Voyage of Discovery

Arthur Kroeger may have become one of the most renowned federal civil servants of his generation—the “dean of deputy ministers” is a name that has stuck—but when his Russian Mennonite parents came to Canada from Ukraine as refugees in 1926, the most precious things they brought with them were a set of carpentry tools, a polished wooden box full of family papers and the family’s Kroeger clock. These austere clocks, manufactured in Ukraine by a branch of Kroeger’s family for over a century, had no cabinetry or glass case. They consisted simply of an exposed 17th-century–style mechanism, a brass pendulum and weights, and a metal clock face painted with a few flowers. Hundreds of these clocks were brought with the 20,000 Mennonites who fled the Soviet Union in the 1920s for Canada and South America. The clocks became symbols of the life that had been violently lost in Ukraine, the soft beat of their pendulums a call to remember both distant roots and a history ruptured by...