My Emigrant Father: Jacob J. Funk, 1896-1986. A Memoir

I knew I had a right to my memories about my father. It took a while to acknowledge that I had an obligation to share them with others. 

As I write in My Emigrant Father: Jacob J. Funk, 1896-1986,  A Memoir, I grew up at the intersection of life and storytelling.  My father was a storyteller. His mother was a storyteller.  They told stories not just to entertain but to release joys and sorrows.  They told stories because life was better with stories. 

I wrote my first article about my father in the 1960s.  It took a while to realize the gold lying buried deep in his life, so I kept researching and writing. I launched into a lengthy essay about him in my book Good Times with Old Times: How to write your memoirs. 

I continued with another about his searching for my mother’s family lost in the Russian Revolution of 1917-19. She had not seen or heard from them in about three years.  That story, “Peter had come home,”  which took me to Russia, Germany and research libraries was published in an academic journal.

Another  was published in The Storekeeper’s Daughter: A memoir.

But  I knew I wasn’t finished.  I stopped my work from time to time to pursue other pursuits like the  translation of my aunt Aganeta Janzen Block’s letters about her eleven years in forced labor in the northern regions of Siberia after World War II.  I was thankful my parents had escaped that fate, having left Ukraine in 1923 for Canada.  Two families—one left and one stayed behind to endure Stalin’s harsh brutality along with thousands of other German-speaking citizens of Russia. That book is A Strong Frailty available from Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas.

But, finally, I knew it was time to get Dad’s story done.  I found a publisher and an editor who was a joy to work with.  Last week my book My Emigrant Father was published in Canada by the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission with Kindred Productions.

I tell my father’s story through the prism of world events affecting thousands of German-Russians at the time.   My father was easily upset by religious posturing, unfairness, injustice, and violence.  I show in the first chapters some of the cultural baggage he brought with him to the new land.  I knew I had to include something about the family “witch.” 

I give a picture of the Funk family living in the valley of Rosenthal in Ukraine in a “forever summer, forever Sunday” life before the Russian Revolution. They never expected this idyllic life to end. But it did. So Dad and his family knew the terror of opposing revolutionary forces stationed on each side of the ravine and their home in the middle. I write about his political imprisonment and experiences as a medical attendant during  World War I.

A story he told often was of having to bury four close family members who died of typhus fever. That memory was sometimes too painful to talk about, but he did.  My sister Anne wrote me she remembered these stories as well. “I remember how upset Dad would get when he remembered this time in Russia—and yet he couldn’t just ‘leave’ it. It was part of his psyche, his innermost being and it was in a way, cathartic for him to speak about it. Now, as an adult, I look back and realize the pain, the hurt he carried with him.  I wanted to weep for Dad and the hurt he carried with him.” 

I wanted to convey to readers the pain, suffering, and turmoil that happens because of war and its aftermath – disease, famine, homelessness.Only readers can tell me if I achieved that goal.

I carry the stories of his life to Canada and the Depression years,  through church turf wars, and into my parent’s  journey into the land of aging.

In this book I have included a map of Rosenthal, other maps, photos (lots of them), a brief family tree, and a chronology of events that affected both the Funk family and the world at large. 

The book is available from Kindred Productions at 1-800-545-7322 with shipping from either Goessel, Kansas, or Winnipeg, Manitoba.  

I like my book and its stories. I hope you do too.

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.