From Kleefeld with Love

It has become apparent over the past weeks that the Buller Time blog is not just for Bullers any more. Recently, for example, someone interested in the Plett family visited the blog and left a comment on the Thinking about Kleefeld 2 post (for the post + comment at the bottom, see here).

That interesting comment reminds me not only to emphasize that everyone (Bullers and non-Bullers alike) is invited to read and comment here, but also to mention the book I am currently reading: From Kleefeld with Love (Harder 2003). The body of the book presents a collection of letters “written by Mennonite women during the onset of Soviet Russia’s most turbulent years, 1925 to 1933.”

The book title derives from the fact that one of the correspondents lived in the Molotschna village of Kleefeld. Over the course of the first third of the twentieth century this woman wrote to and received letters from relatives who had moved from Kleefeld to Manitoba, Canada.

Before reproducing the letters, the book offers background about the village (e.g., it was here I learned that the village name is pronounced clay-feld), the members of the Harder family who lived and left there, and the deterioration of Molotschna life during these years of the Soviet regime.

For the sake of our Plett commenter, I should add that the book also mentions an Elizabeth Plett, who married into the Harder family in the early 1800s (p. 43), and describes the ordination of an unnamed Plett from Nikolaidorf, whose uncle (likewise unnamed) was an elder from Hierschau (51–52).

I hope to return to the substance of this book (what all our lives may have been like if Peter D and Sarah had not left Molotschna for the U.S.) at some point in the future, but for now I simply commend the book itself to all Buller Time readers. You can purchase it online from Pandora Press here.

Source

Harder, John A., ed. and trans. 2003. From Kleefeld with Love. Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press.