The great Schroeder/Funk hoax

We all knew that my sister Frieda and her husband Henry Schroeder had been born in the same village of Rosenthal in south Russia.  But not the details that came out in a story published  by brother Jack  in his Funk family newsletter:

Henry Schroeder, a little Mennonite boy, four going on five, played under the big oak tree in Rosenthal, Russia, with some blocks made by his father. One block had a cross or a plus sign carved on one side.  The boy was so engrossed with his play he didn’t notice the little girl with the reddish-blonde hair watching. She wasn’t very old – about two going on three.

Henry carefully piled the blocks, one on top of the other. The tower swayed precariously as it grew higher, but it held. Finally it was done. Henry sat back to survey this magnificent thing he had built. Suddenly, without warning, but with a squeal of delight, the little girl ran forward and kicked the blocks carefully piled. The blocks flew in all directions. The two children ran to pick them up. The little girl laughed with glee. Henry didn’t laugh as he scrambled after the scattered blocks. He collected most of them but the little toddler ran off with the one with the cross on it.  A young mother with red hair scooped the little girl, block and all, and rushed her away.

Henry stood there and watched his block disappear in the grasp of the little girl lost in the crowd at the railway station in Chortitza. He watched people hug, kiss, and say goodbye. He watched the little girl get on the train, clutching his block.

Three years later it was his turn with his family to get on a train for the long trip to Canada. His blocks were long forgotten.

Henry came to Saskatchewan and from there the family moved to Alberta.  As he was finishing high school, World War II started and gave him the chance to realize a life-long ambition to become a pilot. He was stationed at Davidson, Saskatchewan.

Meanwhile the little girl and her family moved from Hague to Saskatoon, to Laird, Bruno, and then Blaine Lake where her father was a storekeeper. After high school she graduated with a degree in nursing and began work at Davidson. Here she met a handsome young RCAF flyer.  They fell in love and married.

Shortly after their marriage, Frieda’s storekeeper father planned to move to Saskatoon and got ready for an auction sale.  Henry and Frieda came to Blaine Lake to help. As they went through boxes of junk, Henry found a little wooden block with a cross on it. Faintly the memory of the blocks his father had made for him decades ago in Russia flashed through his mind. At first he rejected the memory.  It was just too much. He took the block to Frieda’s mother who confirmed what he suspected: “Nah yoh, that block came with us from Russia. I don’t know where Frieda got it – but she had it on the train. She played with it a lot on the ship.”

Henry took the block to his father. His father held the block in his hand and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He could only shake his head in amazement.

Jack concluded his story with the words: “The next time you visit the Schroeders in Edmonton, look for the little wooden block with a cross carved on one side. It sits in an inconspicuous place in their china cabinet.”

I did just that. Sure enough, there in the china cabinet was an old cracked child’s block with a cross. It couldn’t happen, but it had.  I believed the story – for a while, until Jack and Henry admitted it was all a hoax, carefully concocted and executed. Henry had made the block out of old wood. Jack produced the story – and had fun with the family. Of such stuff family glue is made. 

A story is nothing but a big hug

Why tell a story? 

The answer  became clear to me once again this morning as I read Frederick Buechner’s words: “My story is important not because it is mine, . . . . but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.”  

Yesterday in church a couple of people commented on my recent essay published in Mennonite World Review: “Christmas: Season of Courage.”  When  people like a piece of writing it is usually because they identify with the stories in some way. Their circumstances may have been quite different from mine, but the emotions are the same. And that is why they like the stories.  Someone is telling their story.  And they recognize it. 

I treasured my father’s stories while growing up.  He told stories about his experiences in World War I in the Russian medical corps. He knew the loneliness of being away from home in the huge city of Moscow as a young army soldier for the first time. 

He also told about the deaths of his father, grandparents and an uncle in two quick weeks because of typhus and famine.  He learned of the inhumanity of man to man when he was desperate for help to bury these four bodies. 

I realize now he was trying to make sense of the atrocities and absurdities of the horrible violence he had been witnessing daily by talking about them. 

I treasured each story not because I had experienced war horrors  but because I have experienced the same emotions--the same aching emptiness after the  death of a family member, the  same desperate despair when the family purse kept getting emptier and emptier, the  same strange exultant peace in the soul at arriving at a spiritual decision. 

I think that is why I wait for a story, a personal story, when I listen to a sermon—I am looking for inspiration, not just more abstract terminology and vague generalities. I am waiting for the preacher to tell my story.

In story-telling the listener learns that hope is always hope, forgiveness is always forgiveness, courage is always courage.  And even if he or she can’t quite articulate this vague  understanding,  identification takes place. “I am also that person in the story.” 

This Christmas interest will once again migrate to new electronic equipment like  smart phones, computer   software,  digital cameras, bigger TVs and much more.  I find it hard to talk about such items because I know too little about them. I feel  like a rabbit in a fish pond. I don’t migrate willingly to discussion about such items. 

Since I live alone and don’t go out much anymore, I spend much time thinking about the past – retrieving the stories of my life.   These elusive events flit back into my mind like butterflies on the wing, begging to be remembered.  Other times they’re like wild boars, grunting “Remember me?” But they want to be brought to life, to be retrieved by someone. They are demanding to be told.

I like to tell stories about my life because that is what I know best.   I like to give away my stories because then they become a shared experience. 

What people my age have to offer in terms of wisdom, experience, and stories seems almost quaint when compared to passing on information about which is the best electronic  game to buy.

In  Michener’s Hawaii, the native children memorized their family tree, back eighty generations, and learned the stories of those generations. It was the life-blood being passed down generation to generation. DNA, if you  will.

I see stories as a way of embracing another person or group – even a congregation.  They tell the listener: “I trust you with this story about my life.”  

In this hug-happy society, I advocate we pass along more stories. Hug someone with a real story today.

Recording family stories -- the stuff of life

For decades I have put time and energy into encouraging others to write their family history. I have written two books about this topic:  Good Times with Old Times (out of print) and How to Write Your Personal or Family  History (Good Books). 

I  spoke at workshop again this weekend in the small community of Goessel, Kansas, at their historical museum.  I tell myself that I am too old for this, but then I do it again.  It inspires me when I find people wanting encouragement  in connecting with the past. The group that came together this weekend was small but interested, so we had a good time together. 

Help in writing a family history can be reduced to a few words.  Someone has said all you have to do is walk into your past, haul out what’s there, take a good look at it, sort it, organize it, and record it for posterity. 

I have collected this stuff of life for years. I think my interest started when I was still in high school, reading through a genealogy on my father’s side.  I noticed a small notation next to the name of a woman: “She was reported to be a witch.”  The German word was “hex.”  

A witch in the family? Surely she was a fictive character.  It took me about fifty years to find out who this woman was when I met a relative who had known her in the Ukraine as  a child. The witch had actually existed.  She had been a colorful personality in the conservative Mennonite colonies, wearing bright skirts, smoking, and telling fortunes with Tarot cards.  She could also foretell the future.   Several of my later stories mention her psychic powers. 

I started collecting stories like some people collect stamps or coins or salt and pepper shakers, or whatever.  I collected these stories in my head and then in files  long before I knew why  I was doing this or had begun encouraging others to collect theirs. These family stories fascinated me. 

I was fortunate to have siblings who had the same passion.  Many years ago one Sunday afternoon visiting together in Edmonton we began telling stories of our childhood.  They tumbled out one after another.  

Someone said, “These stories are too good to forget.”  Brother Jack offered to edit a collection of family stories if we would all submit our memories.  We did.  The result was  Growing Up in Blaine Lake by Five Who Did – a modest collection of  family stories but a treasure. 

We grew up with stories. They appeared in our lives in different settings.  Dad came home from the store at noon and told us stories he had heard during the morning business transactions. Mother and Dad told stories during long winter evenings in northern Saskatchewan as we all sat around the oilcloth-covered oak table under the  gas lamp. 

Story telling took place when relatives reminisced about ocean crossings, making watermelon syrup, dodging cannonballs on a hike across no-man’s land to visit a girl friend, and the best way to make Zwieback.

We children told stories, or rather, I should say my oldest sister, Frieda, did. She  gathered all five of us in the bed she and Annie shared.  Snuggled under the comforters on cold winter evenings she told us continuing stories night after night. 

We children told each other made-up stories when playing in the little shed we called the playhouse, making them suit our play. Stories were part of our daily sustenance but in a different form than the food Mother made.   

Several years ago I put together a collection of stories my father told us about his growing up in the Ukraine and then about  Blaine Lake, where we were living (Into the Twilight Zone: Family stories my  father and others told me too good to throw out).   I included the witch story. 

A point I tried to make in this recent workshop as I always do is that everyone has a story to tell, not just the rich and famous.  In many years of teaching family history writing classes, it doesn’t take long to discover that the stories are there, just not recorded or considered worthwhile. 

Judy Blunt writes in  her memoir Breaking Clean that the heart of stories lies in passing on what you  consider important.  By rethinking a story you learn what needs saying and what can be omitted, so each teller may focus on a different aspect of the same story. 

Stories are part of the legacy we elders leave our children and grandchildren.  Over the years I have sensed my greatest riches lie not in tangible things but in the insights and values  those who lived before me thought significant enough to tell in stories and which I am privileged to pass on.