Image: *Preservings* Issue Number 47, FALL 2023: “Marriage of Russlaender Maria Pauls and Old Colony Cornelius Driedger, March 1927. JAKE BUHLER PRIVATE COLLECTION
Here are some thoughts about class and gender conflict with quotes from a variety of observers.
“The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education.”—MC Gabriel’s thoughts in “The Dead” from James Joyce in Dubliners (Public Domain).
Is Joyce’s judgemental Irishman not interchangeable with a haughty Russlaender attending some inelegant, rustic affair in a prairie podunk like Gruenfeld or Neubergthal? Could this class-conscious thinking—reductive and dismissive—just as well be aimed at some random Kanadiers; a huddling of farmers in hand-me-down Sunday suits? Are Mennonites not just as guilty as any ethnic or religious group in their tireless search for an unloved “they” to diminish?
“That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Men made the truth and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts… There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon.” —Author Sherwood Anderson from the prologue of Winesburg Ohio (Public Domain).
The distant cannon fire of class and gender warfare, this time from the rolling hills of Middle America, where sinners and their sins are pilloried by the colour of their licence plates.
“I had heard about Mennonites all my life, about the brawls, the fist-fights at socials and hockey games. The hypocrisy as they kept liquor out of their town, but then drove to La Broquerie or Ste, Anne for booze. How they’d look down their noses at us for doing in the open what they did in the dark,” —MC Richard’s acute observations from Matthew Tétreault‘s Hold Your Tongue (NeWest Press, 2023) summarizes the abrasive relationship common between Francophone/Métis Ste. Anne, Manitoba and its nearby, predominantly Mennonite neighbour, Steinbach.
“I hear them (the ‘wealthy church ladies’) get up from the living room and walk past the kitchen. They’re coming down the stairs now, all talking at once. Like cedar waxwings, in a flock, turning in the sky, then landing as one. Beautiful in a way, but still capable of turning on you. Hurting you to make things better for themselves.”—MC Justy Zehen’s thoughts in “Willa Hund” from Pinching Zwieback (At Bay Press, 2023).
“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.” —Linda Rogers van Krugel in her REVIEW of Pinching Zwieback (At Bay Press, 2023).
The quiet shuffling of souls—betraying different classes, genders, racial origins, and beliefs both phobic and apologist together with their ironfast allegiances—appear to be present in all groups, denominations, and Gemeinde: from those who jumped the turnstiles on the Ha’Penny Bridge to those living in the dusty towns of Southern Manitoba to the Buckeyes of Ohio and beyond.
As an author with a momentary, leaky thimble full of influence, I have made an effort to recognize and embed some questions about this “prost” (ignoble) trait that I see in myself and in Mennonites and their selfish schisms. The unfettered compulsion to divide and re-divide until the original differences are impossible to discern. This flaw is present without relief in my life experience outside of Mennonite familiars too. It’s in all the places I have been and in all the people I have learned to know. I’ve seen more marketing and public relations and gossipy slander in these social groups than in all the thousand vulgar ad campaigns I created, put together.
Are we all Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du mal?” Or is there is hope? My conclusions in “Pinching Zwieback” are doggedly optimistic, but then, I set out to put hope into every circumstance, even the most vile. I did so despite the constant human wickedness and the despair it has caused. In the end, I suppose I’m like the character Justy Zehen, “I don’t want to be a little Russian boy hiding in the rhubarb.”
Mitchell Toews 