http://penonfire.blogspot.com/2010/02/memoirist...

This podcast is well worth the 30-60 minutes it takes to listen to it. Dani Shapiro is the first interview. Rhoda is the second.

How interesting to have your respective windows into MB/GC life on the plains, in CA, and Canada. I grew up totally insulated from all of these “other” Mennonites. My world was the Lancaster Conference (big enough to be a world unto itself if your world is small enough–perhaps the highest concentration of Mennonites anywhere???) and the big issue of the 1960’s was dress! I was vaguely aware of the “worldlier” (more liberal dress policies–no coverings and plain suits) Ohio Conference (GC, I think, the only other Lancaster County, PA Menno choice). College was not encouraged, but if you went, there were only three Mennonite colleges—Eastern Mennonite, Hesston, and Goshen—and EMC and sometimes Hesston were the only ones most trusted, if at all, by church leaders in the Lancaster Conference. Only when I started teaching at Goshen did I even realize that Bluffton, Bethel, Tabor, and Fresno Pacific existed! JDP, you have illustrated well how the colleges break down and reassemble these various branches of the family tree. Since the MC-USA structure emerged, there is slightly more knowledge of the other branches, but that does not often include the MB branch for Eastern Mennos, especially.

Only EMU and then Goshen College and then the Mennonite Weekly Review (in my home we only got the Gospel Herald) opened up the worlds you are describing, Melanie and jdp. My youthful experience of the church was fixated so much on dress that I got precious little of the Anabaptist history that was supposed to be uniting us all after the Goshen School of the 40's-60's. I did get Dirk Willems' story in my instruction class, however.

Thanks much for sharing these memories. Now you know why I was resistant to see a covering on the cover of a book from someone who had never worn one. It's fine to have a slice of life from one Menno tradition. I'm all for that. But those of us who actually spent years living under the veil while going to a public high school in the 1960's have a slice that is different from those who did not. The cover confused the slices. Glad to know it is changed in the paper edition.

I grew up in Kansas in the mid-70s/early 80s, and felt the difference between GCs and MBs acutely. I was the daughter of a GC pastor in a predominantly MB town, and felt like a minority. (Ha! I wonder how the one Catholic in my class felt . . .) My MB friends struck me as more pious–though I wouldn't have been able to articulate that when I was young; I just knew I couldn't say “jeez” at their house, or I'd get in trouble. I knew they were different in how they baptized people, and imagined that one difference was only the surface of much deeper differences.

The big MB church in town (and that I call it the “Big MB” probably gives a clue to the town in which I lived ) was THE church, and I always felt an inferiority complex because we didn't go there. I felt inferior to the pastor's kid in that church; it seemed her dad made more money than mine, and she always wore nicer clothes.

I was also a Bethel fan in a Tabor town, and my one or two GC friends and I would have fights with my MB friends about which school was better (we were in middle school, so had little basis for discussion). Even if we were friends every other week of the year, during the week of the Tabor/Bethel football game, all friendships were off with the MBs.

Of course, it would be lovely now to talk with my friends from that time, to see if they remembered things as I did. Maybe the MB friends, at least, saw things as totally different!

Today I had a conversation with a woman who grew up GC just thirty miles away from where I was raised, and she agreed with me that she was not pushed to see MBs as that different from GCs, so perhaps the lack of border consciousness is a) a midwestern thing (we're both from KS) or b) a generational thing (we're of the 25-35 age group). Or a bit of both. Those first years in the 1870s on the plains were harsh ones–I'm sure people had to put theological debates on the sidelines during that time just for survival. And my generation is one that is more universal–we are more exposed to the world (for good or for ill) then the generation of our parents and grandparents, so borders (like a slight derivation from within a minority group) are not seen as important as they once were.

But the opinions of two women from the same MC USA church is hardly a scientific study, so I may be assuming too much.

I've said in an earlier post that even Janzen's version of MBs is not necessarily MY version of MBs. Her family came to Canada (then the US) much later than mine–if I remember correctly, around 50-60 years later, so right there is more than a generation spent apart from each other. A lot can happen in that amount of time.

I have to reiterate that this is a memoir about a slice of Mennonite life. Perhaps she should have put it out there more boldly, but one would hope that a reader of memoirs would realize that without a direct statement.

Glad you made it through all 66 of these comments. I believe this memoir has evoked almost all the issues worth discussing about the memoir as a genre.

When I read a memoir I always read it with the understanding that this is one person’s perspective. That is what makes it personal and interesting. If all perspectives were covered in a memoir it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting to read, and would lose its “memoir-ness.” That being said, I do believe that an author must give thought to how her personal story will change the lives of other friends/family around her.

Once again you have offered a really interesting window into the dynamics among “MBs” and “OMs.” This lack of “border consciousness” among MB's is all the more impressive, since the insertion of “Brethren” into the name at the point of the split in Russia must have been very important at one time. Right?