An Immigrant Tale

Mostly Mennonite is one of those family stories written and published by so many who were of or stem from that group of immigrants often referred to as Russian Mennonites. This one was written by Ernie Harder, who arrived in the then still cohesive religious village of Yarrow in BC’s Fraser Valley in the early forties as a one year-old child. He was about the same age as I was when I arrived there with my parents twelve years earlier. I did not get to know Ernie or his family before I left that village for Vancouver in the fall of 1945 when Ernie was just starting school.

The comparison of our experiences there was fascinating. His growing up was certainly less stressful than mine. Perhaps that was because the war and post war years were much more upbeat than the Depression years. Maybe it was because his family were members of a more liberal sect of Mennonites than were mine and certainly his arrival in the midst of a growing and younger family had something to do with it. By the time we arrived in the village, my parents were nearing middle age and I was the last born after-thought of an already dispersing family. Who knows?

Ernie tells the Mennonite story well and includes a bibliography for those who wish to find out more. He is rightfully proud of his long-lived parents and the way they influenced the lives of his siblings and himself.

The Mennonite branch of the Sixteenth Century Anabaptist movement of the Reformation in northern Europe continued as a distinct communal grouping for some 500 years. Always there were those who stayed and those who went, through migrations from the North Sea Lowlands to the Polish Vistula River delta and into the Ukrainian lands of the Russian Empire in the 18th century. Though like many growing cohesive religious groups the Mennonites experienced many “awakenings” and sectarian divisions, they all stayed close to the core Mennonite communal settlements as they expanded north and east as far as Siberia to accommodate landless sons and daughters from the early Black Sea area royal land grants. And they continued to communicate, by letter and visits with relations and friends all over Europe and with their American and Canadian cousins.

It seems to me the Russian Mennonites dispersed by the two World Wars have integrated into the Canadian culture more quickly and successfully than most other identifiable groups before or since, including earlier Mennonite migrations. The result, I believe, is that Canadian Mennonites are now simply part of the social mainstream of the country. They have lost the distinct ethnicity, separateness and communal coherence developed in the old country that many tried to recreate in communities here. Now even the more conservative Mennonite Brethren sect of my own background appear to me as just another American style conservative evangelical Christian church and certainly much more Liberal than the one I knew as a child. Fortunately, in my opinion, those changes came about before our current Canadian multiculturalism and double-barrelled nationalities took hold.

This book is really worth a read. I urge you to click here for the author's website.