wasted if they feed it to the pigs.

Mennonite relatives were exotically old-fashioned in the way they spoke in their guttural-sounding language, the way they preferred to dress in their old country clothes that made them look as though they’d stepped out from another century. My great-grandmother Schroeder, at the age of 90 years, dressed all in black, a black shawl accentuating the piercing gaze of her small eyes. An embroidered sampler on her bedroom wall advised: Be not dismayed when sorrow enters; better days will follow. The optimistic message seemed lost on her, for my great-grandmother seldom smiled. Before climbing into bed at night, she poked about underneath it with a broom in the event that someone might be hiding there. She looked as though she wanted to eat children up with her eyes. Her gnarled fingers were so strong that when she grasped our arms it was impossible to pull away. It didn’t take much to convince me and my sisters that our great-grandmother Schroeder was a witch.

My great-aunts were omnipresent, hovering in the corners of a room as they presided over a visit. They exuded a grim sadness and piousness that in my opinion were as outdated as their stiff and formal-looking dark tailored dresses. The dresses were sometimes trimmed with lace collars, or necklines of pleated satin from which the women’s necks stretched swanlike – at least it seemed they were unnaturally long. The better to peer into your life with, my dear, I came to think. The better to listen in, to note a misbehavior, to admonish whenever I made the mistake of complaining that I was starving, or that I was so angry that I wanted to “just kill” one of my sisters. You don’t know the meaning of those words, they said.

My Mennonite relatives sang beautifully in three-part harmony, grew exquisite and velvety-looking gloxinia plants on their windowsills, sighed a great deal, and slept in feather beds. In a story “The Two-Headed Calf,” Betty, the main character, would observe:

Her parents had dragged all their outdated influences with them to this country, including that “damned” clock with its blunt one-dimensional sound. They had bundled themselves, fled the Arctic, arrived in a tropical country wearing their fervent beliefs like layers of clothing they sweated in but refused to shed.

Once upon a time, my grandparents said, we lived in a land that was more beautiful than this land. Eventually they went on to explain that the climate in Russia had not been as cold as it was in Manitoba. There had been apricot and pear trees growing in their yard, and walnuts. They had grown sugar melons and cantaloupes, which my grandfather had tried in vain to cultivate in his garden beside the Red River.

At Thanksgiving they brought samples of their garden crops to church, jars of fruits and vegetables, and baking and sewing that were auctioned off and the proceeds given to charity. They thanked God for the peaceful country of Canada and its government that had opened its doors to them, but still, nothing was quite as good as it had been in Russia, not as lush, not as beautiful. The teaching we received in school was not as rigorous as it should be. Perhaps even we, the children, were not quite as good as the children had been in Russia. Especially not as good as Anna, my mother’s young sister. That little girl had nursed the entire family when they were ill with typhus, only to succumb to the disease later on. We were not as good as the infant boy who’d been buried in a garden a week before my grandparents immigrated.

“So why did you come here, then?” I once ventured to ask. “Because there were bad people,” my mother replied.

Aha! Now the story would begin, I thought. Once upon a time in a land far away, there lived bad people. “There were bad people, and that’s why we left.” And that was the end of my mother’s story. What an unsatisfying tale!

My Mennonite grandparents came from the old colony, Anna Thiessen from the town of Neuendorf, and Johann Schroeder from Rosenthal. They were married on October 4, 1903. My grandmother was a tiny, vigorous woman who would give birth to nine children, and her influence in their lives continued throughout their adult years by means of her letters and their visits. She was as compassionate as she was strong-minded. I don’t recall any outward display of affection from my grandmother, but I knew that she loved us.

My grandfather’s pale blue eyes were often filled with unshed tears. He was an erect slight man who walked and talked with circumspection, and seemed to be at home only in his garden. He took particular interest in me, and the groundwork for my life was cultivated there in his garden while I followed him about, learning the attributes of silence, patience, diligence, acceptance, and the rewards to be gained by hard work.

He later came to me in the story “The Two-Headed Calf”:

Sylvia watched the grandfather tap his knuckle against the side of her watermelon, his ear pressed against it, listening intently. He listened, he said, for the heartbeats of musicians. An orchestra of seeds inside the melon. “Playing a serenade in B flat,” Sylvia told him.... He shook his head. “Don’t forget about the trumpets,” he said. He meant there were also fluted orange-coloured blossoms in the seeds, trumpets toasting the future births of other melons.... “Did you know that seeds have memories?” he asked, as though it had only occurred to him. “They can remember every garden they came from. Even the garden of Eden,” he said, with reverence. “Seeds are the Alpha and Omega,” he went on to say. “The beginning and end of every garden.”

My grandparents had lived in the town of Arkadak, where my grandfather taught school until his father became too ill to manage the farm. Arkadak was north of his family home and colder, near the forests, and sometimes they heard wolves howling in the night. My grandfather returned to Rosenthal with his young family just in time to be in the center of, and to experience first hand, the ugly repercussions of the revolution and the ensuing civil war. In Canada they spent an unproductive year on a farm east of the Red River, and several years in Winnipeg, where they operated a boarding house on William Avenue. My grandfather attempted to eke out a living by selling encyclopedias and Bibles door to door. Then they settled in Morris, Manitoba, supported partly by their working unmarried daughters and partly by my grandfather’s work as a janitor at the local hotel.

Morris was a town whose people were mostly of British descent, the exception being several families from eastern European countries and Germany, a Métis family, a Japanese man, and my family, the Roger Bartlette family. My father had anglicized his name from Berthelet and claimed to be part French, Scottish, Cree, and Ojibwa, a heritage of mixed blood that in the 1940s and ’50s was more often denied than claimed.

There were Mennonites, other than my grandparents’ family, living in the town who had known one another while living in that long ago time and place in Russia. I was related to most of them. I began to tell my friends that I was Russian, until I once heard my mother tell someone that she was not Russian, but Dutch. Her German accent was thick then, and so the man she was speaking with had assumed that she was from Germany. “Russia,” she had corrected. Then she added, “But I’m not Russian. I’m Dutch.” That was news to me. “Did you wear wooden shoes?” I later asked. “No, of course not,” she said. “We wore regular shoes.”

I soon realized that my curiosity about my Mennonite heritage would not be satisfied. I wanted to “be” something. It was important to be able to say where you had come from in the way my friends were able to do. My father spoke French, but he was only part French. My mother spoke German, but she wasn’t German. She’d been born in Russia, but she was not Russian. She was Dutch, and although she did get down on her hands and knees and scrub the back steps and sidewalk as Dutch women were known to do, she had not worn wooden shoes. Being Mennonite, I thought, was complicated.

If I was to learn anything about my Mennonite relatives, I would need to study them when they weren’t looking. I observed that my mother discouraged the expression of strong emotions; looking into a mirror for longer than it was necessary to determine whether or not you were presentable was frowned upon. There were many cousins and second cousins living in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and California, but most of them lived on farms east of the Red River where I sometimes spent my summer vacations pursued by a flock of cranky geese. My cousins, when playing baseball, were fiercely competitive, but in a restrained and quiet way. They liked to tease, to play jokes on one another, and when we went to town on a Saturday night, they had a way of looking at town life with wry humor, which caused me to think how some people in Morris pronounced “Mennonite” as “Minnanite” and called them Knacksote eaters, Low German speakers, square heads. The Morris kids sometimes mimicked the Low German accents of the boys from the nearby towns of Lowe Farm and Rosenort as a way to show their superiority.

Then the husband of one of my great-aunts died, and another opportunity to learn what it meant to be Mennonite presented itself. Uncle Jacob had been my great-aunt’s second husband, her first husband having died as a young man in Russia; their child, a girl, had also died, both of causes that were talked about in hushed tones and in German so the “big ears” in the room could not understand.

My great-aunt had married in Canada and late in life, the second time. The honeymoon was barely over when Uncle Jacob passed away. I overheard a woman comment, rather wryly, that perhaps if she’d been married for a longer time her grief would not have been quite as severe. The comment reflected on what some took to be her rather dramatic display of bereavement over her husband’s body before the funeral (when my sisters and I had been encouraged, and refused, to kiss him goodbye), and during the service and burial. In the following days my great-aunt became fearful of sleeping alone, so I was sent to keep her company. Upon my arrival from the skating rink, shivering with cold, I found hot cocoa waiting and a plate of buttered buns. She hovered over me as though she expected I might run for home. I felt a bit like Hansel in the story “Hansel and Gretel” – as if I was being fattened up for the cooking pot.

For several nights I lay beside my great-aunt in the darkness, the clock ticking loudly as she wept and whispered prayers, sighed, and called out. As the night wore on, her ample body sank deeper and deeper into the feather mattress, dragging me along with it. I hung onto the pillow, afraid that I would smother, and fearing what I thought she feared – that we would be visited by the ghost of Uncle Jacob.

I had learned that Mennonite funerals were very large. People came from far and wide to attend them, and many photographs were taken of various individuals posing with the dead. Afterwards, they ate dill pickles, cheddar cheese, and buns, and told rambling stories about the departed. I had heard that my great-uncle Jacob had been a good man and therefore he had likely gained his reward. My great-aunt expected to join him one day, yet she carried on as though this was not the case. In retrospect, I remember Uncle Jacob had been a handsome silver-haired gentleman with gentle ways. There’s no doubt that his unexpected courtship, and so late in life, had rekindled hope, and there’s no doubt that yet again my aunt’s heart had been broken. But what I recalled then was that she had often sung the song “Faith is the Victory,” and I concluded with my black and white, legalistic, twelve-year-old way of reasoning that my great-aunt’s excessive display of grief over her husband’s body and her fear of sleeping alone made her faith somewhat less than victorious. Was this, too, another attribute of being Mennonite?

I would learn one day that my great-aunties’ lives had been shaped and dictated to by their close-knit community in what was then southern Russia, and by its church. They’d once lived in towns and villages surrounded by Ukrainians and Russians. They’d hired these people as farm laborers and household servants, yet they were content to know little about them, just as they chose to remain uninformed about their non-Mennonite neighbors in Morris, Manitoba, the world in which they now found themselves. They had strong advice on how my mother ought to raise her children. They hoped to compensate, I surmised, for the fact that my mother had committed the unthinkable and married out of her religion and culture.

My sisters and I strenuously resisted being taught how to embroider and to speak German, but our attendance at church was not negotiable. We had been baptized Roman Catholic in deference to the wishes of our paternal Roman Catholic grandmother, but attended a small white Mennonite church that had been hauled into town from the country and set onto a vacant lot beside the Morris Hospital. For a time it was presided over by my grandfather, then by Uncle Jacob and, when he died, by various lay preachers until membership dwindled and it became financially unfeasible to keep the church open. My grandparents had been Old Church members in Russia, and although several of their relatives had become Mennonite Brethren after arriving in Canada, I believe we received Old Church teaching. We were taught that how we lived spoke louder than words. We learned to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, to not seek to draw attention to ourselves, and above all, when others harmed us, to turn the other cheek. There would be no boisterous play on Sundays. As I became a teen I learned that being beautiful meant having a clean heart, groomed fingernails, shining hair, and a complexion enhanced by face cream and not cosmetics. I was not allowed to go to movies and school dances. Being Mennonite, in my opinion, meant not having any fun.

In an early story, “The Day My Grandfather Died,” the young narrator, Lureen, says,

“Being French meant being flashy and demonstrative, traits that I didn’t see in my mother or my grandparents, who were Mennonite, a fact I detested. Being Mennonite was like having acne. It was shameful, dreary. No one invited you out.”

With the exception of my grandparents, whom I had grown to respect and deeply love, the opinion I’d formed of Mennonites in general was unflattering, biased, and, I would one day learn, sometimes just plain wrong. The story “Flowers for Weddings and Funerals” ends like this:

I can see Oma bending in the garden, cutting flowers for weddings and funerals. I can see her rising to search the way I take and she will not find me there.

I had decided that I was most definitely not a Mennonite.

In the early 1980s I was a newly-published writer, living and working in Winnipeg. There was a literary conference, and I was startled to find myself invited to take part in a panel discussion on what it meant to be a Mennonite writer. The auspiciousness of the occasion, that I was to be included in a discussion along with the literary giant Rudy Wiebe, was not lost on me. Being a newly published author meant that several of my stories had appeared in small literary magazines. Wiebe had published one of those first short stories in an anthology, More Stories From Western Canada [1980]. In doing so he had firmly established me as a storyteller of note among other western Canadian storytellers such as Sinclair Ross, Gabrielle Roy, Margaret Laurence, Frederick Philip Grove, Wallace Stegner, and Robert Kroetsch, whose creative writing course I had attended at the University of Manitoba. In that course I had met, and became close friends with, the writers Armin Wiebe and Victor Enns. Kroetsch had been instrumental in bringing my stories to the attention of Turnstone Press. I was in very good company.

Rudy Wiebe and I had corresponded only briefly in an exchange of notes over the short story he had chosen to publish in the anthology. I had read his novel The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), and more recently had fallen under the spell of The Scorched-Wood People (1977), a novel that had affected me deeply and fueled my interest in my father’s ancestry. I wanted to write about my Métis heritage and to explore the possibility that I might be related to Louis Riel.

I was aware of Wiebe’s earlier books, Peace Shall Destroy Many and The Blue Mountains of China, but I hadn’t read them. It had been difficult not to be aware of them and the controversy aroused by their publication. I confess that I didn’t understand the reason for it, and it didn’t concern me. “I’m not Mennonite,” I would tell anyone who would listen, just as I would proclaim I am not a feminist writer, woman writer, Manitoba writer, prairie writer. It behooved me now on the occasion of the panel discussion to accept being identified as a western Canadian writer, and to try and pass myself off, for this occasion at least, as being somewhat Mennonite.

The moderator was Robert Enright of the CBC. Rudy Wiebe sat on one side of me in the studio, and on the other side was Patrick Friesen; and perhaps Di Brandt was there, or it may have been Ralph Friesen, who within several years would become the editor of my first collection of short fiction, Night Travellers (1982). Ralph was on the board of Turnstone Press, and when it looked as though my book would be published without the benefit of having been edited, I prevailed upon him for help and he responded by taking his vacation and spending it working on my stories. During the late 1970s and early ’80s there was an enclave of up-and-coming Manitoba authors who had been dubbed “The Mennonite Mafia.” I found myself among members of the Menno Mafiosi, about to take part in a panel discussion, and feeling very much a fraud.

Before the taping began, I felt the need to substantiate my presence. I leaned over and whispered in Rudy’s ear. I told him about my dual heritage. That was when he said, “You should write about Mennonites. You’d be a good person to do it.” He went on to say that I had one foot in and the other out, which gave me a good perspective.

Years later when I reminded him, and I would do so on several occasions, he couldn’t recall having made the comment. But I can recall as though it was yesterday that my mind immediately churned with objections. He couldn’t have known that several of my new stories were riddled with references to my Mennonite connection. I was writing about them, yet I objected to the suggestion that someone thought I should.

Stories such as “Judgement” questioned the inconsistencies of what I thought was a legalistic faith. An old man, Mr. Thiessen, dies in the night of lung cancer, and his widow waits for the sun to rise. She expects the doctor to come in the morning as usual, to administer a shot of morphine, and while she waits, she and her dead husband have a talk. The husband asks her to roll him a cigarette, and the wife refuses. She berates him for having smoked and harmed his body, and declares that consequently he will not go to heaven. He counter-argues that she eats too much. She’s obese, which, in his opinion, is just as harmful as smoking. After the doctor leaves, the dead husband appears to his wife in the potting shed where he’s gone to get his tobacco and papers, which he takes with him as he goes off down the road to heaven. His wife, Mrs. Thiessen, tries to run after him, but she can’t keep up because she is too fat.

In another story, I had given a woman the name Mrs. Brawn, when I really had meant “Braun.” She’s the leader of a group of women who meet for Bible study and good works in “The Wednesday Circle.” A young girl seeks out the women, hoping for guidance and comfort, to confess a “sin” and find her way to redemption. She overhears a woman among them relate an account of the suicide of a young girl who, during a war, had been captured by soldiers and brutalized many times. The women argue about whether or not God would forgive the girl for having taken her own life. Mrs. Brawn ends the dangerous discussion by quoting scripture. The woman who had told the story about the raped girl sums up their reaction to it when she says, “We obey because we fear punishment, not because we love.”

As part of the literary conference, Rudy Wiebe had agreed to meet with writers and critique their stories. “The Wednesday Circle” was one of them. “This is theological,” Rudy said, which was only one of several comments he’d made about my story, but the one that stuck. I recognized that, indeed, stories such as “The Wednesday Circle,” “Judgment,” and “Night Travellers” were an attempt to achieve religious significance.

My evolution from being an over-achieving homemaker and mother, community volunteer, member of a church choir, Sunday School teacher, leader of a girls’ club in an inner-city neighborhood, to becoming a writer of fiction had been fraught with indecision, self-doubt, and fear. And yet, when I had “discovered” literature and when I began to write fiction, I felt as though all of my life I’d been a duck waddling about on dry land and suddenly I had found the pond. This seemed to be what I was meant to do. However, my mother had taught me that telling stories was tantamount to telling lies. If my stories contained a theological element, I might somehow redeem myself in the eyes of those whose opinions mattered, such as my mother, my relatives, and my church.

The question of whether telling stories was an honorable, or even a moral, thing to do haunted me. When we talked about writing, Mennonite writers immediately understood the very real risk of being ostracized by their family and community. They seemed more willing to take that risk than I was. Indeed, some of them seemed eager to free themselves of who and what they were, which was impossible for me to do even if I’d wanted to. I would need to write my way toward that kind of understanding.

The urge to write stories eventually took precedence over my fear, and I convinced myself that honesty meant no subject could be taboo. It meant portraying the world the way I saw it to be, and not the way that I wished it to be. I had decided that I could bring honor to my grandparents’ name and to my name if, in my writing, I practiced all the attributes I’d learned from them: patience, acceptance for what came, and willingness to pay attention to the smallest details and to work hard. I had read Rudy Wiebe’s preface to the anthology More Stories From Western Canada, where he had written,

Stories must be told and re-told, and the retelling of stories about a place, a person, an act is so much more important than recounting the original facts because the so-called lies—the accretions and deletions of each new telling—are more humanly significant than literal facts can ever be. The “lies” of good stories are always, perversely, truer than, “facts.”

Rudy was a Mennonite, it was quite possible that we were related, and his words were good enough for me.

 Ladies of the House (1984), my second collection of short stories, pointedly stayed away from my Mennonite connections and was followed by two novels. In the first, The Missing Child (1989), the Mennonite community is centered on a small church and is depicted in a rather strong way. The Mennonites in the novel are among the minority in the community, just as they had been in Morris, Manitoba: a kind of sub-culture existing on the edges of the predominant culture, which is British. The gentle pastor, Jacob Friesen, presides over his unruly and trying flock, and his teaching somewhat reflects the teaching of the Mennonite Brethren whose influence among my General Conference Mennonite relatives had at some point taken over. They were influenced, too, by American evangelists who, in the late 1950s and ’60s, had set up their tents in rural Manitoba. When Jacob Friesen dies, his flock comes to mourn him and to tell stories about his life, including Hendrick Schultz, a young boy whose life has been inordinately influenced by the minister and his wife. The pastor’s widow, thinking to finish the work Jacob had started to ensure the salvation of Hendrick’s soul, requests that he stay the night to keep her company.

Hendrick Schultz lay in bed that night beneath the feather quilt, eyes closed, feigning sleep as from the foot of the bed came the sound of Lena drawing her funeral dress up over her head and shaking the creases from it…. She had not turned on the light…but Hendrick saw her anyway, in the sounds she made…. The room contained the smell of Jacob.… something moist and round, an unpleasant clean odour which said nothing of its owner, except that he was clean. … He opened one eye and saw the clock—a pinwheel of green light—as she wound it…. Hendrick clutched at the side of the bed as she pulled back the feather quilt, sat down, and the whole mattress tilted… “Oh, God, oh God,” Lena whispered. “Why did you have to take Jacob away from me so soon? Why did you have to go and do that?” … He pretended that he’d fallen asleep instantly and began to snore, but the wool socks she’d given him to wear to bed prickled against the soles of his feet. He felt like kicking out…, rising up suddenly in a scream…. [During the night] he rose to the surface gradually, aware immediately that the darkness of the night had reached its fullest point…. when there was a loud pounding on the door…. “What is it, oh Lord?” Lena said, awake instantly…. “It’s me, Elizabeth.” The door flew open… [as Hendrick’s mother] strode… into the bedroom.… Hendrick saw her hair,… rippling in silver streams across her breasts. “Get out of bed,” Elizabeth said [to him]. She… climbed into bed beside Lena. “I’ll take his place,” she said. “For tonight only. And then you’re on your own.” …Hendrick tore the wool socks free, felt the shock of the cold linoleum against the soles of his feet, and entered the world.

My second novel, The Chrome Suite (1992), went off in an entirely different direction. But my literary connection to my mother’s heritage would not go away, thanks in part to Hildi Froese Tiessen, a professor of literature at Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo. Very early in my literary life, Hildi sought me out and we became friends. She was influential in my being invited to be writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo in 1987 and 1988, and in 1989 she published several of my stories in Liars and Rascals, an anthology of fiction by Mennonite writers. I was invited to speak to her students and to give public readings, and on these occasions, graciously invited also to attend “community suppers” at the College. There I found myself surrounded, and a bit overwhelmed, by the Mennonite-ness of a hoard of good-natured, clear-eyed, energetic, and gregarious students. They were so like my cousins. I felt a strong kinship towards them, and towards Hildi and her husband Paul Tiessen, as I did to other Mennonites I met throughout my literary life wherever I traveled. Immediately upon hearing the names such as Bergen, Dyck, Toews, Friesen, Wiebe, Enns, I felt an affinity with these persons and was drawn to engage them in conversation, or to just stand beside them in a crowd of people and feel sheltered.

Before one of the several readings I have given at Conrad Grebel since the 1980s, Hildi gave me a book to look through while she attended to lastminute arrangements. She and Paul ran a small publishing company named Sand Hills Books, and they had published a collection of photographs called Forever Summer, Forever Sunday: Peter Gerhard Rempel’s Photographs of Mennonites in Russia, 1890-1917 (1981). In the book was a photograph of a group of women and children sitting on the steps at the entrance of a graceful-looking house, a flower bed of petunias in the foreground, the veranda trellis covered in ivy. The women were all dressed in lightly-colored clothing, white dresses perhaps, such as I had often seen the Tsarina and the beautiful Romanov princesses wearing in photographs. In another picture, children paused in their game of croquet in a yard; beyond them stood a hedge and a tree. Young men sat round a table playing chess; a group of people posed with the carcass of a pig following a butchering, their long aprons and their pride of achievement at the end of the day a replica of the scene I had witnessed as a child.

I was astounded when, as I leafed through the volume of pictures, the familiar faces of my great-aunts leapt out from among a group of women, two young and beautiful women with enigmatic smiles and smoky dark eyes and hair. I recognized my oldest daughter in their features and hair. In another picture I saw my grandparents’ children – my mother and her siblings as youngsters, the very young great-aunties with them looking hauntingly shy. The woman who had lain beside me in the dark grieving the loss of her husband may have been about fifteen or sixteen years old. She held an infant niece on her lap, one hand curled gently across the baby’s stomach, while her other hand was tucked up under the arm of an older child to hold her in place on a stool. My great-aunt looked vulnerable and uncertain as to how she should arrange her features for the picture-taking. It was easy to imagine her going down a Russian street in the town of Rosenthal in winter with that same tentative look, her back straight, her long skirt brushing the tips of her shoes as she made her way along the wooden sidewalk, leaving a trail of footprints in the snow. That imagined description would appear in my next novel, The Russländer (2001).

Winter was taking its time ending, and the town looked dismal, dark tree branches set against a grey woolen sky, the street deeply rutted and icy, wooden sidewalks criss-crossed with the slushy footprints, mostly small ones of the children who had gone to school earlier.

I would see my great-aunt as I wrote about my young protagonist, Katya:

A crisp wind tugged at Katya’s skirt, and she felt the bite of it at her ankles. . . . [Once again she counted her steps,] [noting] how many it took for her to reach her grandparents’ house. When viewed from across the street, the Schroeder house looked small. Pots of African violets and gloxinia lined the windowsills, their blossoms magenta and pink jewels. Her grandmother was known to have a hand with gloxinia, and hers were always in bloom.

The world of that long ago and faraway place portrayed in Forever Summer, Forever Sunday became real. My Mennonite relatives had attended school and church, shopped at stores, gone on picnics and for walks among a grove of walnuts. They’d been flesh, heart, and mind engaged in the daily struggle of life. Why had they been so reluctant to tell their stories?

I returned home realizing that I didn’t know anything about my Mennonite heritage. I had one foot in and one out, but so far, most of what I had written about them had been from an outside point of view. In my few attempts to write from the inside, such as in the novel The Missing Child, the Mennonites – like all the characters – were somewhat larger than life.

My mother feasted for days on the photographs in Forever Summer, Forever Sunday, as though she couldn’t get enough. She recalled the large oak tree in the town of Chortitza which had been central to a legend of the Zaporizhzhyian Cossack, Hetman of Ukraine, Bogdan Khmelnytsky, who in the mid-1600s had assembled his troops around the tree to inspire valor before going to battle with the Poles. My mother knew only that the tree was very old and very large, and that it had been a meeting place. She had sat in the shade of its branches, just as the children in the photo were doing. She claimed to be able to find her house in the photograph of Rosenthal in the winter. The picket fence had a hole in it, she said. She had crawled through that hole when the “bad men” had come and she’d been sent running to tell her grandparents. Other stories, often dark, began to emerge.

I made arrangements to travel to the Vistula Delta region of Poland, and to Ukraine. I finally took the time to read my great-uncle Gerhard Schroeder’s memoir, Miracles of Grace and Judgement, an account of those very terrifying years when my grandparents’ world had come apart. Now I was going to go over there and, finally, “find” them. The narrative in the book of photographs Forever Summer, Forever Sunday had provided enough information for me to realize just how much I didn’t know. I worried that there was too much for me to learn in too short a time. It would prove to take seven years in all to fill in the gaps and write from the inside of the Russian Mennonite world in the novel The Russländer.

While I researched, I wrote another short story collection, The Two- Headed Calf (1997). Several of the stories reflect the efforts of that early research, and touch on the subject of my grandparents’ tragic past – in particular, the story “The Two-Headed Calf,” which I referred to earlier. Sylvia is a child born out of wedlock to Betty, a Mennonite young woman. She’s in the garden with her grandfather when she asks him if he might know who her father is. He replies in this way, in the way that came to me in a dream just before I departed on my first trip to Ukraine:

The grandfather jabbed the earth with a finger and then drew a vertical line through it. “This is the beginning,” he said. Then he drew another vertical line, a wide space between it and the first one. “And this is the end. Watch,” he said, as he drew a horizontal line between the two lines, his finger stopping midway between them. “See? That’s you.” Finally, he drew an ellipse the shape of a melon seed, and enclosed all the lines. “And that’s the almighty God, your father. He already knows your beginning and your end. Do you think that when he sees you, he sees your mother and your father, too? No, He sees only you. So just be who you are. Be you.”

Whomever and whatever that would prove to be.

On the warm evening of July 16, 2007, I knocked (a little nervously) on the door of Miriam Toews’s hotel room in Toronto. Miriam had flown in from Winnipeg to teach a writers’ workshop at Humber College. Although we had e-mailed several times to set up this interview – part of my doctoral research on her writing – this would be our first meeting. Miriam immediately put me at ease. She showed me to a comfortable armchair, offered me a glass of red wine (I accepted), and took up the chair next to me. For the next hour, we talked. We talked about the ways that Miriam’s Mennonite background expresses itself in her writing. We talked about how her upbringing compares to my childhood experiences in the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. And we talked about A Complicated Kindness and how writing this story helped temper the view that Miriam – and her writer-protagonist Nomi Nickel – once had of the Mennonites.

Wiebe: A few years ago, I found myself taking a course on Canadian Mennonite writers. A Complicated Kindness had just come out, so I started by reading it. It shook my world, Miriam, and it wasn’t because of its Mennonite setting; it was because of the way you described the Christian fundamentalist community. Because I was raised – my dad grew up Mennonite, but my mom didn’t – in a Pentecostal church. I always thought I was going to be a Pentecostal preacher’s wife. My husband went to Pentecostal Bible school.…

Toews: Wow. Yeah.

Wiebe: A Complicated Kindness was the first book I’ve read that was set in a world that reminded me, in some ways, of the one that my husband and I grew up in. I was talking about the book with my husband in the car on the way here, and he said, yeah, she got it right.…

Toews: Oh, that’s nice to hear.

Wiebe: I remember when I was reading the book.… Poor guy, he was trying to read his own book or work on the computer, or whatever, and I kept running into the room every ten minutes to read him a passage, because it was so similar to what we had experienced, and I had to share it with him. It captured how that sort of atmosphere can be stifling, but also how there are people there who are lively and…

Toews: Good.

Wiebe: …authentic, and, doing the best they can. I started to write my own “mennocostal” poems in response to some of those episodes, and I was surprised to find how joyful they were. I expected the poems to express some gentle criticism, but I was surprised by the joyfulness in them. Your novel is, for me, very joyful.

Toews: Oh that’s very nice to hear; I appreciate that, because not a lot of people comment on that aspect of it. I like to think that it is, too, that it’s not an indictment or a criticism of the faith or of the Mennonite people, but of the fundamentalism.

Wiebe: The second time I read the book was after spending some time reading some Mennonite history and some other Mennonite literature, and I found myself feeling a little bit more protective of the Mennonites. Not that your book made me feel as though I needed to be –

Toews: Yeah, yeah.

Wiebe: …but I could appreciate what some Mennonite readers might have seen in it that I hadn’t seen before. But, the book just rocked my world. So I am really pleased to be able to talk with you.

Toews: That’s so cool. Thank you!

Wiebe: Now, I should let you talk!

Toews: No, no, no! I’ve been talking all day. I’m used to being by myself in a room, so it’s nice to hear you talk.

Wiebe: So, I have some questions for you…. I’m interested in how your Mennonite background influences your writing. I’m interested in how people’s stories reflect their culture. I’m also interested in you as a writer (a writer whose work really moves me). I’m interested in the idea of how writing can be an act of discovery...

Toews: It’s true.

Wiebe: ...how you can write yourself to a different understanding of your topic, or the audience you’re writing for, or the people you’re writing about, and how you can come to a new perspective of who you – the writer – are. I’m curious about the act of writing, the process of writing, and how it relates to self-awareness. That’s roughly the thread that ties all of my questions together.

Toews: That’s very interesting; that’ll be good! I’ll like talking about that. Yeah, that’ll make me think...

Wiebe: So having said all that, the very first question I have for you seems to have nothing to do with, you know, what I just talked about for a million years.

Toews: [Laughs]

Wiebe: There’s a passage near the end of A Complicated Kindness where Nomi starts talking to her high school English teacher Mr. Quiring. It seems as though she’s been writing all along to him; she’s been writing her final assignment for him. The book – can you see the book as her final assignment for Mr. Quiring, her “Flight of Our People” assignment?

Toews: Absolutely, yeah.

Wiebe: So Nomi is a writer.

Toews: Yeah, yeah.

Wiebe: Why did you choose to structure the novel that way, or why do you think the novel structured itself that way?

Toews: When I write, I have to be writing to somebody. I have to be writing to someone; my main character, my narrator, has to be writing to somebody. I just find it easier to write that way. It just seems to make more sense in terms of the reason for writing. So in this case, I just started writing, and I didn’t know the book was going to be an assignment. I didn’t know that it was going to be directly written to Mr. Quiring until it got to a certain point. I don’t even know exactly at what point it became clear. It makes sense because he was her English teacher, and she was supposed to be writing about the topic “The Flight of Our People,” which would mean one thing from his point of view in terms of the migration of the Mennonites, but for Nomi, she takes it to a more personal end.

Wiebe: So, the “Flight of Our People” for Nomi means the flight of her sister Tash and her mom – and her own intended flight – from East Village.

Toews: Exactly. Yeah, the flight of her people, you know, very specifically; yeah, it’s just sort of a twist on that, on that theme.

Wiebe: That reminds me of an interview you did with Hildi Froese Tiessen for Prairie Fire (2000).

Toews: Okay, yeah.

Wiebe: This would have been just before Swing Low came out. In the interview, you said that, unfortunately, you had negative feelings towards the Mennonite community, the Mennonite church, Mennonites in general, and you were trying to work through that, because you knew not all Mennonites were bad.

Toews: Mm hmm.

Wiebe: Then five years later, flash forward, you’re sitting down with Di Brandt, and she’s interviewing you for Herizons. And you’re talking about A Complicated Kindness with her. You said there were things you really were proud of in your Mennonite heritage, and things you really liked about them, like their wacky sense of humor...

Toews: Mm hmm, yeah.

Wiebe: …and at the same time, there were things that drove you crazy about them.

Toews: Mm hmm.

Wiebe: So, in that five-year period, your perspective shifted. You went from struggling with your view of the Mennonites to a more balanced view. Did writing have anything to do with that shift?

Toews: Writing, certainly, and time passing. I think when I was talking to Hildi....When was that?

Wiebe: 2000. Right before Swing Low was published.

Toews: Back then I was very angry, because of all of the circumstances surrounding my dad’s death, his suicide, and everything that played out in the community, before and after and surrounding that. I was very angry, you know; I was very bitter. I think I in part blamed the Mennonite community and church – to a certain extent, not entirely, obviously, it wasn’t the whole picture in terms of my father’s mental illness and suicide. But certainly, that kind of repression, and his own guilt and the pressure that he felt to play a certain role in a community, in the church, just this very constricted life that he had that was all tied up with religious fundamentalism. And then, some of the responses from some of the people in the community in the terms of their denial of his illness and suicide, or the rumors that were spread that were not true. To a certain degree, I blamed the Mennonite community and Mennonite fundamentalism for contributing to my dad’s mental illness and death. But I think that over the years it’s imperative that you move away from anger and bitterness and blaming. I didn’t want to get caught in that. I also did come to the realization that to a large degree the community did sustain him in some ways. Who knows what kind of a person he would be, would have been, outside of that community, what he would have felt or how he would have been different, if at all.

Yeah, I think certainly the passing of time after his death and beginning A Complicated Kindness, where I could see, where I could remember and I could go further back, where I wasn’t blinded by my own grief and anger and cynicism allowed me to see the Mennonites differently. I still have huge problems with fundamentalism, and with the religious aspect of the Mennonites, but I can see that there is a difference between the community of faith itself, and the way the church and powers-that-be have interpreted it, you know, the way they have affected individuals’ lives, you know, so I think I did come to that awareness.

Wiebe: Through the process of writing A Complicated Kindness?

Toews: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I realized that I didn’t want to be judgmental, or carried away with my own kind of like, okay, Mennonites are, you know,... I realized that there are good Mennonites and there are bad Mennonites like there are good and bad people in any other community, and there are problems within the Mennonite community that are specific to the Mennonites, and there are problems that every other community shares.... So I think I became more open after a certain amount of time had passed and because of the writing, realizing that in order for people to sympathize with Nomi, or to understand the Mennonite community, that A Complicated Kindness couldn’t be, like, this constant diatribe, you know, this scathing indictment of an entire community. I was really, really careful about making sure that I didn’t do that and that that didn’t come across, because first of all I didn’t believe it, and secondly, I realized that that would be off-putting for readers. When A Complicated Kindness was published, I was nervous about people’s reactions. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I also felt quite confident that I had been fair to the Mennonites and that my main character was true to herself. Of course, Nomi’s 16, she’s going to exaggerate some things and downplay others. Sometimes she’s sarcastic and sometimes she’s very earnest.

Wiebe: Yeah, she speaks in these sweeping exaggerations.

Toews: Exactly, the way that teenagers do, and she has some insights as well, the way that teenagers do. She assesses things in a way that I wouldn’t – I’m 43 and she’s 16. Some people have said, “Oh, well, sometimes she sounds very optimistic and sometimes she sounds very negative.” I think that’s normal. And her opinion on a lot of things changes from day to day, like a lot of 16-year-olds, and very much like anyone’s. She’s dealing with a certain set of circumstances and reacting to them in different ways. Throughout the story she’s trying, subconsciously or consciously, to find a place for herself. And it’s always shifting. She’s my protagonist; she’s 16 years old; these are the circumstances in her life. I’m a fiction writer; a novelist. It’s not my job to create something that’s entirely historically accurate. But going back to your original question, for sure I was angry at the Mennonites for a while, but because of time passing after my dad’s death, and also the writing of A Complicated Kindness, I could come to take a more measured view....

Wiebe: I went to the Mennonite/s Writing conference in Bluffton, Ohio, in October. There were a few sessions on A Complicated Kindness, and a number of people who commented on the book seemed really… ambivalent about it.

Toews: Mm hmm.

Wiebe: I was surprised because the book really inspired me, and I saw it as more about religious fundamentalism than about the Mennonites. But some people at the conference seemed concerned about how the book represented the Mennonites. They seemed concerned that outsiders wouldn’t know that the book was caricature, and that outsiders would accept the book as literally true right down to its last jot and tittle, rather than recognizing that some parts were more emotionally than literally true. And other people there thought the book was bleak (not everyone, of course; but some of them). I didn’t see it as bleak. Because at the end, Nomi goes from – this mirrors the shift in your own view of the Mennonites – she goes from seeing East Village as “Shitville” to this place where…. Well, there’s this lovely paragraph in the last chapter of the book, where she’s lying on the grass with the neighbor kid. And she’s running through in her mind all the things she loves about the town and her life there.

Toews: Absolutely.

Wiebe: She finds that “measured view” – is that the phrase you used earlier?

Toews: Mm hmm. Yeah.

Wiebe: It’s an inner freedom Nomi comes to, and whether she leaves East Village or not at the end of the book doesn’t matter to me.…

Toews: Yeah – and she understands that to a certain degree – I mean, she’s still young, and things are up in the air, but, she understands that she can’t necessarily be herself in that community but that community has shaped her and will continue to.

Wiebe: Yeah.

Toews: What you said earlier about caricature, I don’t really see A Complicated Kindness as a caricature. I do see it as written from a 16-year-old’s point of view. Nomi describes her community in the exaggerated way that teenagers I know, and once was, do. But in terms of the impact of that type of discipline and judgment – I don’t find the book to be hyperbole or caricature at all. In fact, so many people who are still living in those Mennonite communities have told me that it could have been far more harsh in terms of what happens to some of those individuals who find themselves outside of the structure, breaking the rules as it were. In terms of the destructiveness, the damage, that that kind of fundamentalism, with its adherence to ridiculous rules that have nothing to do with Christianity and love and goodness and beneficence, can cause human beings.

Wiebe: I mentioned earlier that I grew up in a Pentecostal community. And, your work has caused me to look back at those experiences and to pay attention to the kind of discourse we used to ... well, I guess, “story” ourselves. How we described ourselves. How there were certain metaphors that recurred in the songs that we sang, and in the Bible verses that we quoted, and so on. For example, we often talked about ourselves as being Christian soldiers, as God’s soldiers.

Toews: Mm hmm.

Wiebe: I was even part of a kids’ group called Crusaders.

Toews: Crusaders.

Wiebe: Can you believe it? Like in the Middle Ages…. We had uniforms, with the horse, and the knight, on the crest.

Toews: [Laughs]

Wiebe: And we marched in rallies, with other Crusaders from across the province of Ontario. We had sword drills – I was one of the best at those. You’d hold up your “sword of the spirit” – the Bible – and the commander would yell out, say, “Ephesians 6:13. Charge!!”

Toews: [Laughs]

Wiebe: You would race to find the verse, and whoever stood up and began to read it first would win.

Toews: There’s so much comedy there, you know –

Wiebe: Yeah, yeah.

Toews: …it’s sad, but it’s funny, too.

Wiebe: Shades of A Complicated Kindness.

Toews: Yeah, absolutely. I would have used that had I known. I was a Pioneer Girl. There was a Boys’ Brigade. I don’t know if you had that. That was in my day.

Wiebe: Noooo. But we Crusaders had squads of knights and ladies, and maids and squires. Now, “pioneers” fits these wandering Mennonites, breaking new territory, and –

Toews: Exactly.

Wiebe: This is leading toward my next question…. I know that pacifism is one of the doctrines that Mennonites are most associated with. They selfidentify with it, and other people identify the Mennonites as being pacifist.

Toews: Mm hmm.

Wiebe: So, I suspect that the Bible verses about being God’s soldiers wouldn’t have had a major place in your church’s sermons and songs.

Toews: Mm hmm.

Wiebe: How did you story yourselves instead? How did you describe your Christian walk instead?

Toews: That’s a good question. There was certainly, you know, kind of military undertones, you know, like paramilitary – but, um…you mean as a kid growing up.

Wiebe: Or looking back on it as an adult, like however you want to answer that. What kind of metaphors did your church use?

Toews: There were so many, and so many of them I’ve ... almost absorbed and forgotten, you know, in the same way that you take algebra, or geometry, or calculus inside and then forget about it.... So, I haven’t really, you know, writing A Complicated Kindness, I, you know, I still read the Bible and I’m using verses, um....

Wiebe: You know, it’s interesting that we’re reading it again, and under different circumstances.

Toews: And as a kid I was so outside of that whole religious thing; it didn’t take with me. I never felt like Nomi. Nomi feels the pressures of hell and judgment when she’s younger, and I didn’t. I never believed that after I died I was going to go to some fiery thing, or heaven for that matter. It never washed; it was like this story, this fiction, that was so pervasive, but it was a part of our lives. So in terms of the Bible, and how we defined ourselves in those terms ... sheep.

Wiebe: Sheep? [Laughs]

Toews: Yeah, I think that was probably the biggest image. You know, like Jesus was our shepherd –

Wiebe: Yeah.

Toews: It always bothered me because it seemed so passive.

Wiebe: Baa-thered? [Laughs]

Toews: What? Oh,baa-thered, baa-thered. [Laughs]. Yeah, but it did bother me, because it seemed so passive. Sheep just follow the shepherd around, but that’s what was expected of us, you know, like we were a little flock. So Jesus was presented as quite a loving, caring individual. And, as his followers – which would have been, or should have been, us kids and everybody else in the community – you follow, and you serve. And then Jesus will return, and protect, and ....

Wiebe: And once in a while you’re going to get sheared, but you know ....

Toews: [Laughs] Yeah, exactly. And a few of us are going to be slaughtered.

Wiebe: [Laughs]

Toews: Various rites of passage. So, yeah. I think that the Mennonites as sheep is the most predominant image that I have.

Wiebe: You’re making me think of a quotation from Patrick Friesen. He said….

Toews: That’s another friend of mine. Patrick is from Steinbach, where I grew up….

Wiebe: Patrick said, “Where I grew up, I rarely thought of pacifism as meaning that you didn’t fight; I knew that was true. Pacifism meant that you didn’t argue or confront each other very often, either, and so you found all kinds of other subtle ways of getting around that. And I think that’s where a lot of Mennonites learned how to write” (in Tiessen, 1992, 18).

Toews: That’s really interesting; I hadn’t read that. You know, I believe that. I agree with him. Yeah…there was so much emphasis on toeing the line in my Mennonite community. My parents were always quite openminded, liberal, tolerant; they were a weird little island of ... liberalism in that conservative community. But my dad was so passive, too. He hated confrontation, he wouldn’t argue, he wouldn’t stand up for himself. He was often kicked around in his work or in the community because he was such a doormat in so many ways. It would drive my mom crazy. I obviously would have absorbed that. I don’t know what the home situations were of some of the other Mennonite writers – it sounds like Patrick’s was maybe something similar. Anger is something you’re not supposed to show as a Mennonite because everything that happens in this day and age is God’s will, supposedly, so how can you be angry if something really horrible happens to you or someone treats you like crap? You pray for them, you forgive them. But that still doesn’t really address the anger you might feel inside. It may or may not be justified, but it’s there.

Wiebe: Those feelings have to go somewhere....

Toews: All of those real healing feelings, like anger, and hurt, and feeling abused…. Generally, there’s nowhere to put all those feelings. So, Patrick’s probably right. You put it in your writing, you attach those feelings to your characters.

Wiebe: I’ve noticed that about your characters. The character of your father in Swing Low chooses silence as a life strategy…

Toews: Exactly.

Wiebe: …but his autobiography is written in his voice.

Toews: Yeah, yeah!

Wiebe: And Nomi and her dad exchange notes rather than talking face to face, because she’s trying to get at why her mother left – it’s very indirect, their correspondence.

Toews: Yeah, it is.

Wiebe: Nomi doesn’t challenge anyone about community hypocrisy face to face; she does it in her written assignments. And eventually, when she confronts Mr. Quiring about his affair with her mother, she does that in writing, too.

Toews: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Wiebe: I was curious about why your characters tended to confront others primarily in writing, rather than face to face.

Toews: It’s like what Patrick says….My characters do it and I do it; I mean I do it through my characters, and my characters do it through their…. [Laughs]

Wiebe: ...through their writing, too. You create writers who write.

Toews: Yeah, yeah.

Wiebe: I have another quote for you, Miriam.

Toews: These are interesting.

Wiebe: It’s taken from Di Brandt’s foreword to her first book of essays, Dancing Naked (1996). She’s writing about what it was like to become a published writer:

I was surprised to find, looking back over these essays, how often the Mennonite question came up: how long it took me to recover from the trauma of breaking through the strict codes of separatism and public silence I grew up with in the Mennonite community of south-central Manitoba, and how difficult it was to actually break centuries-old taboos against self-expression and art-making and public speech, as I inherited them in the farming village of Reinland. Not only did this act of rebellion and subversion shatter my identity as I knew it at that time – having to recognize in myself the ‘rebel traitor thief,’ willing to sell out, blow up, throw away the family stories and the official narratives of the culture for art – but also it scared the bejesus out of me: what if the Mennonites came after me? What if they killed me for this act of utter betrayal? (9-10)

How does your experience of writing about the Mennonites compare to the one that Di describes here?

Toews: She and I talked about that very thing. I felt very ... nervous, when A Complicated Kindness came out. On one hand, I felt confident that I had been ... fair. Not that that’s the job of the novelist. But I felt that I had been fair to the Mennonite people. I knew that there was going to be disapproval from some camps, but not from all. But I was nervous. I was looking outside – I remember Di telling me that she would look outside her window, which would face the same way mine was, her house was just a few doors down, and she would imagine that she would see, or she would be waiting for, these black cars of the Kommittee – you know, the elders from the church – showing up to basically ... come and get her. Paranoid thoughts, but –

Wiebe: That’s an image straight out of communist Russia.

Toews: Yeah, it is! Exactly. Which neither she nor I lived through, but of course we heard stories about it all the time. There would be these men – always men, older men –“Who do these young women think they are? How can they say ...? That’s not fair.” You know, expressing real, real, rage. I know it’s out there, you can read stuff online probably, things that are really critical of me – and of Di, I’m sure – but what are you going to do? That’s what we do, that’s what we do, that’s the risk that you take, that’s the fear that you live with –

Wiebe: So you felt that fear, too?

Toews: I did!

Wiebe: I wondered if it might be different for you because you published A Complicated Kindness (2004), well, almost 20 years after Di’s first book was published (questions i asked my mother, 1987).

Toews: There’s still that kind of underlying whatever it is. Something that is engrained as a young girl. The rule of girls and women in those communities and in the church.

Wiebe: You know, my mom was the first woman to speak from the pulpit on Mother’s Day.

Toews: Wow. [Laughs]

Wiebe: In 1991. In the Pentecostal church we were attending at the time.

Toews: That’s amazing. I can’t think of any woman who ever, ever, ever got up to speak during the main service. We had our little girls’ groups, and my high school teacher would speak now and again, but .... Never in the main sanctuary during the main service.

Wiebe: So, you felt some of the same nervousness and apprehension as Di. But what was the response, in general, overall, to A Complicated Kindness?

Toews: In general, it was amazing, amazing, supportive. There were angry people who said it’s all lies, she’s exaggerating, blah blah blah. This is what I expected to happen. What I didn’t expect to happen was the incredible support that was out there. I hoped that this would come from the liberal, more progressive Mennonites who are all over the place....

Wiebe: [Sotto voce] You could walk right by one and never know.

Toews: [Laughs] Yeah, exactly. They’re relatively open-minded. The congregation that my mother belongs to, for instance, had a female minister and all that stuff, but.... But I wasn’t expecting that amount of support, from the small conservative Mennonite communities themselves, which I did get. Not from all of them, obviously. But I would get letters from the ministers of conservative Bible-belt churches in the Fraser Valley or something, saying these are harsh words, this is a harsh story to read, but here are true elements that we have to look at, we have to deal with, we have to look at what we’re doing as a community and grow.... So that was very, very rewarding.

Wiebe: Oh, yeah.

Toews: …and surprising. But there was obviously negative criticism, too.

Wiebe: Di has talked about the affirmative responses she received – and Rudy Wiebe, too, who was one of the first Mennonites to write in English, as of course you know. But I have the sense that there was more negative than positive response for their first books about the Mennonites.

Toews: I think it is true, I mean, from what I’ve heard them say.

Wiebe: So, is the fact that you’ve had more positive reaction than they did because so much time has passed since they first wrote? Is it because the Mennonites are now used to there being Mennonite writing? Is it because most of the Mennonites are now assimilated –

Toews: I think that is a big part of it, absolutely. Times change, people change. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there is a kind of weird conservative vibe thing happening. It’s part of the old American religious right, and it’s affected a lot of the Canadian religious communities, this kind of blind, “anti this, anti that” –

Wiebe: That’s one reason why A Complicated Kindness is so powerful.

Toews: Yeah, it was timely, I think, in that way. But certainly there’s criticism towards me, still is, but not as much as [what] Rudy and Di suffered. I don’t know what the difference is necessarily. I remember Rudy Wiebe’s first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many, being banned –

Wiebe: Banned?

Toews: Oh, yeah. My mother was telling me about it. I was just a kid, but she would say that there was this huge scandal.... And it’s so sad, because the Mennonites have so much to offer and, you know, any group of faith does, if it can get around the prejudices and the narrow-mindedness and the fear, that leaning in, that immediate condemnation that so many, but not all, obviously, but there’s that reaction within some communities. It’s really unfortunate.

Wiebe: You know, we’ve been talking so much about the Mennonites…. It’s just reminded me of an interview that was done with David Bergen.

Toews: Another friend of mine.

Wiebe: Yeah?

Toews: A second cousin. [Laughs]

Wiebe: [Laughs] Well, you know, my Opa used to talk about “the red-headed Toews,” so maybe we’re related, too. Do you have any red-haired Toews in your family?

Toews: My son has red hair!

Wiebe: Well, there you go!

Toews: He has like amazing red hair.

Wiebe: My Oma’s sister married a Toews, and I guess all of their kids had red hair, so....

Toews: That’s hilarious. I thought my son got his hair from the Loewens, but, who knows....

Wiebe: Well, David seemed uncomfortable being “pigeonholed” as a “Mennonite writer” (Walker, 2005). Do you relate to that?

Toews: Yeah, I do. I don’t mind, I mean we all do that, “Miriam Toews, oh yeah, she wrote that book about Mennonites”....

Wiebe: You wrote two other fine works, no, three other fine works, before A Complicated Kindness – one was in a Mennonite setting, and two others weren’t.

Toews: Yeah, exactly. I’m trying not to write about the Mennonites again because I think I said what I needed to say. I’ve been cleansed, purged of those demons – not demons; you know what I mean – but…. Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be known as a Mennonite writer. Or as a prairie writer. Or as a … “lady” writer, that whole outdated expression.

Wiebe: How would you like to be known?

Toews: As just a writer. Absolutely. You know, women, Mennonites, prairie writers – we all bring our own little sensibilities into our writing, but if we’re doing a decent job, the stories are universal. So all that other stuff is irrelevant. It’s interesting to people. It’s the sort of thing that I like to know about the writers that I meet, you know, what is this person’s background. I think it’s a valid thing for people to want to know, but I certainly don’t want to be known as a “Mennonite” writer.

Wiebe: [Sheepishly] Yeah, well, but nonetheless, for my doctoral research, I’m looking at you and Di, as “Mennonite” writers. [Laughs]

Toews: That’s it. Well, there is that sensibility that we bring to it. It’s not the only thing, obviously, but writers for the most part write about what they know, so it’s inevitable. For the longest time I didn’t think that all that Mennonite stuff affected me the way that it did. I felt I could somehow just move away from the community and escape and be fine. And then I realized that it gets under the skin and settles in there. I don’t know what movie it was – “Magnolia” or something – one of the characters says, “You may be finished with the past, but the past isn’t finished with you.” [Laughs] I thought, well, that’s true.

Wiebe: Has your view of whether you are Mennonite shifted over the years?

Toews: No, it hasn’t really. I consider myself to be a Mennonite, I’m a secular Mennonite.

Wiebe: I think you can be. Being Mennonite is like being Jewish, right? There’s a whole continuum.

Toews: Absolutely, you can be Hassidic, or Orthodox, or secular, nonpracticing…. I don’t know how else to.... I’m this, this, this, but yeah, I’m also that. You know, I’m Mennonite. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t attend a Mennonite church – or any church for that matter – right now. It’s not something that I want or need at this point in my life anyway, but yeah, I do certainly think of myself as a Mennonite.

Wiebe: You know, Gertrude Stein was asked a number of times to write her autobiography, but she never did. But after her partner Alice Toklas died, she wrote her partner’s biography. But she wrote it in Alice’s voice. Like you did, for your father with Swing Low.

Toews: Interesting …I wasn’t aware of that.

Wiebe: Some people think that Stein was telling her own story as much as Alice’s, but in a way that she was comfortable with, through the distancing provided by using another person’s voice (cf. Smith and Watson, 2001).

Toews: Mm hmm. Interesting.

Wiebe: I was wondering how much of Swing Low, if at all, is your own story. It’s obviously your father’s story – and it’s beautifully told – but is it yours as well?

Toews: Well.... That’s a good question. I don’t know. Maybe in some small way. But not overall, because… I’m sure you read the reason why I wrote it from his point of view, you know, because of his experience in hospital and how eventually I had to write things from his point of view for him to read so that they would make sense to him because he was so confused. And as I said, I do like writing in first person, becoming characters that I write about. I think to think of Swing Low as non-fiction even though obviously it is in this grey area, and it’s hard to slot or label, but....Yeah, I think of it as his story. I was very careful to write it in his voice, and everything that happens in the book really did happen. Every single thing. His thoughts at any given time are based on what people told me about that he had said about what he was thinking. So in the book when I say he’s thinking this or that, it’s based on something that somebody had told me he had said. There hasn’t been one single individual who has said that it’s not true, that that didn’t happen. I made absolutely sure of that and ran it past a whole bunch of people before I published it, which isn’t what I normally do.

Wiebe: You’re describing the biographer’s work.

Toews: Yeah, yeah! I made absolutely positive that everything was accurate.... So, no I don’t think of it as my story except for the fact that he was my father and so, you know, I’m in the book….

Wiebe: [Laughs] That had to be weird.

Toews: [Laughs] It felt kind of.... I don’t think I was doing the same thing that Gertrude Stein may, or may not, have been doing. But it is an interesting theory, and I think that there’s an element of that, for sure. Her situation could be a little bit more ... true than mine. Yeah.

Miriam Toews is currently at work on her next novel (which isn’t about Mennonites). This interview is one of two that I have conducted for my doctoral thesis. I wish to thank the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, and the Graduate Program and Research Office at the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Education, for making this project possible. – NGW

References

Brandt, Di. (1987). questions I asked my mother. Winnipeg, MB:

Turnstone Press.

Brandt, Di. (1996) Dancing Naked: Narrative Strategies for Writing Across

Centuries. Stratford, ON: The Mercury Press.

Brandt, Di. (2005). “A Complicated Kind of Author.” Herizons 19(1): 20-

21, 23-24, 44-45.

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson (2001). Reading Autobiography: A Guide

for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

Froese Tiessen, Hildi (1992). “Introduction: Mennonite Writing and the

Post-colonial Condition.” In Hildi Froese Tiessen and Peter Hinchcliffe (Eds.), Acts of Concealment: Mennonite/s Writing in Canada. Waterloo, ON: Univ. of Waterloo Press (11-21).

Froese Tiessen, Hildi (2000). “(A place you can’t go home to): A

Conversation with Miriam Toews.” Prairie Fire: A Canadian Magazine of New Writing 21(3): 54-61.

Toews, Miriam (2004). A Complicated Kindness. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Toews, Miriam (2005). Swing Low: A Life. Toronto: Vintage Canada.

Walker, Morley (2005). “David Bergen: In country.” Quill and Quire.

Retrieved Dec. 12, 2006, from http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/profile.cfm?article_id=6741

Wiebe, Rudy (1962). Peace Shall Destroy Many. Toronto: McClelland &

Stewart.

Natasha Wiebe is a doctoral candidate in The Faculty of Education at The University of Western Ontario. Her thesis investigates Mennonite “cultural storylines” that are represented in, and challenged by, the writing of Di Brandt and Miriam Toews.

Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld, Recovering Jesus: The Witness of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007.

With popular interest in Jesus fanned by recent epic films, bestselling novels, and announcements about the discovery of ancient gospels and artifacts, one is not surprised by the appearance of yet another book on Jesus. However, in the bewildering mix of sensationalizing declarations and novelistic embellishments of the story of Jesus, Recovering Jesus comes as a refreshing resource. As the sub-title indicates, this book intends to facilitate serious encounter with the New Testament witnesses to Jesus.

Yoder Neufeld wrote this book having in mind students in his college classroom, who come with a range of prior attitudes toward Jesus “whether religiously indifferent, highly skeptical, or passionately Christian” (9). He writes as a scholar and teacher eager to guide students in their study of Jesus and the various first-century claims made about him. He also writes within a confessional faith commitment to Jesus as Lord. Both the scholar and the believer are everywhere evidenced in what the author communicates. A foundational hermeneutic of trust in the scriptural sources does not deter him from asking the tough historical questions, nor does his scholarly enterprise cause him to refrain from theological reflection and exploration of ethical implications.

The title of the introductory chapter asks, “One Jesus or Many Jesuses?” In chapter 2 Yoder Neufeld turns to the field of archeology for an evocative metaphor. As 21st-century readers we are invited to “dig through the layers” of developing traditions from the present through the Enlightenment, the Reformation era, the creeds, the NT canon, and eventually the individual writings themselves. The third chapter on “One Jesus – Four Gospels” profiles each of the four canonical gospels and their respective portraits of Jesus. Chapter 4 provides a sweeping overview of the historical, geographical, political, and cultural dimensions of the world into which Jesus was born and in which his life and ministry unfolded.

Having dealt with these introductory matters, Yoder Neufeld proceeds to focus on Jesus’ beginnings, public ministry, and death and resurrection. He devotes chapter 5 to a consideration of the nativity narratives in Matthew and Luke. In chapter 6 he returns to background issues in a treatment of the Kingdom of God theme within the Hebrew Scriptures and in Jewish literature contemporary with Jesus. The rubric of “Kingdom” continues in chapters 7 through 10 in a survey of how the NT witnesses depict Jesus’ proclamation, teaching, ministries of compassion, and ethical instruction. In chapters 11 and 12 the focus is on Jesus’ death and the resurrection. Chapter 13, “Jesus – Christ and Lord,” moves into the realm of Christology, an exploration of the phenomenon whereby Jesus became the object of religious devotion.

Several features of the book are self-consciously pedagogical in their intent, obviously constructed to facilitate student exploration and learning. Each chapter includes an inset listing but not defining some “Key Terms and Concepts” pertaining to its primary subject. Brief bibliographies at the conclusion of each chapter point students to resources for further reading. Helpful charts and diagrams appear throughout the book.

Recovering Jesus will potentially have an audience beyond the college students for whom it was written. Scholars may wish for more documentation of the grounds for Yoder Neufeld’s conclusions, or they might find his hermeneutic of “humility and awe” (122) before the witness of the NT writers lacking in precision, but they will find in this volume a remarkably comprehensive discussion of interpretive issues in current debates about Jesus. Interested and motivated youth and adults in congregational study groups will find this to be a compelling guidebook to help them sort through the maze of competing interpretations currently promoted by scholars and the media. Pastors and teachers can also benefit from consulting this book, especially because of the breadth of its scope in discussing Jesus and his world.

The index could have been constructed in ways more beneficial for readers. In particular, an index of ancient sources would assist teachers, pastors, and other interested readers to locate the many treasures buried in the book’s pages.

In sum, Yoder Neufeld models a remarkable integration of scholarly clarity and Christian conviction. His model has the potential of furthering a recovery of Jesus and his vision of liberation in our fractured world.

Jacob W. Elias, Professor of New Testament, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, IN

Albert Borgmann. Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Since his landmark Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life was published in 1984, philosopher Albert Borgmann has been frequently cited in discussions about technology not only among philosophers but among sociologists, environmentalists, and even theologians. Borgmann has continued to publish widely on the topic, and at first glance his most recent book may appear out of place. The title suggests a political platform or manifesto, an impression reinforced by the opening line of the preface: “This book is my attempt to come to terms with the country I love” (ix). Connections with the rest of Borgmann’s corpus soon become apparent, however, and I think this book is an attempt to unpack the broader political significance of his philosophical reflections on technology and culture.

Borgmann does clearly situate himself within a particular political context. One of his overarching arguments is that there must be a renewal of distinctively American virtues, such as generosity and resourcefulness, if the United States is to flourish. This renewal requires the “concentration and illumination” of dispersed movements of reform through a vision that is national in scope (197). As someone who has written much about households and local communities, this does seem to be new terrain for Borgmann. Yet the more basic argument he develops here is that his nation is in need of renewal because its citizens have been disengaged by consumerism and modern technology – by the commodification of both private and public goods. In short, moral conduct not only governs, but is governed by our “tangible environment” (30). To underline this point, Borgmann repeatedly quotes Winston Churchill, a surprising choice for a book on American ethics: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us” (5). Nonetheless, “Churchill’s principle” echoes and encapsulates much of Borgmann’s earlier work on technology, and buildings come to serve as a metaphor for common structures that are social and political as well as physical.

This book can also be viewed as a significant work in philosophical ethics. Indeed, it is because of the complex relationship between ideas, actions, and the tangible environment that Borgmann is convinced Americans need to reconsider their understanding of ethics. Thus: “Theoretical ethics, practical ethics, and real ethics should be thought of not as rivals but as complements of one another” (30), and this book is structured around three parts focusing on these three dimensions. Part one engages philosophers such as Kant and Mill in the course of discussing “The Charms of Principles” (47) and “The Dark Sides of Utilitarianism” (55). Part two is informed by virtue ethics, as Borgmann moves on to consider practices. Along the way he considers personal virtues such as wisdom, courage, and friendship, and political virtues such as justice, stewardship, and design. Part three focuses on his own contribution to ethical discourse, what he calls “real” ethics. As he says in an introductory chapter:

Ethics has to become real as well as theoretical and practical. It has to become a making as well as a doing. Real means tangible; real ethics is taking responsibility for the tangible setting of life. Real also means relevant, and real ethics is grounding theoretical and practical ethics in contemporary culture and making them thrive again. (11)

After linking the contours of real ethics with both “The Economy of the Household” (ch. 13) and “The Design of Public Space” (ch. 14), Borgmann concludes by revisiting his earlier discussion of Thomas Jefferson. What makes Jefferson so compelling is how he exemplifies the ideal of centering our lives in our households in ways that “can give us the courage to join with our neighbors in the design of a public realm” (201).

There is much to commend in this volume, not least of which is Borgmann’s accessible writing style. Newcomers to both philosophy and Borgmann’s work will also appreciate his penchant for moving beyond diagnosing the ills of contemporary culture to offering a prescription for its renewal. However, his interest in framing ethics within his own political context will be less helpful for those not sharing this context or not agreeing that the nation “provides a fair scope for ethics” (3). No doubt Canadians are shaped by the same kind of commodification as their neighbors to the south, and no doubt Mennonites and other Anabaptists have much to learn from the attention Borgmann pays to the environment that shapes our daily lives. But in my view those who find themselves in these categories have more to gain by starting with one of his earlier works.

Paul C. Heidebrecht, PhD candidate, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI