June 2002
vol. 57 no. 2
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Julia Kasdorf, The Body and The Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. 207. ($26.00) ISBN 0-8018-6662-6
Since the appearance of her award-winning first volume of poetry, Sleeping Preacher, in 1991, Julia Kasdorf has been lauded as a significant new voice in American poetry. Her ability to write out of her experience as a Mennonite rooted in a centuries-old Amish-Mennonite community for a larger audience also makes her work unique. She is the only U.S. Mennonite poet to date who has received such critical attention, which also makes her stand out among the handful of religious poets who have a following in the larger circle of contemporary poetry. The soil of ethnicity clinging to the roots of Kasdorf's work has been both a great asset to her writing and a drawback to her being read as anything but an ethnic poet. The essays in The Body and the Book address, from various angles, the problems inherent in representations of ethnicity and voice, of distinctive religious cultures and self-representation, as well as readings and misreadings by the other. Kasdorf does so in a prose as supple and compelling as her poetry.
In Sleeping Preacher, Julia Kasdorf described a place--Big Valley, Pennsylvania--and its Amish and Mennonite community through poems rooted in a bold retelling of its stories . Her second volume, Eve's Striptease, is closer to a solo. The revelation of a young girl's coming of age, stripped nearly bare of the communal stories that both sheltered and shaped her sense of self, seems almost a form of penance for transgressing community propriety in her first volume. In The Body and the Book, Kasdorf holds the reader spellbound with a mature and resonant voice, reclothing herself in a garment woven of her own silken prose, skillfully revealing flashes of naked soul where she chooses. Crafted with exquisite particularity and intellectual integrity, these remarkable essays offer rare insight into a writer's thinking processes--the intersections of experience and thought that provide the substance of the writers' arsenal. Moving through and beyond the layers of autobiographical and cultural inflections, Kasdorf uses her complex positioning as an ethnic and a woman writer to meditate on language itself.
The ten essays are divided into four sections: "A Place to Begin," "Writing Home," "The Witness a Body Bears" and "Conclusion," which contains the single final essay "Writing like a Mennonite." Interspersed among the essays are a dozen poems from Kasdorf's first two books that "converse" with her prose. The first two sections contain essays that illuminate the importance of place, family, and community in Kasdorf's work. Two of these, earlier versions of which have been tucked away in hard-to-find denominational publications, enrich the reading of Kasdorf's Sleeping Preacher and are essential to the informed teaching of it: "When the Stranger is an Angel" and "Bringing Home the Work." Both of these essays explore the theme of boundary crossing, introduced in the first essay, "Mountains and Valleys," written expressly for this volume. Boundary crossing is a distinctive feature of ethnic writing: the writer must travel beyond the boundaries of home, but is always compelled to make a nostalgic return that is never entirely possible. "Tracking the Mullein, or Portrait of a Mennonite Muse" is a tribute to the "Bertha" figure of many of Kasdorf's poems--and at least as unforgettable as the best of them.
The volume's title, The Body and the Book, takes on numerous layers of reference as the essays progress. The outermost layer is Kasdorf's exploration of the ability of language to mimic and construct--to express, if you will--the physical. Yet, as Kasdorf points out in "Writing Like a Mennonite," writing is anything but physical. It is both more permanent and less flexible. "A written text cannot be made to change in response to others; it does not fail to speak out of fear, nor can it alter in response to the loving attention of a reader," Kasdorf explains. While writing comes from the body, its end product in textual form is something like the skin of a snake--secreted, worn, then ultimately discarded as the living being forms another layer to fit the growing mind.
Beneath this layer is another: the construct of Mennonite identity that informs much of Kasdorf's work and which--like many ethnic and religious labels--has often been the source of both attraction and misinterpretation. This layer of Kasdorf's book is complex, perhaps like Dante's seventh circle of hell containing several sub-layers within it. Not only do we have the writer's physical body, scripted by the complexity of cultures and religious values she has grown up with, but we have the larger communities of discourse surrounding the production of poetry.
One of these is the ways in which the aesthetic of contemporary American poetry has joined the current interest in ethnic literature to create both opportunity and danger for ethnic writers. A central tenet of contemporary poetry and creative nonfiction--the substance of many a poetry workshop--is the paradox that in the particular lies the universal. This modernist orthodoxy is both a windfall and pitfall for the ethnic writer. For American readers of ethnic literature often behave like tourists in a gift shop--wanting to find a few trinkets to "bring home" rather than finding connections through the specificity of image. This is true of sophisticated readers as well, and in "The Preacher's Striptease" Kasdorf takes elegant revenge on a few of them in an astute cultural critique of the images and criticism surrounding her book from within and without the Mennonite community.
Kasdorf 's complex linguistic dance in this essay recalls Alice Walker's Crossing the Same River Twice, although Kasdorf's focus is the various interpretations of ethnic and religious identity in her writing, rather than the film version of her work. Her analysis of her book's covers and their resonances with a vocabulary of images serves to illuminate the ways in which ethnicities and the female body are constructed in the American imagination. Her inclusion of two poems by other Mennonite writers in response to her poem "Mennonites," deconstructs the notion that one person can speak for a group.
A common perception of Mennonites as harmless pacifists who can be dismissed as unworthy opponents in either litigation or literature is also dismantled by Kasdorf. In "Writing like a Mennonite" she explores writing as an act of transgression and violence as well as of accommodation and connection. And she burns an irreparable hole in the naive, good-girl Mennonite stereotype by revealing an incident in which she impulsively reached across a bar table to burn another writer with a cigarette when he used a vulgar term referring to female genitalia. This incident occurred when Kasdorf was just beginning to write about the sexual abuse she survived at the hands of a "kindly" neighbor for over a decade. Such poems can be aggressive acts, Kasdorf argues, when they serve as counter-narratives that destroy the more aesthetically pleasing ones families have adopted about neighborliness and mutual accountability, fictions that allowed the abuse to continue unnoticed for so long.
Ironically, it is the perpetrator who gives Kasdorf a heavy, unabridged, albeit old-fashioned dictionary for her seventeenth birthday, hinting at a means of survival, as well as his own eventual punishment, in the "hands" of her words. By owning her own potential as perpetrator and aggressor--both through her writing and through the cigarette incident--Kasdorf moves far beyond the facade of Mennonite martyrdom, that of saintly religious victim, to construct a complex embodied self that can wound, suffer--and heal.
While Kasdorf wishes to remove the glaze of kitsch from the eyes of readers who would dismiss ethnic writing as trivial or marginal to a "centrist" narrative of what counts as memorable literature, she does not allow such readings of her work to deter her from exploring her obsession with Mennonite subjects. Her meticulous research into hidden corners of Mennonite history and culture dignifies her subject and, combined with her narrative skill, enhances the intensely pleasurable experience of reading these essays.
In the most valuable and original layer of this book, Kasdorf addresses those who would dismiss the Mennonite aspect of her work with a few ethnic clichés by delving far more deeply--with meticulous research and a Bakhtinian playfulness--into an analysis of Mennonite icons and artifacts, especially in her repeated explorations of the Martyrs' Mirror, the sacred Mennonite storybook of those who died for the faith. One of these essays focuses on a printer's illustration of "work and hope" that graced the title page for centuries and plays with the ways Mennonites have inculcated these values into their communities. Kasdorf's outrageous juxtaposition of Marilyn Monroe and Mennonite "demi-god" Harold S. Bender is as playful and biting as the trickster hybridity of a Sherman Alexie--another ethnic writer whose work plays the edge of assimilation and ethnic particularity against each other. She closes this essay with another tour de force, uniting her Episcopalian worship with that of Amish and Mennonite acquaintances through their mutual deference to Lady Diana upon hearing the shocking news of her death. Finally, "Writing Like a Mennonite" explores the violence of martyrdom and its implication as a model of witness for the contemporary writer. For those who have internalized religious speech and self-assertion through these images of torture and suffering, art is indeed a serious and sometimes impossible business. Kasdorf concludes, however, upon further examination of martyr, that it is a word for witness, not for victim, and that she must "[offer herself] to conversation and relationship as a martyr offers her body to flames."
In her introduction, Kasdorf cautions readers against superficial readings of other cultures through a humorous anecdote about an Episcopal priest friend who went to visit a Mennonite Church and saw a simple circle above the altar. He attempted a friendly interpretation of it as "suggestive of God's presence, Alpha and Omega, divine mystery without beginning or end. But when he asked the Mennonite pastor--and he did ask, an action that should be instructive to the reader, as well--the pastor replied, "The builders put it there to hide a ventilation duct." Paradoxically, Kasdorf the "Mennonite" writer is now Episcopalian by choice. But The Body and the Book shows the rewards of boundary crossing, and its readers will delight in the richness of travel back and forth between the many boundaries crossed or transgressed in this book, as well as in the quiet of the spaces in-between. They will also hope, as I do, that Kasdorf will continue to share the rewards of her polyphonic vision as she finds her "own life's pleasures."
Ann Hostetler
Goshen College
Nearly a decade ago, C. Nelson Hostetter embarked on the ambitious project of an all-inclusive census of Amish, Brethren in Christ and Mennonites in the United States as a way to highlight the connectedness of these three "cousins" of the Menno Simons faith family. The result was his 1997 book Anabaptist-Mennonites Nationwide USA, a most welcome addition to the library of Anabaptist resources, answering the questions of how many of us there are and where we are located.
Despite its confounding title, Anabaptist-Mennonites Nationwide USA was an immensely fascinating reference work, sort of like the Guiness Book of World Records or Baseball Register. Hostetter told us that the United States was home to 46 distinct groups, ranging from Amish Mennonite to United Zion Churches, with a total membership of 302,256 in 3,474 congregations in 47 states. But there was much, much more. In addition to thumbnail descriptions of each group, Hostetter provided breakdowns by state and by group, thus providing a gold mine of information. Did you know that Pennsylvania had 31 groups, 887 congregations and 87,177 members, by far the most of any state? Or that Nevada, New Hampshire and Rhode Island were the three states without any congregation of Menno cousins? Or that the United Mennonites, with one congregation and 12 members, was the smallest group? Or that there were 10 Old Order Mennonite groups? Hostetter gave us the type of book that could sit by the recliner or the nightstand, inviting a few minutes' perusal at any time and always promising some nugget of information, some insight into contemporary Anabaptism.
Now five years later, Hostetter has been joined by Donald B. Kraybill to produce Anabaptist World USA (yet another confounding title). While it updates and expands Hostetter's 1997 census to provide more useful facts and figures, the book also has added features that unfortunately detract from the charm that made Anabaptist-Mennonites Nationwide USA such a pleasure. Nearly half the book is devoted to 10 "interpretative essays" about the history, convictions and current developments of the groups profiled. Hostetter and Kraybill write that they wanted to "assemble the pieces of a complicated puzzle on a small board in a concise fashion." Certainly attempts to describe the various expressions of Anabaptism are needed, when members of the former Mennonite Church are unfamiliar with the Mennonite Brethren and former General Conference Mennonite Church members still confuse the Brethren in Christ with the Church of the Brethren. And for people who aren't Anabaptist, the name "Mennonite" still conjures images of buggies, suspenders and prayer coverings.
So the book tries to be a historical, sociological and theological primer on Anabaptism--and thus tries to do too much. The book's strength is the census, but they are buried in the back, shifting the focus to topics such as martyrs, christocentric biblicism, "the Anabaptist Escalator," assimilation, education, an overview of 20th century changes, even the layout of Hutterite colonies, all crammed into 117 pages. That makes the book heavy and daunting, not inviting and fun, like its predecessor. Such academic topics, which are more than adequately covered in other books and journals, are beyond the scope of Anabaptist World USA, a point that even Hostetter and Kraybill seem willing to concede in their preface: "Historians may gasp at our sweeping historical overviews, sociologists will likely shudder at our broad generalizations, and theologians may tremble at our scant discussion of the doctrinal and ethical formulations undergirding Anabaptist life."
An example of that lack of development, Hostetter and Kraybill surprisingly categorize the Brethren in Christ as a Brethren group, rather than a Mennonite group, which has been the conventional understanding. That is most apparent in the Brethren in Christ's membership in Mennonite Central Committee and Mennonite World Conference. Historians and other church experts -- including Hostetter's father, longtime Brethren in Christ leader C. N. Hostetter--have long emphasized the pervasive influence of Mennonites and Mennonitism on the Brethren in Christ. This is not to necessarily dispute Hostetter and Kraybill, only to say that their assertion that the Brethren in Christ is more Brethren than Mennonite needs more attention than just two isolated paragraphs.
Anabaptist World USA does offer additions that improve on Anabaptist-Mennonites Nationwide USA, particularly including the Brethren and Hutterite streams of the faith. As a result, the United States now has 63 distinct groups with 537,432 members in 5,539 congregations in 48 states (all but New Hampshire and Rhode Island). Hostetter and Kraybill have also crunched some intriguing numbers that were not in Hostetter's first book. Did you know that 56 percent of the Mennonite groups are in congregations of 75 members or less or that the largest congregation is Columbus (Ohio) Grace Brethren Church with 1,920 members? In addition to memberships, the authors calculated total populations of members and unbaptized children, no doubt a helpful sociological tool. Not surprisingly, the Old Order Amish have 69,578 members but a population 156,551. The Church of the Brethren is the only U.S. group to have a greater population (185,000), but it also has a greater membership (137,037).
So skip the first half of Anabaptist World USA and go the second half for a fun and fascinating look at turn-of-the 21st century Anabaptism.
Rich Preheim
Newton, Kansas
Many traditions use stories to pass on their heritage from generation to generation. In this volume John E. Sharp has compiled twenty-eight stories from the General Conference and Mennonite Church traditions for the purpose of fostering a common identity as the two denominations merge. The project of collecting and publishing the stories was undertaken under the auspices of the Historical Committee of the Mennonite Church, which employs Sharp. Unfortunately the General Conference does not have a similar committee. Instead James C. Juhnke, Professor of History at Bethel College, prepared a preface and represents the General Conference half of the merger equation.
Sharp selected stories which reveal who Mennonites are. He correctly argues that it is collective or common memory which creates identity. Thus the stories focus on the core values of Mennonites, but the stories are quite varied in their specific themes. Some demonstrate Mennonite servanthood. Others look at examples of suffering and even martyrdom. Often the players in the stories are leaders in the church, but sometimes they are ordinary believers who lived or witnessed for their faith. The volume certainly achieves its goal in showing a rich diversity of faithfulness.
However, what does this book reveal in terms of its goal of informing people about the differences and similarities between the Mennonite Church and General Conference traditions? Quite a number of the stories actually come from neither tradition but are inter-Mennonite. These are stories of Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Disaster Service, Mennonite World Conference, Civilian Public Service, and worldwide Mennonite mission projects. While the mission work of the past has tended to be carried out by denominationally based mission boards, the nature and sometimes even locations of the work have not varied considerably between the Mennonite Church and General Conference.
So what will the reader learn from this volume that distinguishes between the traditions of the Mennonite Church and General Conference? One major theme is the importance of the Russian Mennonite experience for the General Conference. The massive immigration of Mennonites from Russia and other locations to the United States and Canada in the 1870s had a formative impact on the General Conference, and continued migrations from Russia and relations with Mennonites who remained behind in Russia impacted Canadian Mennonites throughout the 20th century. Of course, the Clayton Kratz story of a Goshen College student who tragically disappeared while providing aid to the Russian Mennonites in 1920 is just one of many examples which shows that even the Russian Mennonite experience was never completely foreign to those in the Mennonite Church. Nevertheless, the Low German or Dutch background of most General Conference Mennonites is an important distinction which comes through in a number of the stories.
A number of the major traditions in the Mennonite Church which differ from those in the General Conference relate to church polity and authority, and often these differences are revealed through issues related to discipline or dress standards. A handful of stories address these themes, but the reader who is not already quite familiar with the other denomination will not gain a good understanding of very fundamental differences between the Mennonite Church and General Conference on polity and discipline. For example, the General Conference has little experience with practices such as "shunning" or with sources of authority like bishops. It would also be useful for someone of General Conference background to understand the continuum from the Mennonite Church to the Conservative Mennonites and Amish and how many members of the Mennonite Church have family connections over the generations to the more conservative groups. Nothing like this kinship with the Amish exists within most of the General Conference.
The reader is introduced to a handful of leaders within each tradition. Some like David Goerz and David Toews from the General Conference and Orie Miller from the Mennonite Church exhibited incredible energy and diversity in their witness. Of course, a more comprehensive review of denominational leaders in the twentieth century might be problematic, since some leaders like John Horsch and Daniel Kaufman devoted considerable venom to attacks on the General Conference during the second quarter of the century. Even in the sphere of church history the relationship was often tense, as Harold Bender and Cornelius Krahn competed for books for their respective denomination's historical library and did not always speak of each other kindly. This book is not the place to look for some of the bumps in the road which eventually brought the denominations together.
Another weakness of the volume is the format of the stories. Many were previously published or taken from other sources and not thoroughly adapted to read as "stories." So despite the title, one likely will not want to curl up in front of the fireplace and read these stories aloud to the family. This does not detract from the content of the narratives, and the style of the stories is popular rather than scholarly (although the book does have footnotes). Thus while the stories are not presented in dramatic fashion, they are relatively easy reading.
Numerous other areas exist where the reader will only achieve a fragmented understanding of the distinctions between the Mennonite Church and the General Conference. One may safely conclude that the primary goal of this book is not to demonstrate differences between the two denominations as they merge but to show the commonalities. This it does reasonably well. Often if the names and places were deleted, one would not know from which group the story originated. However, it is knowing the names and places and becoming familiar with the people who have shaped the memories of each denomination which make the book valuable. The reader will learn to know Mennonites from the Hochsetlers in the mid-eighteenth century to Annie Funk and John Schrag in the early twentieth century who lived and sacrificed for their faith.
Nonresistance and peacemaking are themes in many of the stories, General Conference and Mennonite Church alike. These and other stories also often reveal deep commitments of individuals to missions and witnessing for their faith. These are the core values which are uniting the denominations. The stories do an excellent job of portraying these common values as they were lived by real people, and in this way the book will help to build the common memories and identity which is its goal.
David A. Haury
Topeka, Kansas