Mennonite soul food -- fit for the gods

In my childhood home food was always something more than nutrition.  It was the heart of our home. We began the day with breakfast.  Dad had left earlier to tend to the store so Mother read us children a short story from Egermeier’s German Bible storybook.  Then she prayed.  We children glitched over our table prayers, eager to get to the food, but she spoke slowly, deliberately, as if she was actually speaking to someone.

It took many years for me to realize that the war years in Russia followed by anarchy, famine, and flight to Canada were still vivid in her memory, less than decade behind her.  She had known real hunger, so food was something to be thankful for, always. Too many people did not have enough. You always prepared and ate food to avoid waste. Waste was wrong. 

Dinner, our noon meal, was the main meal of the day; Mother spent time preparing it.  It was a coming together. We children rushed home from school and Dad joined us, often with stories about what had happened in the store that morning. Sharing food and stories forged family ties.  This small group of people around the oilcloth-covered table belonged together. And eating together made the bonds strong.  I will never forget the joy of knowing a  large pot of chocolate pudding  made with whole milk was nestling in a snowbank until we were ready to eat it – with real whipped cream. 

Supper was always a simple affair, later on the responsibility of us girls:  fried potatoes with eggs, boiled eggs, peanut butter sandwiches and milk,  fresh vegetables from the garden in summer, leftovers from noon. Mother had done her share of food preparation for the noon meal. 

Factory-produced snacks were  few  because they were out of our budget. After school I rushed home to be the first to grab the leftovers of the morning’s porridge Mother set aside for me.  How can I explain how good these crusty scrapings of oatmeal tasted. In summer, if we were hungry between meals,  we pulled up new carrots in the garden, dusted them off on a shirt-sleeve and ate them. In the evening we found our way down the rickety steps into the dark cellar with its dirt floor to pick an apple from the box. Sometimes a between-meals snack was home-made bread and jam  while wishing it was store-bought sliced bread.

Meals changed with the days of the week, seasons of the year, and in time, with the culture in which they were a part of.   Wash-day we often had bean soup, easy to prepare. Saturdays, at noon, we had pancakes, which could be made one at a time as we girls ate and then went to the store to allow Dad to come home to eat. Food for Sunday, day of rest, was always prepared on Saturday. We learned to expect these rhythms to our food and meals and  to accept them as part of the natural flow of life.

Mother showed her love and expressed her creativity with her cooking and baking. A meal was always a gift to those who shared her table.  It was always her food (“They sure liked my crumb cake”). Women had little to do with the public world so she shone in this private one.  I recall my brother standing on the woodpile and shouting to the world, “My mother is a Royal cook,” both in reference to her use of Royal yeast and her skills as queen of Mennonite cuisine.  She relished seeing family and guests enjoy her wonderfully light rolls.  

When I was working on my book My Emigrant Father I  struggled how to  include this reverence and joy of Mennonite food into the book, for it played an important role in my parents’ early upbringing in Ukraine and mine in Canada. It became a major concern when famine conquered the land.  So I added  a recipe to each chapter  of some significant Low German  food I had mentioned and explained how it was used in early times, how it had changed with the culture, and, especially, how cooking in early homes was always eye-measured and taste-tasted.  Measuring cups and spoons and intricate recipes were not needed. You cooked with the heart, not the mind. This was Mennonite soul food, not a scientifically concocted dish.

In good times the Mennonites enjoyed  abundance,  especially foods made with grains,  eggs, cream and fruit from their orchards.  Many dishes were borrowed from the neighboring Russian people.  During the famine, people resorted to Water Soup, which was just that – water with whatever greens they could glean from gardens and fields. Sometimes there was very little.  Some  households made “beggar’s gravy”  with only cream or milk and onions when meat was unavailable. 

Later on, after Mother could read English and had mingled with neighbors,  her cooking repertoire enlarged to include such foods as a glorious Lord Baltimore cake and  lofty Angel Food cake. I don’t think she ever made a casserole.  Something in a combination of foods was beneath her.

I  hope that readers of  my father's story, My Emigrant Father (Kindred Productions),  will enjoy the glory of  Low German soul food  as I explain how it was  eaten in Russia, in my early home, and later on in my own home. Shipping is from Winnipeg or Kansas. 

A Strong Frailty: Aganeta Janzen Block

Having a book published is like having a baby.  Both have a long incubation period and painful birth process. After the birth you are ready to show them off. You desperately want people to like your offspring. 

A few weeks ago my book A Strong Frailty: Aganeta Janzen Block Heroine of the Faith in the Former Soviet Union was published by the Center for MB Studies at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kans.  This was a great cause for rejoicing because the book was more than two decades gestating. 

When I was in Moscow in 1989 I met my aunt Neta and realized she had an amazing story to tell about her long, eventful life, so I encouraged her to tell it through letters.  I collected well over two hundred or more letters from her and other relatives that I translated and sorted to find the story line.  Her stories were not necessarily in chronological order.  But I knew her life story was one worth preserving as a legacy for my children and grandchildren. 

I wanted my children and their children and other people’s children to know something about the underside of this particular history – what happened in the lives of thousands who made up the statistics we read in daily news report and history books about the events following World War II behind the Iron Curtain. 

My father’s extended family made it out of the former Soviet Union to Canada in 1923.  My mother’s family stayed behind, never expecting to be exiled to 11 years of forced labor in the northern regions before being given a measure of freedom at Stalin’s death.  

Two families. Could I tell their stories?  A Strong Frailty is the story of my mother’s family.  My Emigrant Father, due to be published in spring is  the story of my father’s family.  

I can’t tell you about the exact moment of conception but I have stacks of research files, pages of time lines putting events in the right order, and early drafts.

My aunt Neta, whom I met in Moscow in 1989 was an amazing person. She was a born story teller.  She began telling her story in letters to me and other relatives over a period of years. Her husband was the son of kulak (wealthy peasant), so he had been disenfranchised. He lost his citizenship rights. No one was supposed to hire him. 

A major event in the lives of Germans living in Ukraine was the invasion of the Nazi army  in 1941. These  two powerful regimes had once been allies but were now battling for supremacy.    When Germany retreated from Ukraine its military pushed all Germans in the area before it to Poland.  This is known as the Great Trek with hundreds upon hundreds of small makeshift wagons pulled by worn-out horses loaded with a few household goods inching their way to the north.  No hotels at night, no MacDonald’s to buy a hamburger, not enough fodder for horses, no medical attention – just keep moving to stay out of the clutches of the mighty Soviet army.  

In Poland these Germans who once had lived in Ukraine, including Mennonites, Lutherans, and Catholics,  were naturalized as German citizens and given work. The men were conscripted into the German army. Neta’s husband was killed at the war front.  

As the Russian military pushed toward Berlin, the Germans fled, knowing they would be killed as collaborators with the enemy.  Some of them escaped into the Allied zones but some were caught in the Russian dragnet and told “We’re taking you home.”  Home?  They were herded into cattle cars and shipped like livestock to the northern parts of the former USSR to work in mines, lumbering, and factories on starvation rations.  They had become slave laborers. People were dispensable. Lots more where these had come from. They never saw their former home again.

My aunt was sent to the Kirov region, where overseers of the various industries looked them over and selected the strongest for the work they had in mind. Women with children like my aunt with her four youngsters were low on the list of desirable workers.

In this book my aunt tells the story of life in these camps, interrogation by KGB,  struggles to find enough food, and  being shipped from place to place.

I added a chapter in which I attempt to interpret her life and answer questions I have been asked: How did she survive hardships she didn’t deserve at a time when society said a mother without a husband by her side to defend and support her couldn’t make it?  How did she maintain her faith?  How did she pass her faith on to others?  How did she deal with the brutality of camp life, rape, deaths, and  lack of medical attention?

Not all questions have been answered, yet when I think back to meeting her I recognize now even more or so than then that she had incredible inner strength. I am humbled to have been entrusted with her life and words. 

Dr. Marlene Epp, Mennonite historian, writes that “these never-to-be-forgotten stories should be read by everyone in the free world… an amazing chronicle of resilience and grace through years of brutality and despair… this is a story of family and faith, and, despite the book’s title, also one of fortitude more than frailty.”  

A Strong Frailty is available from Center for MB Studies, Tabor College (peggyg@tabor.edu), Watermark Books in Wichita, KS, and from Kindred Productions (kindred@mbchurches.co)  in Canada.   

Is the black man my brother?

            A friend argues that you can’t have real convictions on a social issue until you’ve experienced the matter personally. For example, you can’t claim a solid opinion on capital punishment until you’ve seen a few heads roll (maybe your own?) or demand racial tolerance until you’ve lived side by side with people of other races.  

            I wish my friend’s word were accurate. Then I could rid of the uneasy feeling that I have no responsibility with regard to both issues. I have never seen a person guillotined or had blacks living next door. But to say I have no convictions would be untrue. The headline news these days is much about the racial unrest in a St. Louis community: white cop shoots black young man. 

            I can’t remember when I didn’t hold to the position to some extent that all races are born equal before God.  My attitude was molded to a large extent by my father’s influence during my childhood.  He grew up on the steppes of South Russia as a descendant of the Mennonite settlers who migrated there from Holland and northern Germany in the late 1700s and early 1800s. A sturdy, industrious people, they prospered and became wealthy landowners in their adopted land, living in self-contained, isolated villages, thereby preserving their culture successfully.

            The poorer neighboring Russian peasants, not as successful materially or culturally, became objects of prejudice on the part of some Mennonite settlers. My father’s bitter denunciation of this down-your-nose attitude and how Russian stable boys were sometimes denied the warmth of a bed in the attic of the landowner’s house and sent instead to the hayloft on cold winter nights is an impression I can’t erase. 

            I knew my father as one who, in his own way, always helped those being stepped on by others – the poor, people without work, social outcasts and others. He had seen too much mishandling of others because of prejudice.

            As the son of an Einwohner rather than a landowner my father shared the misery of these Russian peasant boys. He learned to love them and also formed a basic attitude toward the wealthier and more highly educated people that he carried with him throughout life.  He found some experiences hard to forget. As a young man he completed burial arrangements of four close relatives in a two-week period, one of them his father – washing the bodies, prying boards  from fences to make coffins, arranging for transportation to the graveyard on a makeshift cart, and saying the prayer over the grave—during the typhus epidemic and famine. No preacher, no horse-owner,  answered his plea for help. 

            As children we relived the Russian Revolution through our parents’ eyes.  We heard how the battlefront of the Reds and the Whites shifted through  Rosenthal, the anarchist raids, the courage of individuals, and the struggle of all to survive the famine. 

            Yet in northern Saskatchewan we lived far removed from the race issue as it affected people living in the southern United States.  Of course, we Canadians had our Indians, but that was another matter. Indians were simply Indians, and didn’t actually count as people.   They lived on reservations because they had no other place to go.

            Negroes, as we knew them as children, were the objects of jest and a source of amusement.  The only African-Americans we knew were the jolly minstrels, faces darkened with burnt cork, who gave our recreation-starved community an opportunity to laugh.  Mother had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in a German translation.  Her re-telling of the slave girl Eliza’s flight over the ice floes with hounds and bounty hunters in full pursuit became etched in my young mind. It was therefore a simple transfer of sympathy from the exploited Russian masses to the discriminated Negroes of the slave era when our family lived in Canada. But it was harder to see them as people like us only with a different skin color  when they lived in our little village.

            One day an odd family moved into a shack at the edge of town: A white man whose youth had long left him, a white woman, much younger than the man, tired looking and unkempt, and an assortment of children – two white, two black, dark as the night, and one who was neither black nor white. Their sudden presence in school was both a novelty and embarrassment. What should we do with them?  In early spring, when the snow melted and roads opened, they were gone.  I think we were glad.

            At about age 15 I attended a United Church girls’ summer camp. One leader, a national from Trinidad, probably knew the meaning of the word “prejudice” more deeply than we girls grasped at the time. She patiently taught us its meaning: Being down on what you are not up on. She also taught us her name, syllable by syllable: Wilma Samlallsing.  After 70-some years hers is the only name I remember of the more than a hundred people I met at that camp.

            An experience with deeper impact on my attitude toward other races occurred when my husband attended graduate school at Syracuse University in 1961-62.  I and the children remained in Kitchener, Ontario, for the winter.  He shared an apartment near the campus with a Chinese student from Formosa and a young Nigerian, both in America under the sponsorship of the Laubach Literacy Foundation.

            My husband told me about the “little League of Nations” in that apartment.  Both men were intelligent, outstanding individuals. Sometimes by comparison American students lacked their caliber of character.

            Lucky, the Nigerian, more so than Larry, the Formosan, suffered from the blight of racial intolerance.  We suffered with him.  He related how one summer he motored with friends to the West Coast to find employment. En route he was denied admittance to some restaurants because the proprietors thought was an American black.  With the hurt rankling in him, he tested a hunch on the return trip. He traveled the same route and stopped at the same restaurants, but with a difference. This time he was decked out in the outstanding agbada of a Nigerian, a long, full-flowing gown of brightly-checked cloth, embroidered and closely fitted about the neck.  The result? All doors swung open before him.

            Together with Lucky we drove through the black section of Syracuse. Large, unpainted apartment  buildings lay muddled together, with children and adults lolling around on the rickety verandahs. They looked indifferent and indolent. I wondered if the bars of prejudice that imprisoned them were broken, would they rise to the stature of our friend Lucky? 

            The full seriousness of the race issue stunned me when we moved to Kansas in 1962.  In Canada we heard only faint rumblings of the racial unrest, but now it was a full-blown issue with riots, marches, bombings and killings. 

            Every time I saw a black man on the streets of Wichita I took a second look.  I  read books like Black Like Me, Cry the Beloved Country, To Kill a Mockingbird and other strong opinion molders. When I taught minority literature at college I studied black history and literature intensely, reading, sorting, thinking. I researched Christian theology that supported slavery. I was forced to confront the issue of Black English in classes.  Was it a dialect or another language? Would students speaking only Black English successfully navigate the business and academic worlds of their future as Americans? 

            A student told me she had learned in grade school that if you touched a black person you would break out in a rash.  I recalled her comment on a trip to Chicago sitting in a bus with  a large black man next to me. Would my skin break out in red welts? 

            In the late 1960s at an open air meetings Rev. Vincent Harding, black Mennonite minister, related his experiences traveling in the deep South.  Like our friend Lucky, he was denied use of rest rooms, privilege of entering certain restaurants, hotels, and the like. 

            At the close of the service, he taught the audience the civil rights song, “We shall overcome.”  Slow, dirge-like we sang it but without depth of feeling. I sensed a strange restraint in myself and others in that almost completely white audience that seemed to say, “Blacks should have civil rights, but must I, a white person, identify completely with them to help them achieve freedom? If so, how does one do that?”

            I have often told writing classes that it is possible to trace the evolution of any attitude we hold, even the pathway to or away from prejudice.  So, my friend, I have had experience with prejudice and I am entitled to an opinion.  People of other races are my brothers and sisters. They deserve to be treated like equals.