PINCHING ZWIEBACK, Made-up stories from the Darp, Mitchell Toews, At Bay Press, 2023, paper, pp 253 Review by Linda Rogers Van Krugel, Victoria, BC
On child birthdays we toss the kids in the air, make wishes and offer a “pinch to grow an inch.” Pinching Zwieback is a gathering of pinches as a young man, dough in the hands of powerful albeit diminished women that rises in the oven of cultural expectation to a better understanding of his place in the world beyond the kitchen of his creation.
That is the substance of Pinching Zwieback, rhymes with Steinbach, the town of Toews’ awakening. The linked stories in this premier collection from a senior writer describe the apostate Christian community he is growing into and out of now that the skin he was born in no longer fits. This was always true for the narrators born as outsiders in an outsider religion.
The earliest stories in the Bible tell us of exile and that is the status of boys born into an immigrant community, two degrees of separation from their historical selves. For this writer and others, new flesh pyjamas are neologisms that chafe their doctrines of faith. Belonging, at once the impetus for diaspora is the difficulty when it is achieved.
The Steinbach cohort learn in increments and their baby steps are measured in short stories, especially those written when expectation has been replaced by wisdom. Mitch Toews is a grandfather, his voice sifted through grizzle, the grey beard that bears witness to a lifetime of experience, and his coming-of-age collection is a double entendre, panis angelicus and little devils growing into the bodies of angels who challenge the status quo.
His stories, small anxieties, grow out of fear, children afraid of the dark, longing for the light. The transforming narrator has grown up through the three stages of man to a realisation that every effort to rise into a paradigm is the stuff of comedy because there is no perfect fit. Skin is woven by DNA and the declared DNA of Mennonite boys is kindness, pacifism, precepts often lost when religion becomes political, something, we suspect, Toews is noticing in the world his boys long to be part of, but on their own terms.
Pacifism, a precept of Mennonites often lost in the noise of struggling to fit outsiderhood, rises to assert itself in critical moments. This book is a double bun, doughy anecdotes from a spirited childhood coupled with the realisation that manhood is a more complex goal than just being strong, especially when strength translates into bullying, especially of women, the archetypal bakers of the author’s imagination.
One such moment arrives in the story where two friends are expected to fight because one commits an indiscretion by revealing a secret of vulnerability. The boys are expected to duke it out, neither of them comfortable with that resolution. A deeper language speaks in the half-hearted skirmish where blood knowledge informs them that friendship is deeper than difference and indiscretion is often more apocryphal storytelling than moral betrayal.
In “Fall From Grace,” a beautiful story of risk, we learn once again that moral challenges require more courage than mindless forages into physical danger, a temptation that leaves too many young men in graves and wheelchairs, and even more silenced young women subject to the violence menacingly referenced in the drowned silence of “Breezy.”
“Sunday school principles were discarded when the blood ran hot.” In the Steinbach world, a sensitive boy needed armour, regalia with spikes to deflect the shibboleths that kept him static within the social order, thou shalt nots pouring like molten proverb from the mouths of prophets and schoolteachers.
Mennonites were/are a hierarchy, men on top, some pigs better than others in the language of George Orwell. And sows are barely pigs, Adam’s rib, let us guess a penis, dedicated to stirring the pot, with the secret provision for rebellion when the kettle boils over.
In the story “The Grittiness of Mango Chiffon,” Matt describes his mother’s feminist rage against an elitist bully of a schoolteacher who would have her teenaged daughter expelled for wearing pants to stay warm in winter. “For this she used her secret weapon—a large English vocabulary. A second lexical ordnance to complement her mastery of Low German.” It is a small rebellion, albeit over the phone not person to person, but it is women talking, the beginning of revolution against the norms that constrain.
It is control of language that determines cultural survival. That is what so many colonial societies are learning as they search for elders and text to explain themselves. Toews’ struggle between the desire to know himself and find himself is the key to comedy and pathos in his quest for definition. Perhaps this is an easier task for the women who stick to making bread and remember the recipes.
Making bread is women’s work in patriarchal society and it takes a voyeur like Toews to notice strength in forearms that pinch and shape dough and the character of children with muscle memory.
We come out of these stories with sympathy for both sides, but, in the end, bread wins and by the time the boys grow up, the women are in positions of power their grandmothers never dreamed of.
The arc of every story in this collection is a micro-battle against expectation, the status quo, as the three main recurrent boy/man characters—Matt, Lenny, and Diedrich—struggle to understand their legacy, the being of their Mennonite heritage, in the context of a language they barely understand (and kindly provide a glossary) and a hierarchy that makes them less, so that in some senses they are women, or are at least aware of the life sentences handed down at birth.
Just as the three male protagonists are uncomfortable with their ancestral language and the inference that it reduces their status in a patriarchal culture, the reader experiences dis/gravitas as Low German is sprinkled like itching powder in the text. Pain is the father of humour and humour is relief.
I remember being invited to dinner at a forest haven, populated by privileged tourists, all of whom spoke High German, in the BC Interior. Our host, of Mennonite extraction, warned us not to let on that he understood the language. “The minute I respond in my dialect, they will treat us badly,” he said. I had to wonder what we were doing there, reliving pain even a diaspora could not cure.
Only writing can do that, my friend is discovering.
“…he still felt the old resentment, as stinging as tears, being in this place and reliving the old thoughts again.” So what is Toews doing here, outing himself by juggling unfamiliar speech, the language of his ancestors? Just as it is for the mothers and guardian aunts who care for Matt, Lenny, and Diedrich, everything depends on the energy of conviction. The outrider needs to signal danger otherwise we all run off the cliff into the valley of discrimination.
Baseball is the metaphor in this coming of great age book. As we sit back and watch the game: hits, runs, errors, we understand both rules and surprises, and girls can play too. In “The Narrowing” a story about facing fear, Matt, now a grandfather, urges his grandson Tim to confront the knife’s edge of living dangerously, playing chicken with a train. This is a man playing a boy’s game and, although the boy wins by surviving, the grandfather is left to confront his hubris and the greater wisdom of his daughter.
In the final story “In the Dim Light Beyond the Fence,” Matt’s death experience lovingly recalled in the context of baseball, the Mennonite game of recognition is played out: “…the past shunnings, social stigmatization. Institutional misogyny. All of it, the good and the bad. Dad was so proud of the pacifism, though that was tainted in some ways, but so what. They tried.” Life is reaching for the light, which never falters even as the human characters flicker and fade.
As these stories rise in Toews’ proverbial oven they grow away from the fire of creation, the same fire that has tempted and driven notable female voices from the Mennonite community. This time it is men talking. Both sides now.
Mitchell Toews 