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"Mennonite
in A
Little Black Dress
" by
Rhoda Janzen
; Holt (256 pages,
$22
)
———
Whoever
said you can't go home again probably never met a
Mennonite.
Rhoda Janzen
grew up in that hard-working, dance-forbidding,
peace-and-Jesus-loving community — and, as an adult,
left it behind for academia and an atheist husband.
But then
a botched hysterectomy left her urinating into a bag for
months. Her husband of 15 years left for a man he met
online. The same week, a teenager slammed head-on into
her Volkswagen Beetle, leaving her body as broken as her
spirit.
"I
went home to the Mennonites," she writes in this
spirited, fascinating memoir about rediscovering belief
and coming to terms with an upbringing that seemed full
of humiliations. No radio, no unsupervised TV, no
worldly toys. If the lunch pail, modest skirt and braids
in school weren't bad enough, there were also the
contents of that pail to overcome: borscht, for example.
But why
not go back? Her parents — father Si, retired from his
position as "the Mennonite equivalent of the pope,
but in plaid shorts and black dress socks pulled up
snugly along the calf" and mother Mary, "as
buoyant as a lark on a summer's morn" — are as
comforting as a warm blanket on a cold day.
Mennonites,
Janzen explains, are not Amish. They drive cars and use
technology, though her father does not believe in
cellphones. They dedicate their lives to hard work,
pacifism, a lack of vanity and cooking, especially with
cabbage.
Janzen
writes of an extraordinary life that began with
outhouses and modest clothes and found a place among
higher education and
Prada
bags. She is a poet and professor with a Ph.D., and her
writing is occasionally more intellectual than
conversational. But she also offers moments of poetic
beauty.
And
despite her wounded emotional state, Janzen hasn't lost
her sense of humor. Her tumultuous marriage and recent
divorce take up much of the book, along with her efforts
to start dating again. Her mother cheerfully suggests
cousin Waldemar, who has a good job AND a beach house.
One Mennonite woman offers up her 27-year-old grandson:
"I expect he'll think you're too old. I'll tell him
you have a real nice shape."
But more
interesting is her relationship with her faith and the
reconciliation of the person she used to be with the
woman she has become.
As Janzen
spends time with her family and old friends, she
reflects on how her life could have been if she had
stayed in this community. And she looks to a future in
which her traditions have the power to bring peace to a
shattered life.
Dining at
Denny"s
, her father pauses to say a loud, all-inclusive prayer
that extends from the food on the table to the people of
Iraq
. "It had been at least 30 years since I'd believed
in the power of prayer as anything other than a way to
practice gratitude and ameliorate self-pity,"
Janzen writes. She joins in nonetheless.
How
maddening unbreakable bonds can seem. How impossible to
shake our upbringing. But Janzen's story reminds us what
a beautiful gift our past can be.
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