Elaine Sommers Rich: A Tribute

I first met Elaine Sommers Rich through her novel for young readers, Hannah Elizabeth, published by Harper and Row in 1964. My parents knew about Hannah Elizabeth because they had been at a Christian Writers' Conference with Rich at Green Lake, Wisconsin, in 1958. (4) They bought the book for me as a gift, impressing upon me that this Mennonite story, like the ethnic stories of Lois Lenski and Marguerite de Angeli, had been published by a major worldly press. To me this implied that the stories of Mennonites were worthy to stand beside those of other American minority and immigrant groups. Since we did not live in a Mennonite community, I often felt that the stories of my family and ancestors were too strange to be told to my peers at school. I was glad that Hannah Elizabeth would introduce these kinds of stories to a wider reading audience. Hannah Elizabeth is in many ways a novel about reading. It opens with the phrase What did the words mean? as Hannah, age 10, ponders her grandfather's reading of a Psalm in church. A lover of stories and books born into a close-knit, rural Mennonite family, Hannah holds a secret ambition to grow up to be a poet. In the book her love of imaginative literature is challenged by conservative church members but championed by her gentle grandfather in a church meeting when he reads a passage from Judges 9 in response to the question, should you ever tell children stories that are not true? In this poetic passage the speaking trees have the last word. Much later, as an English professor at Goshen College, I turned again to this passage in Hannah Elizabeth in my Critical Theory class as I introduced literary interpretation to students, many of them Mennonite, who questioned whether their love of imaginative literature had a practical application. Hannah Elizabeth was published in the United States during the same era that Rudy Wiebe published his landmark first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many, in Canada, also with a major publishing house. Whereas Wiebe went on to publish many more novels with nationally recognized presses, Elaine Sommers Rich published her later works with Mennonite publishers and chose to write for a primarily Mennonite audience. Hannah Elizabeth was her only children's novel; her later fiction was written for adults. Her novels were based on her life experiences and those of close friends and family members, drawing on her ecumenical Christian vision rooted in Mennonite faith and practice. Elaine was also active in the work of the church in editing devotional books and a collection of essays on Mennonite women as well as writing adult Sunday school curriculum, a biography of Pauline Krehbiel Raid, and her long-running column for The Mennonite Weekly Review (now The Mennonite World Review), Thinking With. Born in 1926 in central Indiana in rural Kokomo, Elaine Sommers attended the Howard Miami congregation, a church built on a county line in an area between Marion, Peru, and Kokomo, where many Brethren, Durtkard, Quaker, and Pennsylvania Dutch had settled. This is the church portrayed in Hannah Elizabeth. The members of Elaine's church attended different schools, and many of the members had come from Amish or Quaker background. It appears that this rural cosmopolitanism created a setting in which meanings and values between groups were actively negotiated, creating an ideal matrix for a plot based on contested interpretations of language. Elaine attended high school during the war, and went straight from her junior year in high school to Goshen College, where she majored in English. After graduating from Goshen College in 1947, she stayed on for six more years to teach, taking one year away at Michigan State where she earned an M.A. in 1950. During the summer of 1947 Elaine joined a group of twenty-eight students from Goshen in a government-sponsored tour of Europe, where she met her future husband, Ronald Rich, a chemist, who was also on the tour. …

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