Despite the fact that Anna Ruth Ediger Baehr danced with her Mennonite father, we all know that Mennonites don’t dance.  Except for . . . Lizbeth, in the eponymous story in Darcie Friesen Hossack’s book MENNONITES DON’T DANCE, a girl who wanted to fall “straight into the real world”, go to a matinee, or at least, “be outside and running”.  But when Lizbeth danced, her world whirled apart, and she lost the rhythm of family life, of Mennonite culture.

Darcie Friesen Hossack is the choreographer for this circle dance of prairie stories about Mennonite families. She incorporates many of life’s big dance steps: loss of innocence, betrayal, forgiveness, redemption, restoration of hope, integrity, joy and love.

The book helped me remember the impact of the words I overheard when a child, the profound changes in me which were wrought by an adult’s seemingly banal action. The life of parents and other adult relatives is so mysterious. A sensitive child is always listening, watching, for some phrase, a tone of voice, or action that will bring meaning, that will illuminate the mystery of why these persons in whom we have trusted behave as humans, and fail, let us down, cruelly hurt us, and then sometimes take us back in their arms with love. A sensitive Mennonite child listens hard, for the clues can be like the dandelion wine a Mennonite mother hides in a concealed room in the cellar, and reveals to her daughter when the time is ripe. Or in another story, like a strip of torn wallpaper that triggers an understanding of how a difficult life was lived.

Jim Bartley of the Toronto Globe and Mail has given a nod to this book as among the “best first fiction of 2011″.  The book is up for some other honors and awards, and it deserves them.  Darcie, I’ll read your next book eagerly.

“Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

1926, Saskatchewan, Canada: my grandmother Anna is on the right; her mother Susanna is in the middle

My red-haired grandmother Anna Janzen Funk was born March 15, 1895, in Friedensfeld, Sagradowka, southern Ukraine, one of twelve children in a Mennonite Brethren family. The Mennonites were about 18 percent of a German minority of some two million in Russia.  She and my grandfather emigrated to Canada in 1923, and the picture above was taken three years later.

When Anna had just turned 22, in early spring of 1918, she was working as a baker’s helper at Bethania Mental Hospital, near the Dnieper River. The Russian government had collapsed and now the Bolshevist regime was in power, attempting to transform revolutionary theory into soviet reality. Their army (the Reds) had taken over the area, seizing livestock, food, and household goods, killing and razing estates. The White army battled the Reds back and forth across the Ukraine. Also at this time, Russian peasants were vengefully confiscating the Mennonite farms, and, led by Nestor Makhno, participating in massacres against the Mennonites.

Anna’s family had disappeared.

Just a month ago, about 30 Red soldiers had stolen all the extra clothing from the male Bethania Mental Hospital patients. Now it was a Sunday morning, and the revolutionaries were back, warmly dressed, slurping soup in the dining room. As fast as she could slice bread, the soldiers grabbed it. Anna rushed into the spacious, bright kitchen with its tiled floor and huge stainless steel kettles to get a new batch of bread which the kitchen girls had just pulled out, and to ask them to punch down the rising dough and form it into more loaves to be baked.

She heard a sharp knock on the back door of the kitchen.

When she opened the door, she was startled to see two dozen soldiers from the White army, who had been able to cross to Bethania on the frozen Dnieper River.

“Let’s have lunch!” they demanded. What was she to do?

The Reds were having their soup in the dining room at that very moment!

As she stood on the doorstep, the bright sun lighting up her coppery hair, she squinted at the hungry White soldiers, many of them her own age or younger, and rubbed a floury hand over her forehead. She could see that their uniforms and boots were muddy from their scramble up the thawing banks of the Dnieper River.

There’s Anna on the back step at Bethania, the flour dusting her forehead, breath condensing into clouds, facing those hungry, rough young men. Perhaps one of them reminded her of one of her lost brothers. Whatever sparked it, in that moment, she took courage. She used what she had—her bright hair, her confident smile, and her memories of her disappeared family —and spoke.

Grinning, she scolded the White soldiers as if they were her brothers: “Boys, do you think I will let you in the house with those boots! Scrape the mud off completely! Knock again when those boots are clean, and I will give you a nice meal.”

Disarmed, they smiled and cleaned their boots. Anna quickly brought the trays of fresh bread into the Red group, eagerly encouraging them to fill their pockets for later, opened the front door for them and shooed them out. As she saw the last Red soldier’s back going through the front door, she motioned silently to the kitchen girl to let the Whites in for their meal.

I have read that children in the womb can taste what their mother is eating. The food flavors the amniotic fluid. I imagine those days in 1924 when Anna carried my mother, she would have been eating borscht with sour cream, and many other delicious Russian recipes she brought with her to Canada.  But there was another flavor that Anna passed on to my mother — a taste for courage and creativity.

Snowscape

I came across this poem, “Letting Go”, by my sister Christine Ruth Wiebe. It’s a Christmas poem and I know it’s after the holidays now, but reading the poem triggered some memories I want to share, and I want to share the poem, too.  It’s just a week after I published my book, BIRTH MOTHER.  Now that so many people are reading my book, I am starting to getting used to the idea of other people knowing the intimate details of that earlier time in my life. I just wish so much that I would have had the courage to share the story earlier. With my sister Christine, for example, and my other sister, my brother and my mother. Why did I hide my thoughts and feelings from them about this part of my life?  It was not until my second child’s thirteenth birthday that I told him about his brother — lost to us, out there somewhere in the world. Why didn’t I talk with my friends — my first husband — anyone?   Why did I lock my story up inside for decades?

Keeping a secret from your dearest ones cripples intimacy, and consumes enormous amounts of personal energy.

Christine passed away in 2000 without ever hearing more than the bare outlines of my experience, and the rest of the family also knew very little.  I am very happy, though, that she and the son I gave up for adoption had the chance to get to know one another, because he found me in 1996, when he was 27 years old.

And I am thankful that when my son found me, my heart had been opened and prepared for the reunion. This was thanks to the imagination, vision and encouragement of a special naturopathic doctor and two psychotherapists, retreats at Kripalu Retreat Center and Shalom Retreat Center, intensive journaling, yoga, and my husband’s love.

So here’s Christine’s poem:

LETTING GO

This is how it should be:
Christmas vacation, and I am six;
Daddy and I are driving outside the city
to a great hill with untouched snow.
Sun warms the car.
I climb up the tracks Daddy makes
hearing the crunch each time the first time.
We stand at the top, just Daddy and I, breathing,
and the sparrows laugh.
“I’m afraid,” I say.
But then we’re sailing
and I’m safe on a narrow strip of wood
clinging to his broad back,
a solid thing in a swaying world,
and I’m laughing and wishing
we could fall like this forever
into the sun sparkles and whipping wind
and the white snowdrift
waiting to embrace us
over and over and over.

- Christine Wiebe

September 19, 1985

An illustration from my book, Birth Mother

Why did I self-publish my book BIRTH MOTHER? Why did I publish first on the Kindle e-book reader?  How easy is it to self-publish an e-book?

Here’s the story.  About two years ago, I began sending out my book proposal to a half-dozen carefully selected agents. Some did not get back to me, and others responded very tardily, with regrets. I was in a big hurry to get my story out in the world. Also, I said to myself, “Self, no matter who publishes your book, you’ll have to do your own marketing. Why not self-publish?”

There was a time when self-publishing carried a similar stigma to bearing a child
“out of wedlock”. But now some women choose in a mature and responsible way to become pregnant outside of a marriage or long-term partnership, and are respected for their decision.  Likewise, writers today can publish without being in a committed agent-publisher-author relationship, and can speak about their self-published literary children openly, without fear of being pitied or scorned.

I began by typing “self-publishing” into Google. I read some of the self-publishing blog posts. I examined a variety of tools for self-publishing, both e-books and print books.

I decided to start with an e-book because the process seemed faster, and because, being my own proof-reader, I knew that there were still a lot of typos in my book which I could discover over a period of months, and correct at my leisure, before committing my story to irrevocable print. (Although with print-on-demand, the books are printed as they are purchased, so at least the scope of typographic errors is contained.)

I decided on the Amazon Kindle e-book format over the Nook, or Sony Reader, because I would get to keep 70% of the proceeds, and because the book would henceforth be in Amazon’s prodigious catalog.

Publishing for the Kindle was tolerable and only took a few hours, albeit spread out over several months.  First, at https://kdp.amazon.com, I opened a Kindle Direct Publishing account.  Then I did what the site said to do:

1. I saved my Microsoft Word file in filtered HTML format
2. I downloaded Kindlegen for my Mac, and tried to follow the steps to convert my file to an e-book. I couldn’t figure it out.
3. So I hauled out my PC, downloaded Mobi PocketCreator (PC only), and used this tool to convert my file to an e-book.
4. I downloaded the free Kindle Previewer to check out how my book would look on a Kindle. It looked OK.
5. I clicked the button on kdp.amazon.com called “Add new title”, which revealed a short form, with the expected questions, such as book name and description.
6. I was given the opportunity to upload my converted file.
7. I was asked for my cover file and I realized that I had not made one.  But there were some simple guidelines, and using PhotoShop, I created a cover image using an illustration by the amazing Chicago visual artist Ellen Greene. I arranged permission with her to use the illustration.
8. Then the day finally came when I clicked the  “Upload book” button.
9. A few days later, my inbox was graced with a missive from Kindle Direct Publishing: “Congratulations, You’ve been Published!”  I clicked on the link in the email, and sure enough, there was my book, on Amazon.
10. My next step was to send out an email to my family and friends, and post on Facebook and this blog. That was December 28. As of today, I’ve sold 17 Kindle e-books, and one Amazon Prime Account reader has downloaded the book for free!

In 1975, with "Snowden", planning my Mexico trip

When I announced my new book after Quaker worship Sunday morning, everyone present drew a blank at the meaning of the title, BIRTH MOTHER.  I used the term “birth mother” as that was the popular term in 1976, the year in which my book was set, in referring to the biological mother of a child who also has an adoptive mother. Six years earlier, when I signed the adoption papers in January of 1970,  the popular terms were “unwed mother” or “natural mother”.

I was instructed to write “final surrender” next to my signature on the adoption papers. Later, this term morphed into “placement”. Today it might be something else, I don’t know.

You can read more about the terminology and history of adoption in Wikipedia.

BIRTH MOTHER is available for the Kindle.

A print copy will be available in a few months, and I’ll post here and on Facebook to let you know.

My first book, BIRTH MOTHER, available for the Kindle, opens in the weeks preceding Christmas 1975.  I longed to celebrate the holiday with my family in Hillsboro, Kansas, but the relationships were tense.

Why, after having a baby out of wedlock, did I take new lovers like I was sampling chocolates?

What did my worldly lifestyle lead people to think about our Mennonite Brethren family?

And, when was I ever going to begin to have a personal relationship with Jesus?

Six years earlier, on Christmas eve 1969, my son Matthew William was born. Three days later I gave him to a social worker. Soon he was in his new home, in the process of being adopted by a loving Western Kansas family.  As I understood the law, adoption meant “final surrender” and I would never see him again.

Since then, the holidays always triggered bleak, black states of being. Now as the 1975 festive season approached, I attempted to solve my problem by launching a Christmas road trip to Mexico with my current boyfriend and my dog, Perfect Master Lord Shiva. However, my dog was soon run over by a truck, my van’s transmission broke down, my friend left me to go back to school, and I was out of money.

After a 7.3 earthquake, I disappeared into the social chaos of Guatemala City, playing a temporary role as La Maestra with a street gang, embracing a dark, dangerous, and all-absorbing way of life.

A journal of my journey toward wholeness, my book BIRTH MOTHER includes drawings and Mennonite and Guatemalan recipes. The book includes descriptions of the closed adoption process in Kansas in 1969, and my experiences at the Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers in Wichita, Kansas.

If you are an Amazon Prime member, you can read this Kindle version at no cost. Others can purchase the Kindle version for $2.99.  I am working to make a hardcopy version available on Amazon later this year.

If this book resonates with you, please be in touch and write a review on the Amazon page for my book!

The incredibly perfect cover illustration is by Ellen Greene, an artist born and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, and a friend from our homeschool association when our family lived in Chicago. 

“A spiritual autobiography focuses less on the people, events and experiences of a person’s life and more on what these people, events and experiences meant for him/her and how they formed him/her or shaped the course of his life. It allows the writer to communicate who she or he is as a person and what is important in her or his life.“  —Jesuit brother Charles J. Jackson

Katie Funk Wiebe, my mom

Go over to  http://kfwiebe.blogspot.com and read my mom’s blog.  Here’s a little sample:

“In a used bookstore I picked up a copy of Frederich Buechner’s Listening to Your Life, a compilation of selections from his books arranged for daily reading. Sixty-five cents, the tag said. Why not? I have enjoyed Buechner’s books in the past, especially The Hungering Dark.

“His idea of good writing is to stick a pen into a vein and start writing. Passionate, life-giving writing is fueled by blood. I have sometimes told would-be writers to think of writing as wearing your heart on your sleeve for all to see what makes it tick.”

That’s what  I love about my mom.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home by Rhoda Janzen

New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2009; 241 pp.; ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8923-7, ISBN-10: 0-8050-8925-X; hardback $22.00

I was charmed by Rhoda’s saucy discussion of body parts and secretions, which reminded me of late-evening chats overheard during my childhood, when the adults got raunchy in a diasporic flavor of Low German, a language that seems to have grown directly out of the earth. I guffawed at Rhoda’s brittle, brilliantly funny sentences. I cringed when she described how she interacted with her in-laws, on her sojourn with her Mennonite family after her handsome husband Nick left her for a guy named Bob whom he had met on gay.com. More than anything, as I read on, I began to get the feeling that Rhoda’s back story intersects mine. I discovered that this was the case, and that our Mennonite Brethren grandparents were friends and neighbors in rural Saskatchewan, where they immigrated after the Russian Revolution.

It puzzles me that Rhoda did not disclose that she sprang from the Mennonite Brethren. The Little Black Dress of the title gains a sharper meaning when one understands that Rhoda has been assimilated into the dominant culture from this particular subgroup, for that black party dress is an apt symbol of the “worldly” behavior that the Mennonite Brethren have historically believed keeps a person from walking closely with God.

Who are the Mennonite Brethren, and why the concern with their “worldliness”?

A restorationist group, the Mennonite Brethren were vigorously evangelical Mennonites who seceded around 1860 from the mother Mennonite church in Russia. The Mennonite Brethren promoted an inward spirituality, spontaneous preaching, exuberant singing, and spiritual renewal. To them, salvation was a personal experience which could be known and celebrated.  My grandfather Jacob Funk, who joined the Mennonite Brethren church in its early days, remembered the founders as intense people who tended to think that they were truly spiritual, unlike their cold, non-believing, worldly Mennonite neighbors.

While working at the Mennonite-run Bethania Mental Hospital in the Ukraine, my grandfather Jake Funk married Anna Janzen, the niece of the hospital’s housefather. Another early Mennonite Brethren, Anna’s uncle Jacob Kornelius Janzen was an educated theologian. Rhoda Janzen is his grandchild.

Our grandparents were part of the exodus of almost 20,000 Russian Mennonites after the 1917 Russian Revolution. In the mid-1920s, these two families made new homes in the northern Saskatchewan prairies, where the Canadian government expected them to become farmers.  Jacob K. Janzen, his second wife Tina, and their seven children landed in Laird, Saskatchewan. My grandparents and their children settled in Blaine Lake, about sixty kilometers away, where my grandfather Jake fortuitously found a position working for a relative’s grocery store. Having been ordained as a deacon/evangelist in Russia, on the weekends he preached in the local Mennonite Brethren churches. My mother, Katie Funk Wiebe says “Our family often visited (Jacob K. and Tina and family) in summer and they came to our place in Blaine Lake by horse and caboose in winter. We were poor but they were poorer.” She mentions the challenges Jacob K. Janzen faced in his transition from being a well-to-do, respected professional in Russia, to being a novice Canadian farmer with seven children to support.  In the early 1940s, he moved his family to a fruit farm near Grimsby, Ontario. He became one of the ordained ministers of the nearby Vineland Mennonite Brethren Church. His youngest son, Edmund, married Mary Loewen, and in the mid-1960s, Rhoda Janzen was born. Edmund later became moderator of the General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, and so one could fairly say that Rhoda grew up steeped in the ways of the Mennonite Brethren.

Rhoda’s title highlights the worldly/spiritual conflict inherent in growing up in modern North American culture as the child of a Mennonite Brethren immigrant from Russia. As I have mentioned, this church grew out of the founders’ desires to be more “spiritual” and less “worldly”. The members already had the tendency to stay to themselves, for throughout their migrations, the Mennonites’ host countries didn’t really want them to mingle with the general populace, infecting the peasants with their virulent memes of pacifism, Biblical literacy, and religious self-determination. This was not a problem, because the Mennonites saw that it was easier to adhere to their religion if they stayed away from the fallen world — and maybe also because the Bible-reading Russian Mennonites felt superior to the illiterate Slavic cultures.

The elder members of the churches Rhoda and I grew up in had survived four years of world war followed by four years of revolution and counter-revolution. Their farms, villages, schools, businesses and homes in the Russian colonies had been a theater of conflict for the fronts of the Red and White armies. They had survived typhoid fever and smallpox epidemics, periods of famine, loss of homes, intimidation, mass burials, anarchy and general panic. My mother writes that after the German troops withdrew from the Ukraine, “complete lawlessness ensued, with a civil war between the Red and White armies and an uprising of peasant anarchist forces competing for dominance at the same time. . . The area where the Mennonites and other Germans lived in the Ukraine was the territory   most affected by the civil war between the Reds and the Whites.” The village where my grandparents lived, Rosenthal, “was an ideal location to station troops because it was situated in a deep and broad valley, but its farm land was located on a high plateau, affording an almost limitless view of approaching forces in all directions except south.” The windmill owned by my great-grandfather sat on top of this high plateau. The Red/White front passed through this area about seventeen times in the next few years, and even across our family’s yard, giving the family “a front-seat experience of the war with bombs flying over their house and  dead soldiers in their backyard with arms and limbs shot off,  empty eyes staring at the  crows overhead, waiting for the furor to stop.” Mennonites in Russia personally saw members of their families, friends and neighbors killed, tortured and raped. They spent time in prison because they were Mennonites. Many of their homes were destroyed. Members of their families were arrested and never heard from again. They lived in fear. The heavy darkness of those earlier times was carried by the senior members of the Canadian Mennonite Brethren churches, and they communicated to the younger people a deep, palpable paranoia of the “world”, which we caught. As contemporary theologian Tom Finger says, “It is understandable why marginalized Anabaptists often attributed the intense opposition they experienced to a single systemic entity, the ‘world’.”

A consistent concern for the immigrants was how to be more “spiritual”, and less “worldly”, and here in Canada, with its openness and freedom, their daily life was shot through and through with worldliness, in the form of media, popular culture, public education and the loss of their cultural languages of Low and High German.  (In 1922-27, several thousand very conservative Russian Mennonites who had come to Canada in the 1870s immigrated further, from Manitoba and Saskatchewan, into Mexico and Central and South America, in a desperate bid to preserve their language, cultural and religious identity, objecting strongly to their children being Canadianized in the public schools.)

Dancing, as Rhoda mentions in her book, is forbidden in the Mennonite Brethren world both because…it leads to sex!…and also because “There was something about the lighthearted frivolity of dance that suggested a fatal weakness in priorities. Mennonites were supposed to work with dignity, and when the work was done, there would be something to show for it.”

Chapter Eight: Rippling Water talks about Rhoda’s intense childhood longing to dance. I was moved to read about the dance training Rhoda’s brother is providing his daughter, and how together they watched  this young dancer perform, interpreting “the elemental concept of rippling water, her hair unfastened, cascading behind her like the sheer azure chiffon that clung to her slender form…it spoke volumes that this man, who knew nothing about dance and who had probably never danced a step in his own life, was prepared to go without a second car so that his daughter could ripple like water.” Finger says, “Historic Anabaptists . . . often overplayed Spirit and downgraded matter.”  Rhoda’s description of her dancing niece and supportive (Mennonite) father is a beautiful intertwining of matter and spirit.

Rhoda suggests that in her generation, the line is blurring between inner and outer, creation and creator, and perhaps, Mennonites could even be “in the world, but not of it.”  A recent issue of Mennonite Weekly Review talks about how urban the Mennonite church is becoming.  Many Mennonites around the world today are not ethnic Mennonites at all.  In an urban, global setting, it’s hard to make fine distinctions about what’s in and what’s out.

Rhoda speaks of a Mennonite “mistrust of education” and quotes an old Low German proverb “Ji jileada, ji vikjeada (the more educated a person is, the more warped)”.  Her viewpoint may be a degradation of a traditional Anabaptist approach, that “Christians must not value a person according to the amount of education he has. Wisdom can be received by every member of Christ’s body, for the Holy Spirit gives wisdom to each member as he or she asks for it in faith.” (J.C. Wenger, What Mennonites Believe, P. 24). But the truth is that I’ve rarely met Mennonite Brethren immigrants from Russia who didn’t want their children to be more highly educated than themselves. Mennonites in general have always sought literacy and education. In fact, they became religious rebels back in the 1500s because they had read the Bible for themselves, and interpreted it differently from the priests. The Mennonites in Russia had managed their own education until World War I, when educators were forbidden to associate. After the March Revolution in 1917, the educators re-formed but in a few years, the Soviet took oversight of all educational efforts.  When the Russian Mennonite Brethren immigrated to Canada, they immediately began thinking about higher education. A two-year Bible institute in Herbert, Saskatchewan was operated as a sort of ecumenical Mennonite school but it wasn’t Mennonite Brethren. So in 1927, the Canadian Mennonite Brethren founded Bethany Bible Institute in Hepburn, Saskatchewan, “ To give our . . . youth foundational Bible instruction in the German and English languages . . ., to wrench our youth away from frivolous pursuits and the contemporary ‘Zeitgeist’ . . ., to nurture the German language as a special possession handed down from our fathers . . ., to raise believing youth for the battle of the faith . . . [and] to take into account the needs of the congregations in the methodical training of Sunday school teachers and sundry (church) workers.” Two years later, in Alberta, the Coaldale Bible School was begun. Mennonite Brethren Bible College was founded in Winnipeg in 1944.  So I don’t get Rhoda’s comment about a “Mennonite mistrust of education”. She’s not talking about the Mennonite Brethren that I know. It’s a worldly education that the Mennonites don’t trust, and it’s the education of women that Mennonites have sometimes viewed as diabolically worldly.  Young Mennonite girls in Russia were not educated past the third grade (my grandmother Anna Janzen Funk, for example), whereas young boys would go on to high school, and even, like Rhoda’s grandfather Jacob K. Janzen, go on to advanced studies.

In the 1966, when Rhoda was a toddler and I was a teenager, Mennonite Brethren women were just starting to look up from their borscht and their babies and take a step into full participation into the life of the church. Marlene Epp comments in her book Mennonite Women in Canada, “Until the mid- to late twentieth century, and in certain subgroups still today, Mennonite women were explicitly excluded from important aspects of church organizational life and expression. In their literal understanding of female subordination and silence before man and god, Mennonites differed little from other Christian denominations.”  Understanding her Mennonite Brethren background, it’s probable that Rhoda left the church because she did not see a place there for an intelligent, strong-minded, creative, zesty woman.

Some reviewers have commented negatively on Rhoda’s slick tone, and her cautious disclosure of her inner experiences. In this, however, Rhoda is solidly within the tradition of Mennonite Brethren immigrants, who developed defense mechanisms with which to cope with their trauma. They often employed intellectualization and rationalization — and humor.

The psycho-social effects of the whole experience of leaving Russia and coming to the US have rippled down through the generations. For a view into this, I am lucky to have in hand a 1997 dissertation researched and written by Lynda Klassen Reynolds.  Recruiting Canadian interview subjects from Mennonite churches and personal referrals, she tested 67 first generation respondents (for example, my grandparents and Rhoda’s father Edmund Janzen), 104 second generation respondents (like my mother and Rhoda), and 42 third generation respondents (me). Because her father was the last son of a second marriage, Rhoda in the same generation of respondents as my mother, although she’s younger than I am by more than a decade.

Lynda Klassen’s goal was to compare scores of her test subjects against the norms on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2) and Personal Experience Questionnaires, to investigate the psychological effects of trauma and immigration on the first generation, and to see if transmission of these symptoms was occurring across generations.

• Lynda learned that people in the first generation had greater levels of anxiety, somatic complaints, psychasthenia (a psychological disorder characterized by phobias, obsessions, compulsions, or excessive anxiety), inhibition of aggression, need for affection, and lesser levels of ego strength.

• The second generation manifested significantly greater levels of inhibition of aggression, over-controlled hostility, and anxiety and depression.

• The third generation showed significantly greater levels of anxiety and depression.

Rhoda’s flippant tone and caustic remarks are typical of people who inhibit their aggression, a trait found in higher-than-average levels amongst second generation Russian Mennonite Brethren immigrants in Klassen’s study.

I’m believing that Rhoda also experienced the anxiety and depression which might be expected in second-generation Mennonite Brethren immigrants. She talks about her Childhood of Fear.  “Why we were always so afraid I cannot say; we weren’t abused, attacked, or violated in any way.  On the contrary: as Mennonites, we lived remarkably sheltered lives. . . Somewhere, somehow, the Mennonite culture had taught us that all non-Mennonite men were would-be rapists. Thus whenever we stepped outside the protective shield of our Mennonite community, we moved in a terrifyingly unfamiliar world.”

After some amount of individuation, what’s it like to come back to the Mennonite Brethren world again? Here is where the more attractive aspects of the Mennonite Brethren church culture come into play: forgiveness and family solidarity. The story of the prodigal son is not lost on the Mennonite Brethren people, and I have seen many examples of young people decisively abandoning their Mennonite homes, communities and churches, becoming worldly in every way that they can – and then being warmly and lovingly welcomed back home, as Rhoda experienced when she returned to the family structure.  Her mother “has always backed her daughters up, always supported us, always welcomed us into her home with open arms, no matter what choices we’ve made.”

Joanna Wiebe, Vashon, WA

This review was first published in the journal of the Communal Studies Association, Communal Societies, Vol. 31, Number One, 2011

Ordering a bacon gorgonzola burger with fries

watching the lead singer screw his mike stand together

and the keyboardist hunch over his keys.

The mustard walls are stained on purpose to look old.

Two of the bar lamps are missing.

The waitress has five children at home.

She’s smiling at me as she lights the candle on my table.

Words fall from the ceiling: estrella, nunca, besos.

The plastic floor is revealed in long fingers of sunlight

A patron with a cane rocks across the floor to the door and out.

After waiting an hour for my family to join me here,

I’ve ordered a bacon gorgonzola burger with fries.

I’m drinking my second glass of cabernet

Waiting to get a feeling of freedom.

Could I be free?

Or am I trapped in the Amazon?

At the Red Bicycle II

Here is my bacon gorgonzola cheeseburger.

The patty glistens under the flows of cheese,

The translucent  ribbons of onion,

The  intelligent pig.

How do they get those pickles so wavy?

How can I be like that small girl next to me, twisting her striped legs under the table, picking her nose, knocking over her water with a straw between her teeth, examining the children’s menu like the Holy Bible.

At the Red Bicycle III

Wondering why my family isn’t here.

I’d have to stop writing if they were here,

So why do I care?

Chords from the keyboard overwhelm the ceiling words.

Nothing I have ever eaten is as good as these French fries,

hot and soft, with chewy salty edges.

My phone batteries are completely dead and I can’t call them any more.