The old man
has had his usual distractions since last writing for the post at the beginning
of April. Spring weather has finally arrived so in trying to get re-vitalized,
he found an old computer file with some of the book reviews he wrote 20 years
ago. His critical comments concerned mainly his pet peeve. I have ranted for
years against Canadian government policies of encouraging many cultures and
languages, but discordant voices like mine have never been heard. Furthermore,
we have adopted and encouraged multiple national citizenships, which I find
even more offensive. Archaic though the old man’s opinion on those subjects may
be, I still feel that way, perhaps for the following reasons.
The book I read
those 20 years ago was Up from the
Rubble, by Peter & Elfrieda Dyck, published by Herald Press at Waterloo, Ontario. I liked the book and its anecdotal
stories. After the first few chapters it
was a page turner for me—perhaps because my own history made me identify with
the subject matter. That made it tough to do a meaningful critique for my
files. Besides, how can I argue with
God? He is endlessly invoked by the
Dycks as the true author of their experiences and good works. As youngsters in
their 20’s Peter Dyck and Elfrieda Klassen, both young idealists, were
separately recruited for the Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) European relief work by Elfrieda’s much
older brother, C. F. Klassen, early in W.W.2.
They met in England while helping bombing victims from 1942 to
1945 and married there in 1944.
In 1945 they were transferred to newly
liberated Holland and later to Germany. The core of the book is the story of
their work in finding, then re-locating mainly Russian Mennonite refugees from Europe to South America, primarily to Paraguay, from 1945 to 1948. My ingrained cynicism
prevailed through the Dycks’ experiences in England and until their first meetings with groups
of Russian Mennonites at the Dutch-German border. Then, at least for a moment,
sentiment and nostalgia for my personal traditions prevailed and evoked tears
of empathy as I recalled the many stories of my parents about their own painful
wanderings through Europe with four young children from 1920 to
1922. From that point the story tellers held me hostage, in spite of their
sermonizing, through their various crises in Berlin and until the whole refugee location and
re-location program obviously became more organized and formalized with
numerous networks in place.
At some point, though, my cynicism
re-asserted itself. The book fairly
reeks with the flavour of that typical Russo-German Mennonite pride and
self-righteousness against which, as a putative American-Canadian, I have
rebelled from childhood. The good works of the MCC cannot be denied and I really believe the temporal
reward of its workers, as C. F. Klassen told Peter Dyck (page 365), is “more work to do.” Considering the continuing and increasing
inhumanity of man to man, the reward will be ample. The trouble I have with the
Mennonite myth, so endlessly expressed in this story, is the setting apart of
the Mennonites as some superior and distinct chosen people. By implication, Mennonites
claim the status of the children of Israel re-incarnate. The myth reminds me of the claims of their
kin, the Boer Afrikaaners of South Africa.
Was this why God led the Dycks’ few
thousand Berlin evacuees through the “Red Sea” of the Russian zone to Bremerhaven? Many
more thousands of equally despairing and deserving unfortunates continued their
interminable suffering at the same time!
If so, it seems to me that from the time of their earliest migrations,
God has done his work through the village and church leaders who have been
notoriously successful as “persistent squeaky wheels” with rulers and
governments ready to help these “good people” as witness Peter Dyck’s success
with the U.S. occupying general, Lucius Clay, in Berlin (page 170).
Though I do believe many Canadian Mennonite
congregations no longer claim the exclusive apostolic mission of a “Mennonite
people”, and MCC may in fact have become an
inter-denominational tool, the authors tend to promote such minority
exclusivity. I found this particularly
so when Peter Dyck effectively ends the book (the last two chapters are really
a sermonette based on his MCC work as text) with this at page 381: “ Through
tragedy, disaster, and the suffering of sisters and brothers in the faith,
thousands of miles away, people in North America were drawn closer to each
other and united for greater kingdom work.”
[The italics are mine.]
Such
efforts to maintain and promote belief in a “distinct” and inherently
“superior” culture are symptomatic of the work of many strong minority lobbies
which continue to capture the power centres of our liberal democracies. The
“separateness” required for such cultural pursuits offended me as a teenager
when the Yarrow village Mennonites with whom I grew up, especially the elders,
considered themselves distinctly “better” than their “English” or otherwise
denoted Canadian neighbours in the community. It offends me still as the power
of the special interests in our country has led to the officially subsidized
multicultural policies that are keeping the development of a truly Canadian or
even an American cultural community at bay. With increasing migratory pressures
from Asia and Latin America, so long as immigrants seek to extend their original
homelands and its ways to the new land rather than give up the past to think of
this as their country, this country will not survive as a cohesive
community. Added to the already
explosive French-English and Native “Nations” mix, the resulting cultural and
multi-lingual separateness can lead only to a multiplicity of mutually
antagonistic racial and cultural ghettos continuously competing for power and
preference. In the end North America may become even more fractured than the constantly warring peoples of
the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent and the Balkans,
to give just a few examples. The old man has not updated the comments, and in
spite of how well we are adapting to such multiplicity in our community, the
loss of cohesion is more and more evident.
