Canadian Mennonite
Volume 6, number 2
January 28, 2002

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Waterloo, Ont.

How does "a disaffected daughter of the faith" tell the Mennonite story? I asked Sandra Birdsell that question shortly after her novel, The Russländer, came out last fall.

"I am not disaffected," protested Birdsell, challenging the Maclean's contrast of her with Rudy Wiebe, "a devout Mennonite" (Oct. 22). While she acknowledges that her experience is "totally different" from Mennonite writers who grew up in a close community, Birdsell lays claim in her new book to the spiritual, and narrative, legacy of her Schroeder grandparents who came to Canada from Mennonite Russia in the 1920s when Birdsell's mother was 12 years old.

"I have the right to write it," she said. The Mennonite faith "is not far from my own faith." She added that the Mennonite community "is one of the best I have known."

Birdsell has attended various churches in her life. The little Mennonite church in her hometown of Morris, Manitoba, closed down when she was 12, and her mother moved to the Baptist church. Birdsell's father was Roman Catholic. Birdsell was actively involved in Elim Chapel in Winnipeg for some years and became an Anglican for a time.

She began seriously researching her Mennonite roots about eight years ago. One of the books that influenced her was her great uncle Gerhard P. Schroeder's book on Ukraine, called Miracles of Grace and Judgment. Her research involved two trips to Ukraine.

Her first trip, in 1994, found her "unprepared," she said. Being there, hearing the stories, left her with a "sense of loss, of something I had lost personally." As she stood under the famous oak tree in the former Mennonite colony, a local Russian woman serenaded her with Gott ist die Liebe (God is love). It was an emotional moment.

In 1997, she went back with "a cooler head and cooler eye."

Her novel attempts to portray Mennonites with "respect and truthfulness," she said. It's not a historical novel but it is based on a particular historical period as experienced by the Mennonite community.

"It happened to be Mennonite because that's what I knew." She added, "It's a story of grace and redemption."

The biggest challenge, she said, was to write characters that secular readers could indentify with. She chose to portray events through the eyes of a young girl, Katya, who is "naive, gentle and accepting." Katya knows little about events in the outside world, allowing the novelist to "limit" her story to life in the colony. Birdsell's meticulous attention to detail includes use of common expressions, recipes and actual historical figures, such as the notorious Pravda.

The church is not very visible in the novel, I observed.

"Power was shifting away from the church by 1919," responded Birdsell. The Mennonite communities had become arrogant and aloof, their close-knit village life steeped in gossip and innuendo. The upheaval of the revolution in her book is mirrored in the class struggles and conflicts within the Mennonite community itself.

Birdsell drew on the stories of her grandfather, Johann Schroeder of Rosenthal, who was arrested and had to go into hiding for "slandering the communists." Thus the novel has special significance for her family.

"I'm glad I've done it," she said.

The book will be reviewed in a future issue.

-Margaret Loewen Reimer

It was November, the killing had been done, and so there were fresh smoked sausages. [Katya Vogt's] mother made sausage bobbat and plumemooss for the noon meal-but not with kjielkje, as some would do; they didn't prefer noodles in plumemooss, but dried apricots and apples. She used damsons-that, and anise made it special....

They didn't do their curing and smoking in the chimney the way most people did, as Abram's estate had a smokehouse. Otherwise, they would have hung hams and rings of sausages in the chimney chamber of the attic....

She and her sisters had spent several days cooking blue plums in the outside oven, hovering over them until the skins swelled to the point of splitting, the exact moment to take them from the oven to dry into prunes. Then they brought in the melons. She wrote down the instructions for pickled watermelons.

Saure Arbusen

Cut up some melons into pieces. Grind them to a pulp in the grinder. Put a layer of whole melons (small, 2-3 pound size) in a wine barrel, then some pulp, dill and salt (so-and-so many saucers of salt, depending on how much the melons weigh). Continue to layer the pulp, dill, salt and melons until the barrel is full. Cover with cheesecloth. Put a wooden bar over the cloth and weigh it down with a scrubbed stone....

The granaries and cellars in the Mennonite commonwealth burgeoned with the record harvest; in the boys' room there were muskmelons under the beds, sacks of roasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds on shelves above their windows. She and her sisters had already dried apples and apricots on the roof during the heat of autumn, and the dried fruit now hung in sacks from rafters above their bed.... It seemed as though the house breathed, its walls expanding with the energy the fruits and vegetables gave off, the sun's energy and the goodness of the earth held inside them.

From The Russländer by Sandra Birdsell (McClelland & Stewart, 2001).

Paul Tiessen, who teaches English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, has won the $1,000 Edna Staebler Research Fellowship for 2002 to study Mennonite culture in Berlin/Kitchener in the early 1900s. His project will focus on "Gordon Christian Eby's poetics of life and language." The award was established in 1994 to increase knowledge of "the cultures of the folk and founding peoples" of Waterloo Region.

Two prominent Canadian artists have been receiving publicity for their unusual sculptures. Aganetha Dyck of Winnipeg exhibited her latest "collaboration with bees" at the Deleon White Gallery in Toronto last fall. Dyck puts objects into beehives and lets the bees create art with them. The results are "objects of enchanting and strange beauty," according to reviewer Robert Enright (Globe and Mail, Nov. 3). Gathie Falk's latest "portraits" at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver continued her exploration of clothing to convey poignant humanity. Falk's exhibit consisted of seven papier-mâché men's shirts, accompanied by floral paintings and photographs. The shirts represent actual men, one a beloved nephew who died of cancer (Globe and Mail, Dec. 13).