2000 Millennial Barcelona

2000   Millennial Barcelona. Spain, a New Year and new century, reflections on transcendence, Venezuela, Family: Jakob, Hannah, Elizabeth, Anson, Gloria. Barcelona and Catalonia, Jakob’s mental illness, visiting London, Wimbledon, US Open, Gordon Parks, a suicide attempt, Philhaven, Kidron, Miriam Kratzer, the Liberian acapella choir, Ruth Miller, Michael Yoder, visits to Cuba.

On January 1, 2000, I was writing in my journal, “Thoughts on Life,” sitting at a table near Barcelona, Spain, where Elizabeth had rented us a beach house. Elizabeth had come to Barcelona in the Fall of 1999 for a year abroad to study Spanish. I was enjoying the light of a new day, a new century, and a new millennium. I was thankful that I have another year to live and for the many blessings of work, family and friends. Most of these next paragraphs come from my journal entries in Barcelona where Hannah, Anson, Gloria and I had traveled for a week of vacation and Christmas. Jakob came over from England where he was in a graduate program at the University of London.

We were actually at Sitges, a small resort city on the Mediterranean Sea coast, and I was in a meditative mood, thankful for the creation and that the world was still standing these two centuries after the coming of Jesus Christ. I remembered in the mid-seventies to eighties, I used to despair that the world would not last. I thought that we would blow up in a nuclear war or another confrontation which would lead to the last world war. 

Then we went to Venezuela in a Christian mission assignment with Eastern Mennonite Missions (EMM), and I believe we made a contribution to the church and mission in Venezuela, especially in regards to Anabaptism and the Mennonites. But more than that, I regained my faith in a transcendent God. Venezuela was a turning point for a middle-aged father to see and experience with Christians who whether poor or rich in worldly goods could be rich in spirit. I recognized that life is and will be more than the present and the material. I recognized in these souls that life on this planet may be saved by those who recognize that life is a gift from the Creator.

I had Venezuela on my mind because from December 14-16 torrential rains fell on the Vargas state causing terrible mudslides. It was estimated that 20,000 to 50,000 people lost their lives there. Mennonite Central Committee and EMM had a campaign of sending buckets in relief, and we helped collect buckets in Scottdale. We also sent a contribution of $1,000 to the Eastern Mennonite Missions for those who have suffered.

On New Year’s Eve we attended a party given by Elizabeth’s friends Manolo and Patricia and among those attending were the counsel and vice-counsel of the Cuban consulate in Spain. It was an enjoyable evening with the Spaniards and the Cubans and some Austrian friends who were visiting. As it turned out, with Spanish, English and German, I could communicate with all of them. The Cubans were looking to purchase computers and technology from the Spanish and their language and foods brought back many good memories of our time of living in Puerto Rico. Cubans and Puerto Ricans shared many Caribbean foods: rice, chicken, large red beans and cold vegetable pea salads were served.

I looked forward to the next century knowing that I will not live another one and wanting to take stock regarding my contribution to the 20^th century and what I might contribute to the next one. In other words, I needed to give an account of my life. Family wise, my biggest project was to think and act kindly with our son Jakob. He had come away from Turkey teaching and a difficult marriage and was making a new start. This change had freed him in his family, vocational and I believed spiritual choices. If his emotions were still fragile (were they not always), his mind was bright and he seemed to manage things in graduate school, or so we thought. Now, our main hope, prayer and support were for him to leave graduate school for his vocational life. The many options of life seemed freeing, but this multiplicity can also paralyze him in making decisions. Little did I know that the options had already paralyzed him at the University of London.   

If Jakob had so much trouble finding a meaningful profession or vocation, our young women seemed to have found life and vocational tracks with some ease. They had an amazing sense for their possibilities and had moved into the medical (Hannah) and teaching (Elizabeth) fields. But most important, they have a deep respect for God and the church. We had taken hymnals along to Barcelona, and on New Year’s Day, we sang in the evening with everyone joining together. We all had our variations of faith, the Christian faith and the Mennonite denomination, but singing was an important expression around which we could unite; it was an aesthetic experience, as well as devotion, praise and confession. Finally, there was Gloria who had been a true, healthy and handsome wife over the past 27 years. She was as strong as the sea and as stable as the earth in her basic intuitions and convictions. Gloria liked the sun, but she also was the sun, which the Ecclesiastes writer said, also rises.  

Dear reader, an apology. Last year we were in the Ukraine and Russia, and now we’re in Spain and you are probably thinking I have gone to writing travelogues and trip reports of interest to few but the writer himself. I want to give a little rationale and defense because Spain was an important part of my education as I hope you’ll see. Elizabeth guided us around Barcelona, la Sagrada Familia, and the land Gaudi, all of which fascinated us. But the biggest realization in this modern and cosmopolitan city and post-Franco country was how civil and well, Western, it seemed. Spain had even stopped bullfighting in Barcelona. I had thought Spain was ungovernable in my youth and until the seventies. After fighting a fierce civil war and being ruled by a 19^th century general Franco for about four decades, Barcelona now seemed like a livable American or European city. Whether in art, economy or architecture, Spain as represented by Barcelona seemed totally at home in the democratic Western European countries of England, France, and Germany. This is not an apologetic for Western modernity, societies of pastoral pre-modernity also have their virtues. It is only to say both are preferable to Spain's earlier habits of anarchy, civil wars, and dictatorship.  

Still, on many of Barcelona’s shop signs and in its bookstores and schools was a language which I did not recognize: Catalan. Within cosmopolitan Barcelona was Catalonia; one found a strong provincial identity. Here was an emphasis of the region’s Catalonia identity and, in fact, a strong impulse to establish a separate country called Catalonia. I suppose the education for me was that history moves in several directions, often in paradoxical and complicated ways.

I often wrote in my journal on vacations and in transitions, and on the second day of the New Year, I wrote 1999 in my journal and then crossed it out. I would need to get used to writing 2000. I would also need to get used to our family being separated. All I could think about was that we left Elizabeth in Barcelona and Jakob at the airport returning to London. We had traveled many times, but this leaving had an especially sad part, and I think it may have had to do with Jakob and the fragile nature of his life, at the same time I was so glad for our children’s lives.

The new year and century was also a time to look at work goals and issues at Mennonite Publishing House; our computer systems did not go down at midnight of the new century, but little did I know of the impending crisis which waited in the next year. But all this seemed secondary to family and especially Jakob who I hoped was now on a new stage of adulthood and meaningful work and profession. We had many good conversations especially relating to his graduate study in international aid and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). But by April, Jakob wrote to us and then called us by phone that he was having anxiety attacks and could not concentrate on his studies. He was depressed, could not finish his papers, and he thought life may not be worth living. Elizabeth had visited him during her spring break and had mentioned that he seemed unusually anxious about his studies and life in general. Early in May I got a ticket and went over to London to visit with Jakob and to encourage him or to bring him home.

In some ways, it was a surreal visit regarding Jakob’s illness because he had relinquished his studies by that time, was quite disinterested in talking about his emotional condition or mental health and mainly wanted me to have a good time in visiting London. In fact, on the surface he seemed like the Jakob of old except that now he was emotionally tied to another woman, this one a young graduate student he had met in Turkey and with whom he was living in London. When we were out and about, about every two hours Jakob would call her, letting her know where and how he was. This attractive young woman seemed to be a prototype of the women who entered Jakob’s life; she was on an educational and career path and seemed to have her life together, and Jakob provided a handsome companion and erudite conversational partner.  

Meantime, although the intent of the London visit was to deal with Jakob’s emotional and mental breakdown, I now realize that neither Jakob nor I were capable of that project without outside help. Both of us had spent our lives ignoring counselors; we were far too strong for these therapeutic weaklings. We often called them shrinks, somewhat on the same level as dog catchers and social workers. In fact, I now realize that the Miller extended family ethos of mainly ignoring and even scorning the new therapeutic culture did not serve us well on these occasions. In Jakob’s case, he got it from both sides; the Miller-Schlabach tradition on my side was that work, willpower, or physical exercise would take care of any and all emotional problems. The Miller tradition on Gloria’s side had a similar approach to work along with a high appreciation for holding one’s feelings and emotions in check, always secondary to a strong will-power. 

As it turned out, the original purpose of my visit was put aside, and Jakob and I spent the week traveling all over London, he serving as an unusually capable guide. We visited the new Tate Art Museum, Westminster Abbey, and 10 Downing Street. One evening we boarded the Eye (a huge super ferris wheel) and viewed the skyline of London, and another day we rented a car and headed out into Shakespeare country -- Stratford on Avon. This visit was an especially comfortable day as we drove through the well-trimmed countryside and farmland. We stopped at various times to see pheasants along fence rows or to get a coffee or ale. Only at Stratford itself was Jakob uncomfortable with its huge stream of tourists and the commercialization. One day we went to Oxford, visited bookshops, and another day we visited the Mennonite Centre at Shepherds Hill (they sold a lot of our Herald Press books).

On Sunday morning, I attended the Mennonite worship at Wood Brook; it was the first Sunday after the departure of the long-term American missionaries Alan and Eleanor Kreider, hence still a time of some grief. In the afternoon I visited Karl Marx’ large grave site at the Highgate Cemetery (East) not far away: “Workers of the world unite.” I paid a two Pound entrance fee “to 

aid in conservation, restoration, and maintenance.”   

Another day Jakob and I went out to Wimbledon and saw the Pete Sampras on Centre Court and Jennifer Capriati on the side courts. The one-time child tennis prodigy Capriati had made a come-back in tennis after going off the rails with personal problems. She showed up in London looking exceptionally well-fed, and the London tabloids were having a field day with her weight, or overweight. Jakob was humorous and as lucid as ever in discussing family, tennis and world affairs as well as the sights and sounds of London, and he was equally opaque and seemingly quite incapable of assessing his own emotional situation and making the small decisions which would have led to a greater sense of accomplishment. Since he had left school, I encouraged him to return to the States, and he seemed to think this was his next move.

In late August I got a call to pick up Jakob in New York where he had arrived and was ready to come home and start another chapter of his life. By this time the US Open was being played, and Jakob and I spent a day there before returning home. But what I recall from that day was not so much the tennis as the Arthur Ashe sculpture in front of the large stadium named after him. That evening who should show up taking photos of the Ashe sculpture but Gordon Parks, one of the century’s best photographers and author of one book (The Learning Tree, 1963), a growing-up story which had influenced me so much as a youth. I don’t recall if there was some special occasion around the Ashe sculpture or whether Parks simply happened to be visiting. But somehow to be with Jakob and Gordon Parks on that afternoon seemed an epiphany. We were all growing up and learning.  We drove home to Scottdale, and I thought Jakob was ready for a new beginning.

A few days later, one evening Jakob and I sat on the back patio visiting, and he brought up the hereafter and what I believed regarding death and life after death. I told him my Christian beliefs, but little did I realize how depressed he was with life and that death was near.  He left that evening with the car, and early the next morning we got a call from an East Cocalico Township police officer in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The police officer said that they had Jakob under suicide watch at a local hospital and were planning to take him to Philhaven, a mental hospital at nearby Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania. Jakob had stopped at a nearby Turkey Hill convenience store, and called the police officers, asking for help and telling them he was on his way to the Atlantic Ocean to end his life. So the officers drove him to a local hospital for the rest of the night under suicide watch and then transferred him to Philhaven. A week later we went to visit Jakob at Philhaven. He was ready to be released, given prescriptions on medication, and he seemed much better.

In the meantime while Jakob was at the hospital, my sister Miriam and Veryl Kratzer volunteered that he could come out to Kidron and live with them for a while. He might possibly find employment with a former teacher; I believe his name was Jim Nussbaum, who had a painting business. This seemed to be a good fit for Jakob, and he lived and worked in Kidron until the end of the year. A decade earlier, Jakob had a good high school year with the Kratzers, and again he found Kidron a healing and growing place. On the surface, at least religiously it should not have worked because Miriam was an emphatic evangelical believer and Jakob closer to a tolerant agnostic.

But Miriam and Jakob always got along. They seemed to empathize with each other in a positive way for various reasons; I suppose both having their share of angels to welcome and demons to repel. Years later, Miriam reflected on those years and saw them as Jakob’s search for God and God’s search for Him. In any case, she led him and his young twenty-something friends in a small group Bible study during those years.  

Jakob also attended the Kidron Mennonite Church, and one Sunday morning the need was presented for a road manager of a Liberian men’s acapella choir. They looked around the circle for a volunteer who had qualifications and was available. They all pointed at Jakob and he was named to this job, a voluntary service assignment for the next several months of 2001.

These young Liberians most of whom were blind had survived the cruel civil war which had wracked their country in the 90s, killing an estimated 200,000 people. They were also confessing Christians and sang of joy in being alive and also for their Christian faith. Their very presence told a story of some of the most brutal atrocities which they had experienced, and they were raising funds for schools and orphanages back in Liberia. The project was a good fit for Jakob for several reasons: he was a good public person and gave them a good introduction; their acapella African music was aesthetically beautiful and authentic; and he enjoyed contributing to a project which was altruistic and giving.  

Jakob did this service project beginning with churches in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and eventually going so far west as St. Louis, Missouri. By Spring the tour was complete, and Jakob came back to Kidron and began to work as a counselor for Boys Village (now the Village Network) near Smithville, Ohio. Jakob had good supportive friends; at this point. Central Christian High School was having strong in enrollment, and young teachers were added to staff. Among these young friends he discovered in Kidron were his cousin Ruth, who had started to teach at the elementary and Michael Yoder, a Hartville native and high school social studies teacher. Jakob and Michael and some cats (Trotsky and Plato, as I recall) soon moved together in a mobile home out at Kidron Road Route 30 intersection and they were sometimes joined by another Central graduate Tom Messner. Other young people who were at Central during those years were Anna Dunn and Tim Kennel. Jakob also got acquainted with his Miller cousins, especially Ruth’s sister Amy and Mark Schlabach who would come up and visit him during those years.

I think those two Kidron years were mainly good years for Jakob, even as he would also get discouraged. Around the holidays of 2001, I mentioned to him that if he could hang in for another year (he was now with Wooster Community Services), why don’t we celebrate with a summer vacation together in Cuba. So in the summer of 2002, we headed for Toronto and then Havana and spent an enjoyable week, staying in the old Sevilla Hotel where Graham Greene had stayed in an earlier day. The hotel served a good breakfast in the open-air top floor, a kind of Marxist heaven with a string quartet playing Beethoven, Bach, and John Lennon’s “Yesterday.” Michael Yoder and his sister Maria were in Havana during the same week, and Jakob visited with them too.

The Cubans were friendly hosts, but our guide at the Museum of the Revolution was such a fervent Castro devote’ that about an hour into the long-winded tour (she had announced that we should be prepared for at least three hours), Jakob quietly told me the place has bad karma. He made a quick escape, and our guide was crestfallen for losing her young audience, and wanted to wait until Jakob returned. I told her Jakob was not feeling well, and I would try to find him. We both escaped the museum, but the island and the Cubans were enjoyable to visit. It was a time of Cuban and American rapprochement, and by Fall the University of Pittsburgh was organizing a teacher exchange. Gloria went to visit with the Cuban teachers and classrooms around Thanksgiving time. Since then relations between our countries cooled, but I post this during 2015 when Cuban American relations are again normalizing. I hope it continues.  

By the summer of 2002, Jakob’s Kidron period ended as he, Michael Yoder and Ruth Miller all moved to Pittsburgh which will be, well, another chapter. If Jakob’s life was transitions, this was also the life of Michael and Ruth and Hannah, Anson and Elizabeth. They were also going through educational, professional and cultural changes which they had initiated and with fewer and smaller crises. Meanwhile, an institutional crisis was looming in the new century at the old Mennonite publishing firm with which I worked, but those chapters also can wait until another year.        

Most of this comes from memory and my files and journals from 2000. Part of the section on Jakob’s Kidron years comes from my Sister Miriam Kratzer’s reflections at Jakob’s memorial service on September 7, 2005.  

1999 Russia, Khorititsa and Tolstoy

1999  Russia, Khorititsa and Tolstoy, “Khortitsa 99: Mennonites in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union,” Harvey L. Dyck,  Orris Basinger, Sarah Kratzer (now Kehrberg), Delbert Plett, Svetlana I. Bobyleva,  Jack Thiessen, “Not Totally with Honor: US Mennonite Church Responses to Soviet Repression,” Derek Fraser  comments and West Overton Overholts, Moscow, Leo Tolstoy, Tula and Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy and the Mennonites.

During first half of my life, Russia was never far away. Because of the Soviet Union, I heard of bomb shelters during the 1950s elementary school. Russia is technically one republic within the Soviet Union but I’ll use the terms interchangeably here. By my high school years there was Sputnik and the Cuban missile crisis; the name Nikita Khrushchev was commonplace. By the time I went to college, I took out low-interest loans with the National Defense Act, and I started to read the Russian novelists, especially Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. 

By the early seventies I started reading the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, and especially his autobiographical memoirs Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick (1972). Although I think I read all of the British Muggeridge’s books, many relating to his conversion to Christianity, his years in Russia in the 1930s were always formative. Then in the seventies I started reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn, especially One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  By 1978, when Solzhenitsyn gave the Harvard commencement address, most of it was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. By the 1980s, I was again reading the New York public intellectuals such as Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, some of whom I had read earlier before they became what were now called neo-conservatives.

But if this national and international context kept Russia in my consciousness during the first half of my life, my religious and denominational affiliations also kept the Soviet Union in my consciousness. As a Mennonite and a confessing Christian; in my youth I learned that the Soviets had driven out or killed the Mennonites in the Ukraine and formed an atheistic state. When the children’s story Henry’s Red Sea was published telling about the Mennonites fleeing the Soviet Union after the Second World War, I read it. I heard of the radio preacher Carl McIntire who was strongly anti-communist and picketed our denominational relief agency Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). We had hosted a delegation of Russian Mennonites (and a Soviet agent). 

When I turned 18, I registered under the military draft as a conscientious objector, in effect because of the Vietnam War, sponsored on the one side by the communist north (backed by Russia) and on the other side the democratic south (backed by the United States). By the time I got to Scottdale in the early seventies, my Mennonite Publishing House colleagues reminded me that we right here in Scottdale had had hosted MCC-sponsored Russian Mennonites. The Mennonite Publishing House magazine Christian Living published articles on Soviet Russia’s domestic life which had the families appearing as a garden variety Good Housekeeping households.

So with this literary, religious, and political background I was very interested in visiting Russia, and when an opportunity came to visit and participate in a conference in the Ukraine (now an independent country), I jumped at the chance. “Khortitsa 99: Mennonites in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union” was a conference of largely Canadian Mennonite related scholars and Russian and Ukrainian scholars headed by Svetlana Bobyleva from the University of Dnepropetrovsk (called Yekaterinoslav from 1802–1917 for Catherine the Great in the Mennonite texts) and Harvey L. Dyck of the University of Toronto. The conference was to have lots of papers by the North American scholars and also by the Ukrainian scholars who now had access to the archives which had records of the Mennonite communities in the area, a kind of lost history. Hence these historians were interested in new research on this sectarian community of which now mainly remained the big dilapidated buildings and Soviet records.

The moving force behind all this was Harvey L. Dyck, an energetic scholar who had just edited a major work on the history of pacifism (The Pacifist Impulse in Historical Perspective, 1996), somewhat in the stream of Peter Brock. If Dyck was a scholar, he was also an organizer and an entrepreneur. I suppose in the lingo of the time, a networker; the conference had dozens of sponsors. This was a time when the Russian Mennonites from California, Manitoba and Ontario still had memories of the lost Khortitsa communities and travel tours were planned each summer taking people to visit their lost homeland, complete with trips down the Dnieper River and regional folk dance shows. 

The trips reminded me of our 1977 TourMagination tour taking American Amish and Mennonite descendants back to visit their European spiritual and cultural origins. Anyway, these Russian Mennonite sons and daughters had money for trips and foundations to support research, conferences, commemorative plaques, and exhibitions. The conference was held in conjunction with the opening of an exhibit of Mennonite life during Tsarist and Soviet Russia with paintings, museum artifacts, and a complete model of a Mennonite village. The conference and exhibit were in the city of Zaporozhe (during pre-1917 called Alexandrovsk) which is near the former Khortitsa settlements. The Ukrainians were interested in this part for their history and also it was a way of attracting tourists.

When word got out to the family of my intent to go, I got two traveling partners in Orris Basinger of the Berlin Mennonite Church in Ohio and my niece Sarah Kratzer of Bethel College in Kansas. My brother Paul’s Men’s I Sunday school class offered travel subsidy and along with the deal came Orris as our travel manager. My sister Miriam offered Sarah who had completed a history paper (1999) at Bethel directly on the topic which interested me: “Whose Story? How the American Mennonites Tell the Russian Mennonite Story, 1940-1975.” However, unlikely a troop we were of a student, an editor, and a retired building products manager, we got along quite well; I don’t recall one unpleasant conflict with either but many enjoyable conversations. 

At any coffee table or lobby, Orris Basinger would tell whoever was sitting nearby whether a Ukrainian scholar or a Manitoba Mennonite that he lived in the world’s largest Amish settlement, immediately striking up a conversation. Orris reminded me of my mother Mattie as traveler who would pick up a conversation with anyone whether the pilot, a young child, or a business traveler-- talking about the weather, babies, or quilting, seemingly assured that the other person was equally interested in the topic. Sarah went jogging every day, and one morning I met her near our hotel after she had met a poor Ukrainian woman who needed money. She had given her some, but was still in distress whether she should have given her even more. I remember it for Sarah’s conscientiousness, but also because the poverty of these European-looking Ukrainians was unsettling. I suppose I was expecting that their new political freedom would also bring greater economic freedom. 
  

Orris, Sarah and I had many opportunities for informal conversations because of the cast of characters who sat around the Khortitsa 99 tables were as memorable as the papers. From Steinbach, Manitoba, came attorney Delbert Plett (1948-2004) who was interested in all things Kleine Gemeinde (the Russian Mennonite conservatives), old order, or Amish. Plett wore a string-tie like a cowboy and enjoyed a kind of a sheriff and scholar persona for the old order and conservative groups. I had known him earlier from phone conversations, and he did an interesting and idiosyncratic magazine called Preservings, strong on Steinbach, Manitoba, history and with a special editorial animus toward the American evangelicals and dispensationalists who had been polluting his pure and innocent Canadians. Hence, he liked the Amish and the old order Mennonites in Mexico for whom he was also a lord protector, buying them old John C. Wenger texts such as Separated Unto God.

Another Manitoba person around the tables was Winnipeg Mennonite heritage director Lawrence Klippenstein who had shared the archivist Dennis Stoesz with us, and kept a lively conversations going on a coffee-break and lunch-time text, the New Zealand historian James Urry’s scurrilous attack article on our convener Harvey Dyck, in effect accusing Dyck of being a neo-Nazi sympathizer. Dyck was threatening to sue the Mennonite Quarterly Review journal for libel, and  Klippenstein, of course, knew that the editor of the review was our relative John D. Roth. Why Urry who until then was one of the main non-Mennonite historians of the Russian Mennonites did this flimsy attack on Dyck and why John published it, I never quite understood. To me on the outside, it appeared as little more than petty academic turf protection and jealousy. In any case, John Roth eventually issued an apology and the subject passed, but it provided an unpleasant if salacious undercurrent at the conference.

A young historian Marlene Epp, daughter of the journalist Frank Epp, was studying the families, especially the single parent Mennonite women who had led courageously during the great trek out of the Ukraine from 1943 to 1945. The Ukrainian academy also brought a number of very capable women scholars to the table, the most memorable being the co-chair professor Svetlana I. Bobyleva. I am, however, surely remembering her for all the wrong reasons and through no fault of her own. Bobyleva was an attractive woman, hence often bringing the Manitoba professor and humorist Jack Thiessen to her side. The conference Falstaff, Thiessen seemed equally drawn to low German humor and to low neckline blouses. He had the crowd happily howling with shared memories of a Plattduetsch dialect while we outsiders, the Ukrainians and the “Swiss,” looked on bemusedly.

Identity re-interpretations are commonplace to anyone who travels, and on this trip, we Pennsylvania German Mennonites became Swiss, a term which I had formerly used for the Kidron and Berne (Indiana) Mennonites who had more recently arrived from Switzerland. Here Swiss meant all American Amish and Mennonites of Swiss German origins, not to be confused with the real Mennonites that would be the Californians and Canadians of Dutch Russian heritage. Meanwhile, conversations with the Ukrainians often took on a personal tone as these professionals tried to adapt to their cultural, especially economic, come-down in a post-Soviet Ukraine. One professor about my age described his family in detail; under Soviet Russia he could take his family each summer on vacation to the Black Sea. Now his salary was hardly enough for food and shelter; how economic conditions had deteriorated in the independent Ukraine was a constant theme. Freedom, as we used to sing, certainly wasn’t free in the Ukraine.

I will not review the several dozen papers which gave one a better understanding of the Mennonites in Tsarist and Soviet Russia. My own contribution was probably a sideshow, a reflection on how the American Mennonites had come to view these Mennonites from the first half of the century as suffering brethren to the last half of the century as islands of privilege. My presentation “Not Totally with Honor: US [USA] Mennonite Church Responses to Soviet Repression”was based on surveying the Gospel Herald and other documents on how Mennonite leaders wrote and especially Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) leaders responded. During the first half of the century, one could characterize Mennonite leaders clearly being anti-communist, but by the second half of the century, Soviet communism was viewed as a moral equivalent of the Western democracies. 

I wrote: “A double standard emerged which allowed one to praise a communist dictatorship from a distance, even though one did not have to live with its consequences. The Mennonites in the Ukraine who did not have this luxury suffered grievously. But this Marxist view left little room to sympathize with their plight.” The exceptions here were the rank and file Mennonites who had little interest in leftist politics and supported MCC as a relief and service agency. The conservative Mennonites and Amish meanwhile quietly pulled out of MCC and began their own organization to aid the suffering Christians in communist countries such as Romania. My Holmes County, Ohio, Alvin and Mae Gingerich cousins were leaders in this movement which eventually became Christian Aid Ministries at Berlin, Ohio. I viewed the MCC left-leaning leaders as giving tacit approval to Soviet totalitarianism in the 60s and 70s and supporting violent socialist revolutions in Latin America in the 80s. I could do neither.
     

In many ways, the paper was a confessional of my own intellectual travels during this second half of the century; I was no longer a fellow-traveler on the road to some idealized socialist justice. If 1968 represented my youthful flings of utopian dreams of universal love and social justice as defined by the New Left, by the late seventies I was also aware of socialist nightmares. The Soviets had killed ten million of their own people, including 30,000 Mennonites. When the Baptists and Mennonites were able to leave in the early nineties, they did.  I have yet to hear any of these Umsiedler (Resettlers) commending MCC moral equivalency efforts, unlike what one heard from the refugees during the first half of the century. In Latin America, Cuba remained imprisoned and poor, while Chile became free and prospering. Meanwhile, Russia and China were moving toward the civility of the Western democracies, however haltingly. As I post this, haltingly must be emphasized because Russia remains, well Mother Russia, hence annexing parts of ifs former lands in Ukraine. 

It seemed to me that the 20^th century had been a major debate on free markets and socialism and on democracy and totalitarianisms. In both cases, free markets and democracies generally delivered a greater degree of freedom, justice, peace and prosperity. By the eighties the British had elected Margaret Thatcher and free markets and freedom began to flourish around the world, especially in small Asian countries and India. I understood some of the pacifist reluctance to be on the side of freedom as coming from fear of heating up the cold war; the democratic West and the Soviets appeared to be at a nuclear stand-off. 

Still it seemed to me an honorable path could be navigated in which pacifist Mennonites would give moral legitimacy to the free countries where they found themselves. I was especially influenced by Richard Gid Powers’ book Not Without Honor on American anticommunism during the 20^th century. Early on, Powers believed he was studying one of the sordid chapters of American history, in the public mind almost exclusively associated with U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy or anticommunism as fascism. But Powers discovered that he had studied one of the most honorable chapters of American history.  

But back to Khortitsa 99 where two memories especially remained with me. First, the Canadian ambassador to the Ukraine Derek Fraser spoke at the opening of the exhibition, reflecting on the tragedy which happened almost a century ago. Violent revolution and Soviet repression meant that thousands of Mennonites migrated to Canada which turned out to be a tremendous human resource to his country. The net effect was that Canada as a society benefited culturally and economically from this influx of churches and citizens. Left unsaid but clear to all was that by driving out some of its most productive citizens. Ukraine had greatly impoverished itself during the past century; the evidence was still all around. A second insight was visiting the big brick buildings which were left around the former Khortitsa, machinery factories, a girls’ school and a large meetinghouse in which we sang hymns and heard addresses. 

Although these one-time Mennonite owned buildings were all in some state of dis-repair, they reminded me of the large brick Overholt homestead back at West Overton, Pennsylvania: the distillery, houses, and barns which the Overholts and their workers had built during the 19^th century. By the 20^th century the Overholt project was also finished, and the people, industry and commerce had moved on. The difference was big however. The change at West Overton happened through people’s choices and the market place; the change at Khortitsa had happened through violent revolution and repression. Somehow, I could not find moral equivalence in these two systems of government.

But we had a second week; we traveled to Moscow where we stayed at the Hotel National which is right beside Red Square and the Kremlin. The 1903 hotel, most recently renovated in 1995, itself had historical meaning because Lenin and Trotsky had stayed here as had the North American Mennonites Harold Bender and David B. Wiens in 1955. Don Loewen the Mennonite Central Committee representative in Moscow had arranged for his friend Natasha Sedenkova to serve as our bilingual guide for the week. We visited the sites such as Lenin’s Tomb, and one day we drove out to the Novodevichy Cemetery, located on the grounds of a former convent where notables such as Nikita Khrushchev were buried. 

I remember Sarah was especially interested in the Russian musicians and composers who were also nearby: Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) and Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953). Loewen was able to get us tickets one night for the legendary Bolshoi Theater, and we took in a performance of Verdi’s “Aida.” We visited the Orthodox cathedrals and also the big Baptist church building where Billy Graham had preached and which during the Cold War had often appeared in our church periodicals. We went to various museums, the most memorable the Tetyakov Gallery which had classic 20th century social realism and a number of Ilya Repin paintings. Nearby in a desolate lot were tumbled over monuments of Stalin and other fallen Soviet leaders.

Repin also painted portraits of Leo Tolstoy. One day, we visited the Leo and Sonya Beers Tolstoy’s family house, now a museum, in Moscow and another day we headed for Tula, a city a 100-mile drive south and nearby Yasanya Polyana. This was my real goal of our trip, and it was a beautiful Spring day, and as we drove to Tula the same aspens which Tolstoy had described in War and Peace were still quivering during our morning drive. We stopped at a bakery and coffee along the way and bought a traditional bread at Tula (our guide Natasha called it ginger bread) which I took along back for the Mennonite publishing workers. The large Tolstoy estate was well preserved and a number of workers were out in the orchards and field with the tools and forks of 19^th Century Russia. The house is also well preserved and has the feeling of a country house as described in his novels. We walked out to grove of Tolstoy’s final burial place with green vegetation on top of the unmarked earth bier. Tolstoy and his brothers used to talk of a green stick buried nearby which would have all the secrets of life, peace and health. It was never found.

I started reading Tolstoy in college and when we moved to Scottdale Ken Reed was reading the 19^th century Russian novelists, and we would often discuss them. Then my mother-in-law Berdella Miller gave me Henri Troyat’s wonderful Tolstoy biography which she had read in her Berlin book club. Now, I was fascinated by his life and family too. By 1974 I had discovered Tolstoy’s connection to the American Mennonite Daniel Musser, and I sent a letter to John Oyer of the Mennonite Quarterly Review that I would like to do a study of Tolstoy and the Mennonites. Oyer encouraged it, and over the next three decades I dabbled in the subject, and I confess that I’m probably one of the world’s foremost living authorities on that subject, and I’ll list the publications below. Some Winnipeg PhD student has probably studied it since in greater detail. 

Ken Reed and I used to say that our life goal was more modest than Tolstoy’s to find the green stick which in his boyhood economy had the meaning of life, peace and happiness. Our goal was to become old sages like Tolstoy, sit on our porches and have the peasants come by and seek our counsel. So, now I am an old man, have a house with a long porch and sit on it in the summer time with plenty of time and room for the muziks to visit. As of this writing in 2013, I can report that only one Upper Tyrone peasant regularly comes to seek my counsel, or perhaps more accurately companionship. His name is Carlos, my faithful dog. So much for my youthful Tolstoyan vanities, but his writings remain.. 

Most winters I pull out a Tolstoy volume, and have probably read War and Peace and Anna Karenina a half dozen times, and their density, brilliance and characterizations continue to fascinate me. Still, given all that I know about Sonya Beers and Leo Tolstoy’s sad and terrible latter years, I also read them as cautionary stories and essays. A brilliant mind and moral certitude can have an ugly underside, especially to family life. Still, visiting Yasnaya Polyana was a highlight of our Ukraine and Russia visit, and now I was ready to go home. 

Our Moscow send- off was one morning at the large Sheremetyevo International Airport where everything seemed to be totally confused and disorderly, even as flights somehow safely were taking off and landing. I tried to find German, English or Spanish declaration forms but could not. So I decided to join the spirit of this apparent disorder. I simply took the French and Russian form (I’m guessing here) and after filling in my name Levi Miller Schlabach wrote in random addresses, dates and numbers in boxes with no idea what they represented. Everyone was hurried; the official took my form without looking at it, placed it on a stack, and told me to proceed to the gate and plane. Sarah and Orris navigated this airport with equal aplomb, and we were headed home. Back in the United States, the end of the year was approaching, but it was also the end of the century, and everyone had what was called Y2K fever; our daughter Elizabeth was headed for Barcelona and Jakob in London. But that is the subject of the next chapter.    

Most of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement address was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (June 9, 1978, 7), still in my files. James Urry’s attack essay on Harvey L. Dyck was "Fate, Hate and Denial: Ingrid Rimland's Lebensraum!" in Mennonite Quarterly Review (January, 1999, 107-127). My Khorititsa paper “Not Totally with Honor: US Mennonite Church Responses to Soviet Repression” was published in Mennonite Life (September, 2004, http://tools.bethelks.edu/mennonitelife/2004Sept/miller.php ). The Richard Gid Powers’ book is Not Without Honor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). My Tolstoy and the Mennonites projects were  “Daniel Musser and Leo Tolstoy, Mennonite Historical Bulletin (April 1993, 1-7); Robert Friedmann and Tolstoy in “A Reconstruction of Evangelical Anabaptism,” Mennonite Quarterly Review (July, 1995, 295-306); and “Leo Tolstoy and the Mennonites,” Journal of Mennonite Studies (Volume 16, 1998, 163-180).