Finding Father: Stories from Mennonite Daughters ed. by Mary Ann Loewen

Reviewed by: Finding Father: Stories from Mennonite Daughters ed. by Mary Ann Loewen Rebecca Janzen Finding Father: Stories from Mennonite Daughters. Edited by Mary Ann Loewen. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2019. ix + 163 pp. Contributor biographies. $16.95, paper. This is a collection of memories Mennonite women have written about their fathers. Some of the writers and their fathers are well known to readers of Mennonite literature, like Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Jean Janzen, and others are less well known, such as Rebecca Plett and Raylene Hinz-Penner. The entries in the collection represent a variety of relationships between fathers and daughters during different parts of the twentieth century, demonstrating how changes in the cultural landscape of Canada and the United States in this same time period have affected members of the Mennonite religious community. Mennonites—a Christian religious group that emphasizes separation from the world, including, in most cases, resistance to military service—have lived in the United States since the late seventeenth century. With successive waves of migration in the late nineteenth century, the 1920s, and the 1940s, they developed a series of Christian denominations and religious institutions from their somewhat isolated communities. Many of these communities are located in the Great Plains, and they, like others there, began to interact more with the world outside of their small towns and farms by the 1950s and 1960s. As their members began to have higher levels of education and more prestigious forms of employment, family structures changed. Carol Dyck's "Reflections of a Grateful Daughter," for instance, reflects on her father's profession as a doctor, which meant he missed important family gatherings and religious events (80–81). Other writers reflect on how land affects people. Rebecca Plett describes her ancestors in the Manitoba prairie and observes that '"To love the prairie, I suppose, requires care for detail, to see, and to want to see, subtlety'" (12). As part of this attention to subtlety, some contributions reflect on the Mennonite settlers' relationships with Indigenous people. Magdalene Redekop does interrogate multiple social structures, for instance, recalling that her father, a Mennonite bishop, always gave gasoline, food, or blankets to Indigenous people who came to her family's door in Manitoba (62–63). In a similar vein, Hildi Froese Tiessen mentions issues of class when she discusses her father's family's forced migration from the Soviet Union to Canada, because their economic position as kulaks made them targets for the communists (93–94). Her contribution, however, does not bring this question of income and social class to bear on her analysis of her family's experience in Canada. In spite of the attention to these issues of race and social class, the collection as a whole [End Page 151] represents the experiences of Mennonites who have some tie to European migration. This does not reflect the reality of Mennonites in the US, Canada, or the world. Nevertheless, the collection contains varied interpretations of how Mennonites changed in the past century. They are no longer a group based in separate communities. Today, Mennonites likely no longer feel as connected to the settlements the writers mention; rather, they look to them as points of origin and try to find ways to create a different world. Rebecca Janzen Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures University of South Carolina Copyright © 2022 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

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