Worldly: Part 3
March 23rd, 2010 § 2 Comments
Worldly (in Low German: weltlijch): A response to mennonite in a little black dress by Rhoda Janzen
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Leaving the Mennonite Brethren church is a momentous life event. Either you are in or you are out. When I left, it didn’t seem possible to say, oh, I’ll stay in the church and be partly worldly and explore all my questions about pantheism and existentialism in the context of the gemeinde. But it’s not easy to leave the church and keep your toe in, either. This is a historical approach, of separation from the world. This was maybe largely due to the fact that as Mennonites dispersed across Prussia and Russia, their 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 themselves saw that it was easier to be themselves if they stayed away from the fallen world — and maybe also because the book-reading Russian Mennonites saw themselves as superior to the illiterate Slavic cultures. Many Mennonites employed Russian laborers, but they didn’t necessarily treat them like full human beings. (This was not going to help the Mennonites later during the Russian Revolution, but that’s another story.)
Part of Russia’s approach to keeping the Mennonites contained was to restrict the amount of land they could occupy. By the early part of the twentieth century, this policy resulted in the division of the approximately 110,000 Mennonites in Russia into an elite landed and a discontented, proletariat, landless class, because there just wasn’t enough land to pass on to the kids.
So here we have the Russian Mennonites at the turn of the Twentieth Century, living with the uneasy tensions of Frisian/Flemish, worldly/spiritual, land-owning and landless. As the Russian Mennonites struggled internally with their own polarities, they began to experience the effect of similar class struggles in society at large. They were directly impacted by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the German occupation, the destructive impact of the Red and White Armies, and the Makhno Occupation, with its continuous climate of violence, plunder, confiscation of property, starvation, bloodbaths, epidemics, and rape.
I don’t know any details of the suffering Rhoda says her family experienced during this time, but I can imagine that there are parallels with my own. For more than half a century before the Russian Revolution, Mennonites had been leaving Russia for Canada and the US, in response to the political and economic upheavals that had been going on for even longer. During the German Occupation, my mom writes, the Mennonites, who were of Dutch origin, were German-speaking and thus were labeled “’agents of Germany’ and ‘enemies of the state’. They were forbidden to use the German language in the press or in public assemblies of more than three persons or face a fine or prison term. From November 1917, until the German occupation troops arrived in March 1918, roving bandits robbed, imprisoned, tortured and murdered the Mennonites. The leader of these bandits, Nestor Makhno, claimed that his molestation of the Mennonites was due to a Mennonite employer’s earlier mistreatment of him.
Mom 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 overheard 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.
Almost every Mennonite decided to leave Russia for Canada; Canada finally opened its doors to approximately 20,200 Mennonites between 1923 and 1929. A sizable percentage of those who were able to go to Canada were Mennonite Brethren (including my grandparents and Rhoda’s grandparents). These immigrants experienced further trauma as they uprooted themselves from the Ukraine. The members of the Janzen and Funk families had called the Ukraine their home for about 130 years. Rhoda’s grandfather, Jacob K. Janzen, was an educated professional with a large family to support. My grandfather was a clerk; his family had owned a successful flour mill. Now they were expected to become farmers, for that was what the Canadian government wanted them to do.
These immigrants had survived four years of world war followed by four years of revolution and counter-revolution. Their farms, villages, schools, businesses and homes of the Mennonite colonies had been a theater of conflict for the fronts of the two armies. They had survived typhoid fever and smallpox epidemics, periods of famine.
Now they were in Canada, being encouraged to learn English and assimilate into Canadian culture, which most of them did, although not without great soul-searching. For hundreds of years, the Mennonites had been living separately from their cultural milieu – first in Prussia and then again in the Ukraine. A consistent concern of theirs 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.)
When the Mennonite Brethren immigrated to North America, their issues came with them. The Frisian/Flemish polarity fell away with the emergence of a new form of class consciousness: the newcomers vs. Mennonites who had come to Canada from Russian earlier. Relationships between the two groups were strained. The Kanadier viewed the newly-arrived Russian Mennonites as “too proud, too aggressive, too enthusiastic about higher education, too anxious to exercise leadership, too ready to compromise with the state, too ready to move to the cities, and too unappreciative of the pioneering done by the Kanadier. As far as the Russlander were concerned, the Kanadier were too withdrawn, too simple-minded, too uncultured, too weak in their High German. . . too afraid of schools and education.” (Frank Epp, Mennonites in Canada: 1920-1940.)
Rhoda’s father, Edmund. Janzen, and his wife were both Russlanders. In my own family, my mother was a Russlander who grew up in a Canadianized home, because Blaine Lake did not have a Mennonite Brethren church. My father, Walter William Wiebe, was a Kanadier who grew up in a Russlander community (and absorbed their values). I grew up in Russlander communities in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, before moving to Hillsboro, Kansas in the early 1960s, the place where my father died.
In Hillsboro, settled in the late 1800s by Russian Mennonites, our family struggled to figure out how and who to be. We swung between the values and practices of the conservative Russlander culture we had known in Canada, and the temptations of the American Mennonite Brethren culture. I could see by the names on the tombstones in the Gnadenau church cemetery that these people who had died in Hillsboro, Kansas, were my people: Janzen, Wiebe, Funk. But — Hillsboro Mennonites were so…worldly!
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6
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.
Worldly: Part 2
March 23rd, 2010 § 1 Comment
Worldly (in Low German: weltlijch): A response to mennonite in a little black dress by Rhoda Janzen
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6
I was immediately charmed by the bold way in which Rhoda launched into a discussion of body parts and secretions. To be honest, it reminded me of those late-evening chats round the dinner tables of my childhood, when the adults got raunchy in a diasporic Mennonite 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, causing people in nearby seats on the plane to crane their necks to see what was so hilarious. I cringed when she described her interactions with some of her relatives and in-laws.
Of course, Rhoda’s story is uniquely her own—a visit back to her Mennonite family and the community in California in which she had been raised, after her handsome husband Nick left her for a guy named Bob whom he had met on gay.com. However, as I read on, I began to get the feeling that Rhoda’s back story intersects mine. I saw similarities:
- dramatic and drastic flights from our Mennonite Brethren roots
- ability to whip up dinner for ten with an hour’s notice
- puzzling early choices in men
- happy-go-lucky academic demeanor
- quest for meaning
- ultimately, respect for and participation in the values and principles of our parents
When I got home from my trip to Portland, I emailed my mother, Katie Funk Wiebe, to tell her about this book. Of course, she knew about it. Being the leading Mennonite feminist writer means she’s always got her finger on the pulse of Mennonite literature.
Not surprising. It’s a fun parlor game among Mennonite Brethren people to dig up these kinds of family connections. In fact, given the small gene pool, it’s not unusual to discover that you are related to another person in more than one way (Come to think of it, at the funeral of my husband’s grandmother Ruth this past summer, I discovered that my paternal aunt Susie was married to the grand-nephew of the man who married my husband’s grandmother’s sister. Was that fun for you? If so, you may be a Mennonite Brethren.)
Some of the details in this essay are drawn from an extensively-researched history of my grandfather Jacob Funk, which my mom is writing. The history of this side of my family begins with the August 1, 1789 arrival of 20-year-old Frantz Peter Funck and his young wife Maria at Kronsweide, near Zaporoschye, South Russia, in the first group of Mennonite immigrants from Prussia. I also dug up a history of my grandmother Anna Janzen Funk, which mom wrote awhile ago. From these pages, and a few other sources I had handy, I was able to delve into the history which Rhoda and I share.
I already knew that some time in the 1500s, some of our Dutch ancestors read the Bible for themselves, and felt led to disobey the state church (and thus, the state) and re-baptise themselves as adults. These rebels, our great-etcetera grandparents, were from the Flemish and Frisian areas of Holland. For their effrontery in claiming freedom of thought and action, they were burned at the stake, roasted on a slow fire, tied to the stake, drowned, buried alive and otherwise persecuted. (Read the Martyrs Mirror if you want to know more, but I warn you, it’s scary.)
The Mennonite survivors fled to the northern lowlands of Germany and the Danzig area, which later became Prussia. Here they lived from 1540 to 1790. They learned German, which became the language of God and Mennonite culture — Low German in daily life, and High German in church. Non-conformity to the “world” was important, both in their material and spiritual practices. They honed their spiritual approach, sometimes squabbling between themselves over culturally-related expressions of what exactly non-conformity meant. The Flemish Mennonites saw themselves as an elite, progressive group, and considered the Frisians low-brow. These two groups took their class consciousness and divisiveness with them to the Ukraine, where they migrated after an1786 invitation from Catharine the Great. Here they continued the great debate over how best to live a spiritual life. Frisians accused the Flemish of being worldly in their choice of clothing; the Flemish said the Frisians were less than spiritual in their style of houses and furnishings. They differed in their modes of baptism: the Frisians sprinkled, the Flemish poured. Who walked closer to God? was the question.
A small but fervent group of restorationists seceded from the mother Russian Mennonite church around 1860, calling themselves Mennonite Brethren. They considered themselves the true believers, as opposed to their cold, non-believing, worldly Mennonite neighbors. This group considered themselves really spiritual – when they baptized, they dunked the entire person!
My grandfather remembered these early Mennonite Brethren as intense people who tended to think that they were better than others. They were vigorously evangelical. They promoted an inward spirituality, spontaneous preaching, exuberant singing, and religious services of spiritual renewal. They believed that salvation was a personal experience which could be known and celebrated.
Rhoda and I grew up drenched in Mennnonite Brethren-ism. Her grandfather, Jacob Kornelius Janzen, joined with the Mennonite Brethren soon after the group formed. Not long after, my grandfather Jacob Funk also joined the MBs, because he agreed with their theology. My father was a Mennonite Brethren pastor. My mom is a famous Mennonite Brethren writer. Rhoda’s dad, Edmund, was for some years moderator of the General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches.
When I was growing up in the MB church, it seemed to me that the folks in the church had an idea that they had a good handle on the truth, and the other branches of the Mennonite church were not as close to God. The GCs, or General Conference Mennonites, weren’t rigorous enough in their beliefs or practices, I learned. The GCs might go to heaven when they died, but then again, who could be sure.
In1984, my mother, Katie Funk Wiebe, wrote a book, Who are the Mennonite Brethren?, which included an outline of the 1976 Mennonite Brethren Confession of Faith. Jesus Christ, the Confession says, is the eternal Son of god, sent by the Father to reconcile a sinful humanity to himself. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary, and lived a holy and sinless life. He was crucified and died for the sin of human kind and rose from the dead. He is now with God the Father, interceding for all who believe in him. He will come again to judge the living and the dead and to establish his eternal kingdom. Jesus is the key to understanding the Bible. He is the mediator between God and humankind. He came to redeem the human race from the judgment and power of sin and to reconcile men and women to God. Through his death on the cross, Christ became the sacrifice which was sufficient to atone for sin and which established God’s new covenant with humanity. The Holy Spirit lives in every Christian and transforms him or her into the image of Christ. He empowers the believer to follow Christ and to be an effective witness for him. The Christian is expected to live in fellowship with God and other believers and to join a local church at baptism. He or she helps to build the body of Christ with spiritual and material gifts. Nurtured through the Word, fellowship and prayer, the believer grows more Christlike and glorifies God by being a witness for him in everyday life. All followers of Christ continually need the forgiving, chastening and cleansing grace of the Lord. The fruit of the Spirit is increasingly evident in the believer’s life, especially in relationships with other people.
Whoa! that’s a lot of stuff to think through. I thought and thought and after several years concluded that maybe by the end of my life I might have some understanding of some of it. I couldn’t honestly say that I believed it all, or even substantial sections, or even one full sentence. Who or what exactly is “God”? What does “eternal” mean? Isn’t blood sacrifice a little. . . extreme? What about that nice Jewish boy in school…was Jesus not interceding for him, then? Seemed kind of picky of Jesus…no, I am not going to put in a good word to God for Howard, because he doesn’t believe in me. Yet I had said that I believed the whole Confession of Faith when I was baptised at 15.
At the conclusion of the chapter discussing the MB Confession of Faith, mother quoted a MB theologian as saying, “If there are articles in our Confession that a person cannot accept, then he or she should find a church with those teachings he or she can fully agree.” Mom said, “These words may sound hard, but it is important for all Christians to find a church home where they are comfortable with the teaching, with the approach to the Word of God, and with the ministry of the church.”
Well, I left the MB church, at the age of 19. I don’t know when Rhoda left, but I am guessing that confession of faith didn’t resonate with her either.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6
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.
Worldly: Part 1
March 22nd, 2010 § 1 Comment
Worldly (in Low German: weltlijch): A response to mennonite in a little black dress by Rhoda Janzen
- What is “Mennonite” about Rhoda Janzen?
- Which part of her is the Little Black Dress?
- After a Mennonite woman has worn the Little Black Dress, can she really go home again?
I will address these three questions in this response to Rhoda’s book.
First, please bear with me while I give you a lot of background on myself and Rhoda and our genetic and cultural relationship. What follows may seem like a long string of “begats” but knowing this information might be interesting and useful. And some people have mentioned that the historical information Rhoda gave in her book was too sketchy. So here goes.
My red-haired grandmother, Anna Janzen, was part of the radically revolutionary religious group of Anabaptists called the Mennonites. Anna was born March 15, 1895, in a village in the Ukraine, in Southern Russia. In 1923, Anna and her husband – my left-handed, vigorous grandfather Jacob Funk – immigrated to Saskatchewan with their two young girls, Annie and Frieda, avoiding the two undesirables of either being wiped out entirely, or disappearing into a labor camp in Siberia. Arriving with nothing but twenty-five cents and a debt of $468 to the Canadian Pacific Railways, they stepped of the train in the small prairie town of Rosthern. They soon moved to an even smaller town, Laird, where my mother, Katie was born, at a cost of $14, then the big city of Saskatoon, then back to the sticks of Bruno, where my Uncle Jack was born, and finally, Blaine Lake, a slightly bigger dot on the map, where my Aunt Susan came into the world. Throughout these moves, Jacob Funk pursued a career in the grocery business and tried not to think about the events he had witnessed in the aftermath of March 1917: beheadings, stabbings, shootings, typhoid epidemics, rapes, mass burials, hunger, anarchy and general panic. It was enough now, to be in Canada, safe, and free. Having been ordained as a deacon/evangelist in Russia, he also preached in the Mennonite Brethren churches in Saskatchewan.
My mom, Katie Funk, married Walter Wiebe (also the child of Mennonite Brethren immigrants, who had come to Canada in 1917). I was Katie and Walter’s first child, a little ray of sunshine, chubby, energetic and interested in everything.
My red-haired grandmother, Anna, was part of a large extended family. When her grandfather, Kornelius Janzen died in 1896, he left each child an inheritance. I don’t know what Anna’s father Franz did with his money, but it is recorded that Anna’s uncle Jacob Kornelius Janzen used his inheritance to study theology in Germany.
After Jacob K. had finished his theology studies and was back in Russia, he became a Mennonite minister, and from 1912 to 1920 he also was the highly-respected housefather of the Bethania Mental Hospital in Alt-Kronsweide, Chortitz colony. From 1915 to 1920 my grandmother Anna Janzen Funk worked as a cook at Bethania, where she became good friends with a young woman named Tina, who was working at Bethania “for the Lord”, as a volunteer, and not for wages as my grandmother was. On a clear spring day, March 30, 1920, Anna’s uncle Jacob K. Janzen married Anna to Jake Funk, a co-worker at the hospital.
Three years later, in July, 1923, Jacob and Anna Funk immigrated to Rosthern, Saskatchewan, Canada. Jacob K. stayed behind in Russia with his wife Martha and their children, Jacob, Siegfried and Walter. Martha died, and Jacob K. married his children’s nursemaid, Katherine Quiring. This was Tina, my grandmother’s friend at Bethania. Tina and Jacob K. had another four children, Martha, John, Waldemar and Edmund.
A few terrible years later, (Rhoda’s book marks it as 1925 although the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encylopedia Online has it as 1927), Jacob K. Janzen, Tina, and their seven children immigrated to Laird, Saskatchewan. My grandparents were living in Blaine Lake, a town full of Russian Doukhobors, which was not far from Laird as the crow flies.
(Doukhobors were kind of like Quakers, in that they believed “The church is not within logs, but within ribs”. My grandpa was chosen to run the OK Economy Store in Blaine Lake because he could speak Doukhobor Russian fluently, among other languages.)
A trip from Blaine Lake to Laird could not be taken as the crow flies. My grandparents would get in the Buick and drive south through the Indian Reserve and then take the Petrofka Ferry (there’s a bridge there now) across the Saskatchewan River, head east to Waldheim, and then north again to Laird. In winter, there was no need for a ferry. You could drive right over the river on the ice. The whole trip is about sixty kilometers.
My mom 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 an educated, well-to-do professional in Russia, to being a novice farmer with seven children to support. All the immigrants were supposed to be farmers; my maternal grandfather was lucky to have had an uncle, D.A. Schellenberg, who had come to Canada earlier, who offered him a job in his grocery store. (My paternal grandfather was not so lucky. A poet, musician, and sensitive soul in Russia, he became an anxious, terribly inept Canadian farmer. Their family was so poor that as a teenager, my father couldn’t have his burst appendix removed. Somehow he survived, but a few decades later, when I was fourteen years old, a massive jelly-like tumor coalesced around the site of the trauma, and killed him.)
But back to the story of Jacob K. Janzen. 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, they had a daughter, Rhoda.
Leaping ahead, in her forties, Rhoda Janzen published a book, mennonite in a little black dress and all hell broke loose. It was reviewed in the New York Times and the Mennonite Weekly Review, and became the talk of the Mennonite blogs. Hurt feelings were aired. Controversies swirled. Some people didn’t like Rhoda’s generic approach to describing Mennonite beliefs and culture.
My friend, Ruth Baer Lambach, a woman of Mennonite origin, who incidentally is also my (Mennonite origin) husband’s double second cousin, gave me the book to read on flight from Chicago to Portland, Oregon, on my way to my granddaughter’s fourth birthday party. At the time, I didn’t know that Rhoda was in any way related to me, but knowing that she was writing about the experience of being a Mennonite, I was interested.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6
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.
