Echoes of Violence

Sandra Birdsell walked so that Miriam Toews could run. Both Mennonite writers from rural Manitoba — Birdsell from the generation before Toews — they chronicled the lives of girls and women from that funny diasporic religious group to which I too belong, a group that has taken on giant proportions in our national literature.

I discovered Birdsell’s first book, Night Travellers, in my twenties, in the middle of the boring and beautiful act of rediscovering one’s culture after time away from it. Where has this been all my life?! I mentally shouted, alone on my mattress in a third-floor Winnipeg walk‑up. Following a dreamy, hurting Métis-Mennonite family from the fictional town of Agassiz, the linked stories are soft and electric, measured and urgent, and they are honest. I tore through her second collection, Ladies of the House, with the same zeal.

I hated to admit it, but reading her debut novel, The Missing Child, went more slowly. My attention wandered. I plodded my way toward the finish line, but my Birdsell kick came to a not-so-screeching halt.

In part, that’s because the remaining book I owned of hers was The Russländer. My first-edition paperback features a young girl garbed in black, staring severely into the distance, in front of a vaguely rural scene. I was well aware of its contents: it was about the Mennonites who escaped the turmoil and violence of the nascent Soviet Union in the 1910s and 1920s to come to Canada, where they were met with suspicion by those who’d settled decades prior.

My copy moved with me from Manitoba to Ontario, from New York to Ohio. I never once cracked it. Every flash of its cover sparked an internal klaxon: Here is this serious book about your serious people! I began to resent it. Diasporic guilt, you can’t win over me!

Until recently it did.

The Russländer, as it turns out, is serious — but in a good way. The sweeping historical novel follows Katya Vogt, a daughter of the overseer of a rich estate. Her father believes the owner’s empty promise of land, while he belittles the locals who work under him. (They are described as “Russians” in “Russia.” Reading it today, you know they are Ukrainians, and they are in Ukraine.) Then comes the First World War. Then the Russian Revolution, the birth of the Soviet Union. Then 1923, when Katya and what’s left of her family go to Canada.

Birdsell’s writing is as powerful and measured as I remembered it to be. Partly this strength comes from her simple and savvy use of point of view: she diverges from Katya’s voice only by way of letters. At critical moments, the framing shifts to the 1990s, showing Katya in a Winnipeg nursing home, speaking to a “young man with a tape machine,” who is hoping to preserve her community’s tragic stories.

So Katya tells him. She shares the detailed story she never told anybody. Her parents and many other relatives were murdered in cold blood in their yard by a group known to the world largely as “Makhnovists” or “anarchists” but for whom Mennonites had a different name: “the bandits.” Katya survived only because she was able to run and hide.

Other traumas Katya does not reveal — traumas that women spoke of only among themselves, when men were not around. “God knew what had happened,” Birdsell writes, “and, for them, that was enough.”

That’s the other reason it took me so long to open The Russländer. I am one of many who grew up with these kinds of stories. My great-grandfather appears in the 1980s documentary . . . And When They Shall Ask, in which one man tells of the bandits severing the heads of an entire family and then placing them around the dinner table. Mennonites, traditionally, are unconditionally non-violent. Many held on to that principle until the bandits came. “No man is a pacifist,” another interviewee says, “when a soldier is at his mother’s bed.” I realize now that I felt an aversion to ingesting any more details about the faith-extinguishing brutality from this time. I had known these stories since I was small. I have long known, also, that Mennonites were not unique in holding such experiences.

But I’m glad I read Birdsell’s novel. Moreover, I’m glad I read it in 2025. It reminded me of, among other things, her commitment to honesty. The bandits were led by a man who believed he was building a better world. To this day, he has admirers, as is often the way with those who lead movements and tolerate cruelty, no matter what they leave in their wake.