Review of Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature by Robert Zacharias

Kerber, Jenny

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 13 | No. 2 Article 101-20-2015Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites andMigration in Canadian Literature by RobertZachariasJenny KerberWilfrid Laurier UniversityPart of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North AmericaCommons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeKerber, Jenny. "Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature by Robert Zacharias." The Goose, vol. 13 ,no. 2 , article 10, 2015,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/10.The Promises and Perils of Communal, Place-based Narratives: Writing Mennonite Experiences of Diaspora  Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature by ROBERT ZACHARIAS U of Manitoba P, 2013 $31.95  Reviewed by JENNY KERBER  Diaspora studies have formed a major current of scholarly conversation over the last decade or so, as critics have considered definitions of diasporic communities, the extent to which diaspora overlaps with cosmopolitanism, and the ways in which diasporas complicate the publication, circulation, and teaching of national literatures. Robert Zacharias’ Rewriting the Break Event approaches questions of diaspora from a somewhat unconventional angle, considering how Russian Mennonite literature in Canada fits into these debates. In its study of what might be called a “white diaspora,” Rewriting the Break Event fits alongside Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s recent work on Newfoundland diasporic writing, for both texts ask readers to contemplate whiteness as a racialized category in Canada, and to consider in turn how the fraught relationship between race and ethnicity affects the interpretation of narratives of intra-national and transnational migration. From the outset, Zacharias makes clear that his focus is not on Mennonite literature writ large, but on Russian Mennonite novels by Canadian authors. His rationale for this choice is two-fold. First, he argues that Russian Mennonite writers in Canada have repeatedly returned to a signal “break event”—namely, the traumatic dissolution of the prosperous Mennonite Commonwealth in Ukraine established under Catherine the Great—in ways that have made this history central to the larger field of Mennonite literature. Second, he notes that scholars have also repeatedly emphasized the role of Russian experience in the 1920s in their discussions about the “birth” of Mennonite literature in Canada. Key to the efforts to carve out a place for Mennonite writing in Canada in the 1970s and 80s was the idea that Mennonites needed a central story upon which to solidify an “imagined community.” The Russian Mennonite story of “orderchaosflight” not only provided such a narrative arc, but also proved to be a good fit with the institutionalization of difference in Canadian literary studies, since it presented readers with a form of ethnicity that was relatively non-threatening even as it satisfied a desire for the exotic. As Zacharias notes, one of the major consequences of the absorption of Russian Mennonite identity into the national frame under the rubric of multiculturalism has been that Mennonite literature’s moral or religious dimensions have been downplayed. This is an intriguing point, for my own sense is that this trend continues in part because of a certain level of discomfort among Canadian literary critics when it comes to discussing matters of religious faith. What might the field be missing, however, when a commitment to secularism becomes the unquestioned critical orthodoxy? What might we stand to learn from a more sustained engagement with certain literatures at the level of the religious claims they make? In the chapters that follow the book’s introduction, Zacharias attempts to show how the literature of Russian Mennonite authors in Canada puts forward a picture of identity—specifically one re-produced through 1Kerber: Rewriting the Break EventPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015narratives of trauma and migration—that is more complicated than state-sanctioned models of ethnicity usually allow.  Although I knew quite a bit about Mennonite history upon starting this book, its first chapter taught me a good deal more about the layered politics of Mennonite experience in Russia under Catherine the Great and onward through the Russian Revolution. Zacharias explains how the happy portrait of life in Russia prior to the break event that characterizes so many Canadian Russian Mennonite novels risks downplaying the political complexities of Mennonite settlement in imperial Russia, wherein Mennonites were often favoured at the expense of their impoverished Russian and Ukrainian neighbours. This narrative also overlooks the stories of the majority of those Russian Mennonites who remained behind in Russia in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This kind of historical nuance is especially valuable given the current political turmoil in places like Ukraine and Crimea, wherein claims to territory are often based on romantic narratives of the past. Further, Zacharias notes that the Russian Mennonite narrative arc which posits Canada as a refuge is at times disturbingly quiet about the fact that Canada’s position as a safe haven was also predicated on the positing of the Canadian landscape as “empty” and ripe for Mennonite agricultural settlement.   The book then moves on to consider two texts that re-write the break event of Russian Mennonite history, Janice L. Dick’s Out of the Storm (2004) and Al Reimer’s classic My Harp is Turned to Mourning (1985), exploring their overt engagement with religious-theological ideas. In particular, Zacharias shows how Reimer’s text functions on two narrative levels, the first within a horizontal, linear sense of historical time, and the second according to a vertical, theological sense of time in which the Biblical story illumines and complicates the literary rendering of historical events. The third chapter will be of particular interest to CanLit scholars, since it explores the consequences of making ethnicity the main category around which Mennonite writing is organized in Canada. The way in which Canadian critical discourse has made “ethnic Russian Mennonites” a synonym for Mennonite Canadian literature, for example, has obscured Mennonite writing that comes from outside the Russian Mennonite tradition (and indeed, one could argue that Zacharias’ book risks perpetuating this trend). In some cases, the construction of a Russian Mennonite literary tradition in Canada has also promoted troubling myths of cultural purity that presume a certain form of pastoral attachment to the land. As Zacharias rightly notes, such myths have proven especially attractive to readers who no longer have direct access agricultural livelihoods. In this discussion I read an implicit call for critics to further tease out the strains of an enduring cultural narrative that posits Mennonites as more ecologically wholesome in their agricultural and craft practices than the Canadian “mainstream.” What particular investments reside in such a narrative, both within Mennonite communities and beyond, and what are the consequences of questioning it?  The book’s fourth chapter delves into theories of trauma in a reading of Sandra Birdsell’s The Rüsslander (2001). The novel, Zacharias argues, offers a warning against reading personal experiences of trauma as “transhistorical markers of communal identity.” Instead, it asserts the value of preserving the irresolvable tension between individual remembrances of trauma and communal narratives of it. The 2The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 10https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/10final chapter takes a more ambitious approach to considering literary form, viewing Rudy Wiebe’s challenging 1970 novel The Blue Mountains of China as a departure from a tendency to root Mennonite identity in a particular geography and shared communal past. This is the most exciting chapter from the perspective of diaspora studies, since it considers the Russian Mennonite diaspora as something that cannot be reduced either to a single geographical site or a homogeneous perspective. Drawing on Deleuze, Zacharias argues that if a communal identity for Mennonites is to be found at all, it is produced through differences that emerge via narrative repetition. Put more simply, there is no “Mennonite identity” or culture that exists prior to its repeated and often divergent tellings. While this conclusion treads rather familiar post-structuralist ground, what is more original and interesting, to my mind, is the direction in which Zacharias briefly ventures near the end of the book: he returns to religion, suggesting that for the Mennonite community, spiritual renewal might be found not through fixed attachments to place or particular social structures, or in the outer trappings of ethnicity such as food and craft traditions, but rather through a willingness to be diminished in the model of Jesus, and to exercise a form of faith that remains vulnerable to waves of difference and change. This more radical notion of an Anabaptist community of discipleship then has the potential for opening up how we think about who is a “Mennonite,” what constitutes “Mennonite literature,” and what might constitute a Mennonite environmental ethic once the pastoral ideal is stripped away. These ideas might serve as a starting point for a future study, resulting in a more profound unsettling of Mennonite identity in Canada and beyond. Overall, however, this is a well-researched first book that will especially appeal to scholars of North American Mennonite literature, and Zacharias has begun to pave the way for further considerations of Anabaptism’s contemporary global reach.  JENNY KERBER teaches Canadian literature in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.     3Kerber: Rewriting the Break EventPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015

Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature by Robert Zacharias

Scholars Commons

The Goose
Volume 13 | No. 2 Article 10
1-20-2015
Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and
Migration in Canadian Literature by Robert
Zacharias
Jenny Kerber
Wilfrid Laurier University
Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America
Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment Commons
Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose
This article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by an
authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrante
de la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactez
scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation / Citation recommandée
Kerber, Jenny. "Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature by Robert Zacharias." The Goose, vol. 13 ,
no. 2 , article 10, 2015,
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/10.
The Promises and Perils of Communal, 
Place-based Narratives: Writing Mennonite 
Experiences of Diaspora 
 
Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites 
and Migration in Canadian Literature by 
ROBERT ZACHARIAS 
U of Manitoba P, 2013 $31.95 
 
Reviewed by JENNY KERBER 
 
Diaspora studies have formed a 
major current of scholarly conversation 
over the last decade or so, as critics have 
considered definitions of diasporic 
communities, the extent to which diaspora 
overlaps with cosmopolitanism, and the 
ways in which diasporas complicate the 
publication, circulation, and teaching of 
national literatures. Robert Zacharias’ 
Rewriting the Break Event approaches 
questions of diaspora from a somewhat 
unconventional angle, considering how 
Russian Mennonite literature in Canada fits 
into these debates. In its study of what 
might be called a “white diaspora,” 
Rewriting the Break Event fits alongside 
Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s recent work on 
Newfoundland diasporic writing, for both 
texts ask readers to contemplate whiteness 
as a racialized category in Canada, and to 
consider in turn how the fraught 
relationship between race and ethnicity 
affects the interpretation of narratives of 
intra-national and transnational migration. 
From the outset, Zacharias makes 
clear that his focus is not on Mennonite 
literature writ large, but on Russian 
Mennonite novels by Canadian authors. His 
rationale for this choice is two-fold. First, he 
argues that Russian Mennonite writers in 
Canada have repeatedly returned to a signal 
“break event”—namely, the traumatic 
dissolution of the prosperous Mennonite 
Commonwealth in Ukraine established 
under Catherine the Great—in ways that 
have made this history central to the larger 
field of Mennonite literature. Second, he 
notes that scholars have also repeatedly 
emphasized the role of Russian experience 
in the 1920s in their discussions about the 
“birth” of Mennonite literature in Canada. 
Key to the efforts to carve out a place for 
Mennonite writing in Canada in the 1970s 
and 80s was the idea that Mennonites 
needed a central story upon which to 
solidify an “imagined community.” The 
Russian Mennonite story of 
“orderchaosflight” not only provided 
such a narrative arc, but also proved to be a 
good fit with the institutionalization of 
difference in Canadian literary studies, since 
it presented readers with a form of 
ethnicity that was relatively non-
threatening even as it satisfied a desire for 
the exotic. As Zacharias notes, one of the 
major consequences of the absorption of 
Russian Mennonite identity into the 
national frame under the rubric of 
multiculturalism has been that Mennonite 
literature’s moral or religious dimensions 
have been downplayed. This is an intriguing 
point, for my own sense is that this trend 
continues in part because of a certain level 
of discomfort among Canadian literary 
critics when it comes to discussing matters 
of religious faith. What might the field be 
missing, however, when a commitment to 
secularism becomes the unquestioned 
critical orthodoxy? What might we stand to 
learn from a more sustained engagement 
with certain literatures at the level of the 
religious claims they make? In the chapters 
that follow the book’s introduction, 
Zacharias attempts to show how the 
literature of Russian Mennonite authors in 
Canada puts forward a picture of identity—
specifically one re-produced through 
1
Kerber: Rewriting the Break Event
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015
narratives of trauma and migration—that is 
more complicated than state-sanctioned 
models of ethnicity usually allow.  
Although I knew quite a bit about 
Mennonite history upon starting this book, 
its first chapter taught me a good deal more 
about the layered politics of Mennonite 
experience in Russia under Catherine the 
Great and onward through the Russian 
Revolution. Zacharias explains how the 
happy portrait of life in Russia prior to the 
break event that characterizes so many 
Canadian Russian Mennonite novels risks 
downplaying the political complexities of 
Mennonite settlement in imperial Russia, 
wherein Mennonites were often favoured 
at the expense of their impoverished 
Russian and Ukrainian neighbours. This 
narrative also overlooks the stories of the 
majority of those Russian Mennonites who 
remained behind in Russia in the late-
nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. 
This kind of historical nuance is especially 
valuable given the current political turmoil 
in places like Ukraine and Crimea, wherein 
claims to territory are often based on 
romantic narratives of the past. Further, 
Zacharias notes that the Russian Mennonite 
narrative arc which posits Canada as a 
refuge is at times disturbingly quiet about 
the fact that Canada’s position as a safe 
haven was also predicated on the positing 
of the Canadian landscape as “empty” and 
ripe for Mennonite agricultural settlement.  
 The book then moves on to consider 
two texts that re-write the break event of 
Russian Mennonite history, Janice L. Dick’s 
Out of the Storm (2004) and Al Reimer’s 
classic My Harp is Turned to Mourning 
(1985), exploring their overt engagement 
with religious-theological ideas. In 
particular, Zacharias shows how Reimer’s 
text functions on two narrative levels, the 
first within a horizontal, linear sense of 
historical time, and the second according to 
a vertical, theological sense of time in which 
the Biblical story illumines and complicates 
the literary rendering of historical events. 
The third chapter will be of particular 
interest to CanLit scholars, since it explores 
the consequences of making ethnicity the 
main category around which Mennonite 
writing is organized in Canada. The way in 
which Canadian critical discourse has made 
“ethnic Russian Mennonites” a synonym for 
Mennonite Canadian literature, for example, 
has obscured Mennonite writing that comes 
from outside the Russian Mennonite 
tradition (and indeed, one could argue that 
Zacharias’ book risks perpetuating this 
trend). In some cases, the construction of a 
Russian Mennonite literary tradition in 
Canada has also promoted troubling myths 
of cultural purity that presume a certain 
form of pastoral attachment to the land. As 
Zacharias rightly notes, such myths have 
proven especially attractive to readers who 
no longer have direct access agricultural 
livelihoods. In this discussion I read an 
implicit call for critics to further tease out 
the strains of an enduring cultural narrative 
that posits Mennonites as more ecologically 
wholesome in their agricultural and craft 
practices than the Canadian “mainstream.” 
What particular investments reside in such 
a narrative, both within Mennonite 
communities and beyond, and what are the 
consequences of questioning it? 
 The book’s fourth chapter delves 
into theories of trauma in a reading of 
Sandra Birdsell’s The Rüsslander (2001). The 
novel, Zacharias argues, offers a warning 
against reading personal experiences of 
trauma as “transhistorical markers of 
communal identity.” Instead, it asserts the 
value of preserving the irresolvable tension 
between individual remembrances of 
trauma and communal narratives of it. The 
2
The Goose, Vol. 13, No. 2 [2015], Art. 10
https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol13/iss2/10
final chapter takes a more ambitious 
approach to considering literary form, 
viewing Rudy Wiebe’s challenging 1970 
novel The Blue Mountains of China as a 
departure from a tendency to root 
Mennonite identity in a particular 
geography and shared communal past. This 
is the most exciting chapter from the 
perspective of diaspora studies, since it 
considers the Russian Mennonite diaspora 
as something that cannot be reduced either 
to a single geographical site or a 
homogeneous perspective. Drawing on 
Deleuze, Zacharias argues that if a 
communal identity for Mennonites is to be 
found at all, it is produced through 
differences that emerge via narrative 
repetition. Put more simply, there is no 
“Mennonite identity” or culture that exists 
prior to its repeated and often divergent 
tellings. 
While this conclusion treads rather 
familiar post-structuralist ground, what is 
more original and interesting, to my mind, 
is the direction in which Zacharias briefly 
ventures near the end of the book: he 
returns to religion, suggesting that for the 
Mennonite community, spiritual renewal 
might be found not through fixed 
attachments to place or particular social 
structures, or in the outer trappings of 
ethnicity such as food and craft traditions, 
but rather through a willingness to be 
diminished in the model of Jesus, and to 
exercise a form of faith that remains 
vulnerable to waves of difference and 
change. This more radical notion of an 
Anabaptist community of discipleship then 
has the potential for opening up how we 
think about who is a “Mennonite,” what 
constitutes “Mennonite literature,” and 
what might constitute a Mennonite 
environmental ethic once the pastoral ideal 
is stripped away. These ideas might serve as 
a starting point for a future study, resulting 
in a more profound unsettling of Mennonite 
identity in Canada and beyond. Overall, 
however, this is a well-researched first book 
that will especially appeal to scholars of 
North American Mennonite literature, and 
Zacharias has begun to pave the way for 
further considerations of Anabaptism’s 
contemporary global reach. 
 
JENNY KERBER teaches Canadian literature 
in the Department of English and Film 
Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.
 
 
 
 
 
3
Kerber: Rewriting the Break Event
Published by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2015


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Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature by Robert Zacharias

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