Where is home when you've traveled halfway around the world? Where is home where memories are all you have? Where is home when you find a new path? The Germans from Russia have been redefining the idea of home for over 200 years. They made home where they found themselves - among family, church, community, school and friends, whether they stayed in their small communities or ventured to cities across the globe. The members of the North Star Chapter of Minnesota Germans from Russia explore these themes and more in their second anthology of essays reflecting on being children of three homelands in two centuries. Their respect for the past and hopes for the future are ever-constant, and these glimpses into the spaces they call home will recall memories we all hold dear.
Review
Book Review North Star Chapter of Minnesota, Germans from Russia, ed. Watermelons and Thistles. Growing Up German from Russia in America. Pp +164. Eagan, Minnesota. Amber Skye Publishing, 2018. ISBN#. 9977266-5-7.
By Eric J Schmaltz
Based out of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, the North Star Chapter of Minnesota, Germans from Russia in the recent release of its second anthology, Watermelons and Thistles: Growing Up German from Russia in America again deserves the special distinction as one of the most active and prolific chapters in the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) and even in the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR). In 2013, the North Star Chapter's editorial board produced it's first anthology of stories from descendants of ethnic German immigrants from Russia to North America, Hollyhocks and Grasshoppers. -Growing Up German from Russia in America, which proved popular among readers.
This second anthology released in 2018 was intended to coincide with and celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the chapter's founding. Indeed, the decision to coumarate it's 1978 inception in this manner also rightly should remind GRHS members of some of the initial drive at the time devoted to preserving and promoting the group's heritage and history. Beyond the North Star Chapter's creation, the year 1978 als proved significant because the still young GRHS collaborated with North Dakota State University Libraries in Fargo (NDSU) in establishing the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection (GRHC) under the direction of bibliographer Michael M. Miller. Since that time, these bodies in ethnic network have often participated in numerous joint projects and ventures to keep the cultural traditions alive.
An impressive collection of twenty-four contributors, most of them children or grandchildren of German-Russian immigrants, supplied the North Star Chapter editors with an array of detailed and rich memories and perspectives. The book also contains black and white illustrations and photographs to complement the short stories though which readers can thumb in any order they wish and at their own pace. Organizing the compendium into several chapters which stories presented in pot-lock style... no first or last in line, "the editors lay bare-in the forward the core inspiration behind the collective undertaking, stating that they have "included names and places so they do not go lost, do not remain undiscovered, do not go looking from a home, do not remain under a bushel basket where no one else can see them. Instead readers can say, Aha! or Yes! or That's the way it was, or Did people really live like that? (xiv)
The mid to late twentieth century timeframe is becoming now a promising field of investigation into the German Russian experience. On that note, several years ago, German-Russian writer Debra Marquardt noted in an interview with Prairie Public Broadcasting in Fargo that German-
Russian immigrants and the older generations traditionally had been forward-looking, wishing to move beyond past disappointments and burdens in hopes of improving their and their children's lot, while today their descendants, at least in North America, living in a world of relative affluence, tend to wax nostalgic abut a long lost and perhaps even a times ideal, past. For Marquardt, the group's salvation or immortality as much might be centered on a shared, collective memory that we take care to preserve, but also one that is more realistic and can balance our understandings of the pas, present, and future. In other words, the group remnant's task beyond the twenty-first century might be to keep the German-Russian saga alive, but in process it will also need to simplify and sort out the narrative for future generations, including among those outside of the ethnic group, especially as we move across ever greater expanses of space and time. It is here that Watermelons and Thistles takes its rightful place to help with heritage preservation. Personal, family and group memories and stories continue to evolve, and there has arisen a growing human need today to find roots in an increasingly confusing and fast-paced world. In this case, to gain some historical perspective and meaning, we need to examine, reflect upon, and perhaps ground ourselves in the chain of experiences and memories of the second, third even forth generation descendants of the original immigrants who faced trails and tribulations.
At the volume's conclusion, quite fascinating short biographies of the contributors offer us a further glimpse into the divergent accomplishments and fates of the immigrant group's descendants now dispersed across Canada, the United States, and beyond, yet who discern themselves even now as bound together by a common inheritance of culture, geography, and language. Many descendants of Germans from Russia today find themselves at a crucial transition or crossroads in the broader world history, with most of the contributors (encompassing up to three cohort groups or generations) coming of age during the middle decades of the twentieth century, roughly the period from the 1930s to the 1970s. Memories of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War still retain a strong hold over contemporary North American societies, but these impressionable and transformative events have now taken place more than a half to three-quarters of a century ago and will soon be fading fast from the public mind, thereby-running the risk of being forgotten or at least obscured if not preserved in time.
The book has so far received strong, positive reviews, as evidenced by sales at its presentation at the 2018 GRHS international convention hosted in Pierre, South Dakota. In view of its public embrace, and since not all GRHS members could attend the Pierre event, plans are underway to publish selected excerpts of the book in upcoming Heritage Review issues.
Original article found in Heritage Review, Vol. 48 No. 3 September 2018 …………a publication of Germans from Russia Heritage Society
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trips Down Nostalgia Lane: The North Star Chapter Anthologies
Lynn Fauth, PhD
Editor of The Glueckstal Colonies Research Association Newsletter
As one who left South Dakota at age ten when his family moved to California, I’ve survived on memories of Dakota prairies forged in my ten years on that farm near Emery, and through annual family visits when a child and teenager to visit grandparents in Emery and Menno, as well as relatives in Washburn, ND. Our visits were filled with encounters with the myriad of Fauths and Kosts and their in-laws near Emery and Parkston, and when my grandparents aged, we spent time in “care centers” in Menno, Marion, and Freeman, and at memorial services at churches and graveyards in Emery, Olivet, and Menno.
My academic odyssey took me to graduate schools in Indiana, California, and England and I more or less envied those with more pronounced ethnic identities: Jewish, Chicano, or Italian—where were the movies and TV shows about our families’ pathos? I sometimes wondered. Earning a PhD in English, I specialized in the literature, history and culture of the British Isles, and one summer while on vacation from my professoriate in St. Paul, MN, I was brought up short by my maternal grandfather, a “German” with family roots in Hinter Pomerania, and a German grandmother who had been born in Adelaide, Australia. “You’re not German, you’re Rooshian!” was my grandfather’s response to my self-identification as a German—after all, my paternal grandparents conversed with my father in German, and he with his cousins and aunts and uncles in the same language. However, it was a spoken language quite dissimilar to what I had learned in my Graduate School reading courses in German.
Discovering genealogy, DNA, Ancestry.com, the GRHS and AHSGR, and then the GCRA, I began to piece together my family’s history and eventually began to work with Margaret Freeman in Redondo Beach on the GCRA Newsletter, which I now edit. And I began to learn much about my ancestors’ odysseys and the impact the Seven Years War, the Manifestos by Czarina Catharine, and the French Revolution had upon my paternal (Fauth and Kost) lines.
With all that in mind, it’s a pleasant experience to pick up the North Star Chapter’s anthologies: Hollyhocks and Grasshoppers, and Watermelons and Thistles, both subtitled Growing Up German from Russia in America. They are well-written and offer a myriad of insights into what it was like growing-up German, but Rooshian!
These two volumes present multiple insights into our folk, from the nostalgic views of the prairie, seemingly accessible only to those of us who have heard the breeze blow through the oat field or hear the meadowlark’s song—“Prairie Memories”. With Carol Just and Merv Rennich, I have searched for family ties before Russia, in Russia, in Germany, and now the USA, wading through Stumpp and learning from Height and Geisinger. And with David Delzer, I have lived through what I thought were massive blizzards while on the farm in South Dakota, waiting to be picked up at my one-room Taylor # 7 school by my father on his Massy Harris tractor, the only vehicle that could traverse the drifted roads.
As one who matriculated to a massive city school in the fifth grade (three classes of 5th graders at El Marino School in Culver City, California), the memories of my years at Taylor # 7 were rekindled by Ron Scherbenski’s “Bauer #2 Launched a Lifetime of Learning,” in Watermelons and Thistles. Taylor # 7, like Bauer # 2 had no indoor plumbing, although the girls got to use the chemical facilities, while the boys had to trek to the outhouse. “Red rover, hide and seek, kick the can, and softball” were common to Taylor and Bauer schools, as were the two swings, although we did not have a see-saw. Seven students at Taylor # 7, and six students at Bauer # 2 afforded us much individual attention, and I was pushed because my teacher lumped me into lessons with Beverly Decker and Joyce Heiman, one grade ahead of me. Like Ron, when in “town school” I found myself well prepared for any academic quest—indeed, both Ron, myself, and I’m sure, the multitudes of others so taught—as noted in the accounts by Henrietta Weigel (“A Farm School Education”), and Lil Ward (“My One-Room Schoolhouse”). We were beneficiaries of the individual attention that one-room education provided.
Bernelda Kallenberger Becker’s “Radio: Bringing the World to the Prairie” with its reminder of the “J-E-L-L-O” and the “Call for Philip Morris” advertising ditties reminds me of our Saturday evening trips from the farm to Menno, twenty miles south to take piano lessons from Mrs. Ulmer, visit the Farmer’s Union and the K&K Market for supplies, and to Espedal’s Bakery before ice-cream at Grandma’s house. On the journey to Menno, we would listen to Gunsmoke on the car radio. No radio for the return trip, though; sleep was needed to prepare for Sunday School and church in the morning. And with Bernelda, I too share memories of The Old Time Revival Hour and remember my mother listening to WNAX from Yankton, especially Our Neighbor Lady.
Another piece arousing nostalgia is “Dad’s Auction” by Bernelda Kallenberger Becker. I’m sure the sentiments aroused are common to many reading GCRA Newsletter, having seen relatives “sell out.” Ruben Kallenberger’s Auction Notice reproduced on p. 111 of Watermelons and Thistles reminded me of dad’s sale notice; it’s framed in his office in my mother’s house, a reminder of the material culture of another era and another area.
Similar stories, Merv Rennich’s “Picking Rock” and James Gessle’s “Kuchen: What’s In It for Me” in the earlier volume, Hollyhocks and Grasshoppezrs” tickle the strings of memories of those of us who grew up on the prairie, and offer insights into our ethnic group for readers to see, to learn, and to cherish.
As a long-time Professor of Literature, I find these stories well-written and replete with verisimilitude, a truthfulness-to-life that vicariously reminds me of the taste of my grandmother’s prune and apricot Kuchens; reading these stories I again can hear the meadowlarks singing, or the blizzard winds blowing. And, as one who has earned a degree in an ethnic studies field (Chicano Studies), I view these two collections as pieces of material culture, ethnic artifacts that illustrate the customs and perspectives of people who have gone under the radar of ethnic awareness. Thanks to these volumes, our folk and our ways will not be forgotten.
The North Star Chapter has provided for those of us alive today insights into a world that is dying out, and for those of future generations who pick up these anthologies, they will be able to get a glimpse of life on the prairies during the middle third of the twentieth century.
By Eric J Schmaltz
Based out of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, the North Star Chapter of Minnesota, Germans from Russia in the recent release of its second anthology, Watermelons and Thistles: Growing Up German from Russia in America again deserves the special distinction as one of the most active and prolific chapters in the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) and even in the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR). In 2013, the North Star Chapter's editorial board produced it's first anthology of stories from descendants of ethnic German immigrants from Russia to North America, Hollyhocks and Grasshoppers. -Growing Up German from Russia in America, which proved popular among readers.
This second anthology released in 2018 was intended to coincide with and celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the chapter's founding. Indeed, the decision to coumarate it's 1978 inception in this manner also rightly should remind GRHS members of some of the initial drive at the time devoted to preserving and promoting the group's heritage and history. Beyond the North Star Chapter's creation, the year 1978 als proved significant because the still young GRHS collaborated with North Dakota State University Libraries in Fargo (NDSU) in establishing the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection (GRHC) under the direction of bibliographer Michael M. Miller. Since that time, these bodies in ethnic network have often participated in numerous joint projects and ventures to keep the cultural traditions alive.
An impressive collection of twenty-four contributors, most of them children or grandchildren of German-Russian immigrants, supplied the North Star Chapter editors with an array of detailed and rich memories and perspectives. The book also contains black and white illustrations and photographs to complement the short stories though which readers can thumb in any order they wish and at their own pace. Organizing the compendium into several chapters which stories presented in pot-lock style... no first or last in line, "the editors lay bare-in the forward the core inspiration behind the collective undertaking, stating that they have "included names and places so they do not go lost, do not remain undiscovered, do not go looking from a home, do not remain under a bushel basket where no one else can see them. Instead readers can say, Aha! or Yes! or That's the way it was, or Did people really live like that? (xiv)
The mid to late twentieth century timeframe is becoming now a promising field of investigation into the German Russian experience. On that note, several years ago, German-Russian writer Debra Marquardt noted in an interview with Prairie Public Broadcasting in Fargo that German-
Russian immigrants and the older generations traditionally had been forward-looking, wishing to move beyond past disappointments and burdens in hopes of improving their and their children's lot, while today their descendants, at least in North America, living in a world of relative affluence, tend to wax nostalgic abut a long lost and perhaps even a times ideal, past. For Marquardt, the group's salvation or immortality as much might be centered on a shared, collective memory that we take care to preserve, but also one that is more realistic and can balance our understandings of the pas, present, and future. In other words, the group remnant's task beyond the twenty-first century might be to keep the German-Russian saga alive, but in process it will also need to simplify and sort out the narrative for future generations, including among those outside of the ethnic group, especially as we move across ever greater expanses of space and time. It is here that Watermelons and Thistles takes its rightful place to help with heritage preservation. Personal, family and group memories and stories continue to evolve, and there has arisen a growing human need today to find roots in an increasingly confusing and fast-paced world. In this case, to gain some historical perspective and meaning, we need to examine, reflect upon, and perhaps ground ourselves in the chain of experiences and memories of the second, third even forth generation descendants of the original immigrants who faced trails and tribulations.
At the volume's conclusion, quite fascinating short biographies of the contributors offer us a further glimpse into the divergent accomplishments and fates of the immigrant group's descendants now dispersed across Canada, the United States, and beyond, yet who discern themselves even now as bound together by a common inheritance of culture, geography, and language. Many descendants of Germans from Russia today find themselves at a crucial transition or crossroads in the broader world history, with most of the contributors (encompassing up to three cohort groups or generations) coming of age during the middle decades of the twentieth century, roughly the period from the 1930s to the 1970s. Memories of the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War still retain a strong hold over contemporary North American societies, but these impressionable and transformative events have now taken place more than a half to three-quarters of a century ago and will soon be fading fast from the public mind, thereby-running the risk of being forgotten or at least obscured if not preserved in time.
The book has so far received strong, positive reviews, as evidenced by sales at its presentation at the 2018 GRHS international convention hosted in Pierre, South Dakota. In view of its public embrace, and since not all GRHS members could attend the Pierre event, plans are underway to publish selected excerpts of the book in upcoming Heritage Review issues.
Original article found in Heritage Review, Vol. 48 No. 3 September 2018 …………a publication of Germans from Russia Heritage Society
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trips Down Nostalgia Lane: The North Star Chapter Anthologies
Lynn Fauth, PhD
Editor of The Glueckstal Colonies Research Association Newsletter
As one who left South Dakota at age ten when his family moved to California, I’ve survived on memories of Dakota prairies forged in my ten years on that farm near Emery, and through annual family visits when a child and teenager to visit grandparents in Emery and Menno, as well as relatives in Washburn, ND. Our visits were filled with encounters with the myriad of Fauths and Kosts and their in-laws near Emery and Parkston, and when my grandparents aged, we spent time in “care centers” in Menno, Marion, and Freeman, and at memorial services at churches and graveyards in Emery, Olivet, and Menno.
My academic odyssey took me to graduate schools in Indiana, California, and England and I more or less envied those with more pronounced ethnic identities: Jewish, Chicano, or Italian—where were the movies and TV shows about our families’ pathos? I sometimes wondered. Earning a PhD in English, I specialized in the literature, history and culture of the British Isles, and one summer while on vacation from my professoriate in St. Paul, MN, I was brought up short by my maternal grandfather, a “German” with family roots in Hinter Pomerania, and a German grandmother who had been born in Adelaide, Australia. “You’re not German, you’re Rooshian!” was my grandfather’s response to my self-identification as a German—after all, my paternal grandparents conversed with my father in German, and he with his cousins and aunts and uncles in the same language. However, it was a spoken language quite dissimilar to what I had learned in my Graduate School reading courses in German.
Discovering genealogy, DNA, Ancestry.com, the GRHS and AHSGR, and then the GCRA, I began to piece together my family’s history and eventually began to work with Margaret Freeman in Redondo Beach on the GCRA Newsletter, which I now edit. And I began to learn much about my ancestors’ odysseys and the impact the Seven Years War, the Manifestos by Czarina Catharine, and the French Revolution had upon my paternal (Fauth and Kost) lines.
With all that in mind, it’s a pleasant experience to pick up the North Star Chapter’s anthologies: Hollyhocks and Grasshoppers, and Watermelons and Thistles, both subtitled Growing Up German from Russia in America. They are well-written and offer a myriad of insights into what it was like growing-up German, but Rooshian!
These two volumes present multiple insights into our folk, from the nostalgic views of the prairie, seemingly accessible only to those of us who have heard the breeze blow through the oat field or hear the meadowlark’s song—“Prairie Memories”. With Carol Just and Merv Rennich, I have searched for family ties before Russia, in Russia, in Germany, and now the USA, wading through Stumpp and learning from Height and Geisinger. And with David Delzer, I have lived through what I thought were massive blizzards while on the farm in South Dakota, waiting to be picked up at my one-room Taylor # 7 school by my father on his Massy Harris tractor, the only vehicle that could traverse the drifted roads.
As one who matriculated to a massive city school in the fifth grade (three classes of 5th graders at El Marino School in Culver City, California), the memories of my years at Taylor # 7 were rekindled by Ron Scherbenski’s “Bauer #2 Launched a Lifetime of Learning,” in Watermelons and Thistles. Taylor # 7, like Bauer # 2 had no indoor plumbing, although the girls got to use the chemical facilities, while the boys had to trek to the outhouse. “Red rover, hide and seek, kick the can, and softball” were common to Taylor and Bauer schools, as were the two swings, although we did not have a see-saw. Seven students at Taylor # 7, and six students at Bauer # 2 afforded us much individual attention, and I was pushed because my teacher lumped me into lessons with Beverly Decker and Joyce Heiman, one grade ahead of me. Like Ron, when in “town school” I found myself well prepared for any academic quest—indeed, both Ron, myself, and I’m sure, the multitudes of others so taught—as noted in the accounts by Henrietta Weigel (“A Farm School Education”), and Lil Ward (“My One-Room Schoolhouse”). We were beneficiaries of the individual attention that one-room education provided.
Bernelda Kallenberger Becker’s “Radio: Bringing the World to the Prairie” with its reminder of the “J-E-L-L-O” and the “Call for Philip Morris” advertising ditties reminds me of our Saturday evening trips from the farm to Menno, twenty miles south to take piano lessons from Mrs. Ulmer, visit the Farmer’s Union and the K&K Market for supplies, and to Espedal’s Bakery before ice-cream at Grandma’s house. On the journey to Menno, we would listen to Gunsmoke on the car radio. No radio for the return trip, though; sleep was needed to prepare for Sunday School and church in the morning. And with Bernelda, I too share memories of The Old Time Revival Hour and remember my mother listening to WNAX from Yankton, especially Our Neighbor Lady.
Another piece arousing nostalgia is “Dad’s Auction” by Bernelda Kallenberger Becker. I’m sure the sentiments aroused are common to many reading GCRA Newsletter, having seen relatives “sell out.” Ruben Kallenberger’s Auction Notice reproduced on p. 111 of Watermelons and Thistles reminded me of dad’s sale notice; it’s framed in his office in my mother’s house, a reminder of the material culture of another era and another area.
Similar stories, Merv Rennich’s “Picking Rock” and James Gessle’s “Kuchen: What’s In It for Me” in the earlier volume, Hollyhocks and Grasshoppezrs” tickle the strings of memories of those of us who grew up on the prairie, and offer insights into our ethnic group for readers to see, to learn, and to cherish.
As a long-time Professor of Literature, I find these stories well-written and replete with verisimilitude, a truthfulness-to-life that vicariously reminds me of the taste of my grandmother’s prune and apricot Kuchens; reading these stories I again can hear the meadowlarks singing, or the blizzard winds blowing. And, as one who has earned a degree in an ethnic studies field (Chicano Studies), I view these two collections as pieces of material culture, ethnic artifacts that illustrate the customs and perspectives of people who have gone under the radar of ethnic awareness. Thanks to these volumes, our folk and our ways will not be forgotten.
The North Star Chapter has provided for those of us alive today insights into a world that is dying out, and for those of future generations who pick up these anthologies, they will be able to get a glimpse of life on the prairies during the middle third of the twentieth century.