Since 1962, when Rudy Wiebe published his first novel Peace Shall Destroy Many, the body of literature--especially fiction and poetry--written by Mennonites about Mennonite experience has increased dramatically, both in quantity and quality. In fact, this literature is so good that it is probably known and admired outside the Mennonite community more than within it.

Assuming that many Mennonite readers have some catching up to do in this area, I offer a survey of literature by both Canadian and U.S. writers. Instead of trying to sort out a Top Ten, I call attention to books that promise to be "good reads" and that survey a wide range of writers and literary expressions. First, fiction about people from Swiss-Alsatian and Dutch-Prussian-Russian Mennonite communities, then a few books of poems.

Swiss Mennonite Experience in Fiction

An excellent place to start is Jeff Gundy's recent book of creative nonfiction, A Community of Memory: My Days with George and Clara (University of Illinois 1996), which traces the immigration of Hessian and Alsatian Amish to Illinois through Butler County, Ohio, and then depicts their evolution into the Mennonite and General Conference Mennonite churches of Illinois. Told through the voices of eight ancestors of the author, the story culminates in the autobiographies of the author's grandparents, George and Clara Strubhar Gundy, who operated the Meadows Old Peoples home. Throughout, Jeff interrupts his story by making provocative personal comments on it. For the secular reader, the book offers Amish-Mennonite community as an attractive option for these relativistic times; for the Mennonite reader, the book questions that community's regard for artists who work within it.

Two very different novels depict the Mennonites of Lancaster County. Sara Stambaugh's I Hear the Reaper's Song (Good Books 1984) recreates a turning point in the history of Lancaster County Mennonites in 1896. A tragic accident, resulting in the deaths of Mennonite young people, leads to a fervent religious revival and adoption of the plain costume and other rigid rules advocated by visiting ministers from the Midwest. Set in the 1960s, Janet Kauffman's Collaborators (Gray Wolf 1986) depicts the bizarre relationship of Andrea Doria and her plain Mennonite mother who, in effect, pushes her daughter to leave the Mennonite community and become like her mother's scholar friend. Tobacco-farm culture is well depicted, and the novel is almost more poetic than narrative.

Although Rosemary Deckert Nixon depicts the Old Mennonite community of "Wadden," Saskatchewan in her book of linked short stories, Mostly Country (NeWest 1991), the people and their personal, social and religious struggles also match those of Old Mennonites living in the United States. Nixon's handling of her materials is always fresh and satisfying, especially as in the story, "Taking Boardwalk," where Rita is exhilarated by her successful integration of Christian faith and secular learning.

Omar Eby depicts American missionaries to Africa in his novel, A Long Dry Season (Good Books 1988). But in place of the heroes of the faith and the heart-warming conversion experiences of typical missionary literature, here we find people like us, struggling to retain their Christian motivation while they also try to love each other and Africa and and its people. Better than any annual mission office report, this novel depicts what life on the mission field must be like for more missionaries than we might want to think. Rosemary Nixon's recent book of short stories The Cock's Egg (NeWest 1994) depicts Christian service workers in Africa in an equally honest, provocative way.

Russian Mennonite Experience in Fiction

Russian Mennonite writers--especially Canadian--have written more and finer fiction than have their Swiss Mennonite counterparts. One of the best ways for Old Mennonites to move toward the integration of the two traditions might be to read fiction that depicts Russian Mennonite experience, both historical and contemporary.

Al Reimer's My Harp Is Turned to Mourning (Hyperion 1985) is the perfect place to begin, since it is a very readable and convincing account of Russian Mennonites' experience beginning in the Ukraine in 1805 and moving through their immigration to western Canada. The main characters are an artist and a preacher, both of whose Mennonite commitments are tested during the turmoil associated with the anarchist Makhno. Reading Reimer's straightforward account prepares one to understand Rudy Wiebe's artistically more complex novel about the same experience, The Blue Mountains of China (McClellan and Stewart 1970) -- which may be the best novel ever written by a Mennonite.

In the most recently published historical novel about Russian Mennonites, Our Asian Journey (mlr editions 1997), Dallas Wiebe tries to capture the spiritual yearning and horrible experiences of the Mennonites who left the Ukraine in 1879 and followed the charismatic leader Claas Epp, Jr. to eastern Asia to await the Second Coming. The story is told mainly through the diary and memoirs of Joseph B. Toews, one of the pilgrims who eventually settled in the western United States, although not to his heart's ease.

Two very different novels portray life in the very close-knit Russian Mennonite communities that developed in western Canada. In Rudy Wiebe's Peace Shall Destroy Many (McClellan and Stewart 1962) the disciplined community of "Wapiti" headed by Deacon Block gradually disintegrates, thanks to both external influences such as secular education and World War 2 and the moral failings of members of the community. But in the fictional "Gutenthal" of Armin Wiebe's book of short stories, The Salvation of Yasch Siemens (Turnstone 1984), we see the same kind of community depicted in a satiric, yet sympathetic manner. Yasch Siemens, a real downix, lives on the margins of the community's economy and religious life. He presents his earthy, bumbling experiences and ideas in a Plattdeutsch-influenced English that makes this one of the funniest books I have ever read. Fans of Armin Wiebe might also read his Murder in Gutenthal (Turnstone 1991) and The Second Coming of Yeeat Shpanst (Turnstone 1995).

The short stories of Sandra Birdsell's Night Travellers (General Publishing 1972) show the Western Canadian Mennonite community disintegrating in the course of the marriage of Mika to her Meti Indian husband Maurice in the town of "Agassis" on the Red River in Manitoba. Mika's immigrant Mennonite parents die, bickering over watermelon pickle and cigarettes. Mika keeps in touch with her Wednesday Circle prayer group, but is no longer a faithful Mennonite. Her daughters' lives move even farther into acculturation and disintegration and her husband's Meti identity, earlier suppressed, flowers only in his death.

The lives of more successful, acculturated, urban, educated Canadian Mennonites--"Muppies"--are brilliantly depicted by Rudy Wiebe in the novel My Lovely Enemy (McClellan and Stewart 1983) and by David Bergen in his book of short stories Sitting Opposite My Brother (Turnstone 1993) and his recent novel A Year of Lesser (Phyllis Bruce 1996). Because Wiebe uses the style known as "magical realism" and because he depicts somewhat unconventional behavior, My Lovely Enemy may appeal most to readers with a caviar taste in literature. In any event, I recommend reading Wiebe after reading Bergen, who depicts fallen, yet spiritually questing Mennonites in a more realistic, affective manner.

Poetry

Although few people sit down and read books of poetry, cover to cover, I recommend two books of poetry by Mennonites that should interest and fascinate most Mennonite readers.

The first is Sleeping Preacher (University of Pittsburgh 1991) by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, which contains the poem "Mennonites" that was the subject of a recent editorial in Gospel Herald. Many of Kasdorf's poems deal with Amish, Beachy Amish and Mennonite experience in "Big Valley," Pennsylvania, near Belleville, where the speaker-author spent summers when she was a child. The sequence of poems then follows her marriage and life in New York City, where she embraces the broader world while still holding on to memories and values from her Amish-Mennonite past.

Three Mennonite Poets (Good Books 1986) is a bargain, presenting as it does generous selections from the early poetry of Jean Janzen, David Waltner-Toews and Yorifumi Yaguchi. Janzen, from Fresno, and Waltner-Toews, from Ontario, both celebrate everyday experience in sensuous images with transcendent implications. Yaguchi, a Mennonite pastor, poet and professor in Sapporo, Japan, sometimes writes in the restrained spiritual tradition of typical Japanese poetry, but he sometimes also disrupts that decorum with more western, Christian images of human guilt and fear. Yaguchi has also published Jesus (Pinchpenny Press 1989), a collection of poems that depict Christ through the eyes of many people who met him during his life.

Other artful and insightful books of poetry have been published by Jeff Gundy, Juanita Brunk, Keith Ratzlaff, Sarah Klassen, Di Brandt and Patrick Friesen, among others.

The Mennonite Writer's Vision

The careful reader will notice that none of these books has been published by a denominational press -- neither Herald Press nor Faith and Life. That fact indicates no necessary hostility to the church by the writers nor any particular neglect of artists by church publishers.

The goal of these writers is not to write uplifting, orthodox depictions of life, although I see a spiritual center in all of them. Rather, the literary artist's task is to create a world of images and ideas true to their own experience, insight and inspiration. They remind us of the the diversity of gifts in the church that St. Paul celebrated in Romans 12:4-8. In one sense Mennonite poets and novelists are interpreters of life and truth. Or perhaps they are speakers in tongues, for whom we readers need to become the interpreters.

In any event, we need them to keep us from becoming culturally insular and spiritually complacent. And they need us as a supporting community in which even more creative art can be grounded.

A final note: It is extremely difficult to obtain Canadian books in the United States. The best way is to call Heaven (yes, Heaven) Bookstore in Winnipeg at 204-452-6400. The manager Tim Brandt will fill your order cheerfully and quickly--and will even suggest the next Canadian Mennonite book for you to read.

Originally published inThe Gospel Herald and The Mennonite, October 1997.

Comments about this article may be e-mailed to:
Ervin Beck, ervinb@goshen.edu

Visitors since October, 1997