Women without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War

Women Without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War. By Marlene Epp. Toronto: U. of Toronto Press. 2000. Pp. 275. $21.95. This is a haunting, gracefully written history of the experiences of the approximately 8000 Mennonites who arrived in Canada in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the aftermath of famine, war and dislocation from their homes in the Soviet Union and uncertain years as refugees in postwar Germany. Although the book gives primary attention to women and children who found their way to Canada, one chapter discusses the approximately 4000 Mennonites who migrated to the Paraguayan Chaco before many of them, too, immigrated to Canada in the 1950s. Women Without Men is a compelling story of mass immigration as well as a feminist reinterpretation of this chapter in Mennonite history. Epp, herself a second-generation Canadian, began this project as a doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto. In addition to mining primary sources at Winnipeg's Mennonite Heritage Centre and the Centre for Mennonite Brethren Studies, she interviewed 34 Mennonite women and men from Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia about their immigration experiences. Additionally, she drew from oral history interviews conducted in the early 1950s by Russian Mennonite immigrant and historian Cornelius Krahn. The resulting book--which probes the Mennonites' wartime traumas, impoverishment, refugee status and efforts to adjust to a new land--is an important addition to both immigration and Mennonite historical scholarship. The title Women Without Men aptly describes the book's subject of primarily fragmented, female-headed families on the move. Most of the Mennonites who in the 1940s trekked westward from their homes in the Ukraine to Germany and then to North or South America underwent separation from family members. Tens of thousands of Mennonite men--husbands, brothers, sons--had been exiled or murdered during Stalin's Great Purges in the 1930s, killed while participating in German self-defense leagues during World War II or, later, repatriated to Soviet territory from postwar German occupation zones. Drawing on wartime German surveys of Mennonite villages in the Ukraine as well as the records of the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization and other sources, Epp reports that Mennonite women immigrating to Canada outnumbered Mennonite men by a 2:1 ratio. Most of the men who had survived and managed to immigrate were either elderly or in their late teens. In Epp's analytic framework this dramatic imbalance in the gender ratio is not an incidental but rather a central facet that helps to illuminate many dimensions of the immigrants' life experiences. It also provides a point of departure from conventional wisdom. As Epp points out, North American immigration studies have usually taken male experience as normative since immigrants, historically, have often been either single young males or men leading their families to new lands. Epp's subject is compelling, for while the Mennonite women she describes encountered many of the same problems common to immigrants in other places and other times, they also encountered significant differences. They were vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation, issues rarely documented in standard immigration studies. As heads of households, these women also had more opportunities to exert leadership and to develop a range of practical skills, from driving wagons to negotiating bureaucracies, as well as performing heroic deeds such as saving others' lives, than they might have in more normal circumstances. Yet even in their own late-in-life reminiscences, these women--perhaps conditioned by a cultural framework that tends to regard single or widowed women as weak or burdensome--did not generally describe their experiences in terms of courage or heroism. Epp explains, After years of turmoil and instability, most immigrants were eager to be settled and secure, which also meant fitting in as much as possible (186). …

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