Katie Funk Wiebe was a child of parents who had endured the predations of Nestor Makhno in Chortitza and Rosenthal, South Russia. These villages were the headquarters from which Makhno and his thugs would range out to despoil the countryside. Not long before Katie's birth, the extended Funk family had escaped the 1923 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, leaving Mrs. Funk's large family of Janzens behind.
Katie was born and grew up a world away from South Russia, in the town of Blaine Lake in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. Here the snow came in October and didn't melt till April, and they lived in "a small, squeezed-together house without a bathroom," but it was a safe place to live. The population of Blaine Lake was ethnically mixed, made up largely of recent immigrants, including many Russians with whom the Funks could speak. Her father Jacob Johann Funk ran his own grocery store, the OK Economy Store, and as a consequence, overripe fruit, dried cheese and bologna, and hardened peanut butter from the bottom of the barrel more often than not appeared on their table. Her mother kept house for her husband and five children, including Katie, the "the middle button."
The book is constructed in such a way that the author alternates chapters that tell what she learned from her parents of life in Russia with stories about her Canadian childhood and youth. The Funks attended the Mennonite Church when they could get to it by ferry across the river, the United Church in Blaine Lake, and the Russian Baptist Church about 10 miles out of town for special occasions. Katie struggled to feel "saved." in the Mennonite Church, a pressure less immediate in the United Church. She puzzled about the meaning of being Mennonite. Was it some kind of mark you received when you were born? She noted how her parents were drawn to other Mennonites. "It constituted a bond stronger than blood ties among those who had shared the Mennonite experience of suffering in Bolshevik Russia."
It took years for Katie to piece together her parents' story. The hurts resulting from the revolution-years experiences were so deep that the Funks seemed incapable of telling a coherent story. But the tradition of storytelling was rich within them. They would relate bits and pieces, and then it was bedtime. At the next storytelling session, they would not pick up where they had left off. They would say, "Peter had come home," which would be somewhere in the middle of the story, and it was only with great persistence that Katie worked it out backward and forward. But through Katie's reconstruction of their story, we see what happened to the countryside and her people during the revolution and the famine times of 1921-23 in Russia.
The coming home of her uncle Peter from the Russian army, she learned, was a pivotal event. The connection with far-away Russia first became real to Katie when a black-bordered letter arrived telling of her maternal grandmother's death. Katie's mother's story was that of her family, the Franz Janzens, who disappeared in 1914 during the revolution and were not seen or heard from for three years. Katie's father walked the countryside in homemade, wooden-soled sandals until he found his inlaws and their younger children in a a Russian village. They were living in dire circumstances in a thatched hut with a mud roof, part of which was missing. The children's clothing consisted of gunny sacks with holes for their arms and their bedding was straw. He told Katie, after she persisted, how he rescued them from situation that would soon have killed them and returned them to their extended family.
Her father, she learned through a single telling, was imprisoned for a time for siding with the wrong side during the revolution. He was also a noncombatant who served as a Red Cross orderly in 1914 Russia. He watched healthy young men go to the front whole and cared for them when they returned, not long after, wounded and wracked with pain--or dead. He recalled their "...haunted faces and ugly, gaping wounds..."
The Funks had been landless in Russia. Though Mr. Funk's father, Katie's grandfather, owned a flour mill, landlessness assigned them a kind of second-class citizenship. Left-handed and therefore branded as stubborn at school, he was apprenticed to the local grocer. The description of the grocery store in which he worked in Russia is so rare that it alone, for its historical value, makes the book worth its price.
As a young person during the 1930s in Canada, Katie recalls the depression. The hungry people who appeared at their door reminded her parents of the homeless beggars who wandered the steppes in revolutionary times in Russia. Her mother cooked many an extra meal and served it to them with grace, using linen and fine china.
In this memoir, Katie reflects on her spiritual journey. Coming of age and becoming culturally Canadian against some of the religious precepts and attitudes from Russia was often traumatic. She also speaks of her father's spiritual journey, in Russia and in Canada, as he told it to her and as she observed it.
A bio sketch of Katie Funk Wiebe says she graduated from Tabor College (in Kansas) and holds an M.A. degree from Wichita State University. She taught English at the college level. She has written hundreds of articles and columns and has written and/or edited fourteen books, most recently focusing on aging. She is a world traveler and member of the Peace Education Commission, sponsored by agencies of the Mennonite Brethren Church. She has four children and five grandchildren.
Review © 2003 by Edna Boardman
| GRHS Home Page |