David showed up in class one day at E. B. Nesbitt Primary School wearing bell bottoms. I had never heard of bell bottoms and found this new development unnerving. David’s last name escapes me, but I do remember that “Hey Jude” was big that same week. And that some girls in my grade 6 class were developing armpit hair.
There are a lot of things like this I remember, and many of them probably happened.
But I don’t remember, because I never knew, how David got a jump on the rest of us with those bell bottoms. Reflecting back, I suppose he had a cousin down south. Toronto, that is. That is what we meant in Sudbury when we said “down south.” Or maybe David’s parents were cool somehow. Certainly, my parents weren’t cool and were at least as taken aback by the appearance of bell bottoms as I was. I did have a cool cousin, but he lived in the Deep South. Leamington, that is, and he was too cool to be bothered clueing me in to bell bottoms.
My family was different, and in grade 6, different was not a desirable characteristic. It all started with my grandparents. Opa and Oma (Mom’s folks) wore black clothes, hardly spoke English, ate chicken feet and didn’t believe Neil Armstrong had stepped on the moon. Grandma and Grandpa (Dad’s folks) at least spoke English, but they were rural, rustic, and disapproving. My classmates had grandparents who vacationed in Florida, gave useful advice, and maybe even gave bell bottoms as Christmas presents. Sure, I loved my grandparents, but I wouldn’t have been happy to take any of them to school. In fact, family in general seemed poised to cause embarrassment.
Part of this embarrassment had to do with occupation. Most fathers seemed to work in the INCO mines and most mothers at Sears. My parents worked with alcoholics during the day and made us help with the janitorial work they did in the evening to make ends meet.
Another part was origins; that whole Mennonite culture thing what with the black-clothed ancestral photos and the chicken feet in the soup (not to mention a suspicious preoccupation with peace). In retrospect, pacifism was having one of its rare periods of popularity around that time so at least that was a point of pride. But something in that Mennonite background did lead to unusual behaviours. Like that time my mother weeded the city’s flowerpots in downtown Thunder Bay.
Not that my younger brother and sisters were any help. They seemed unaware or unconcerned about our general lack of coolness. Too young maybe, or just insensitive, I couldn’t figure it out. Some of my friends had older siblings who were able to provide guidance or at least a sympathetic ear, but I was on my own.
Then one day Sudbury got an FM radio station. Not much hope there you would think, but there was this one program squeezed between the Opera Hour and The Symphony that offered some. I remember lying on the couch in the middle of a Saturday afternoon contemplating the futility of my teen-age existence; kind of a northern Ontario seventies version of Ilya Illich Oblomov, when Tchaikovsky faded out and “Little Green Bag” by the George Baker Selection came blasting over the CBC airwaves. I had never heard anything like this before and it blew my mind that staid old CBC would dare to play such obviously subversive music. In hindsight I now realize this could have been interpreted to mean that I was too late for the counter-culture revolution; that it had already been co-opted by the establishment before I could even get on board. But that was not how I took it. For me it was a crack in everything that was oppressing me and provided me the licence to grow that hair, fail my classes and join the youth migration to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. Or Stanley Park in Vancouver. Or perhaps, as an interim step, to skip classes and hang out at pool hall in Sudbury.
I was going to need a uniform. Ralph (my revolution soulmate) and I headed down to the Army surplus store on Notre Dame to check out the threadbare fatigue jackets. Perfect. Except that my mother took anguished and tear-filled exception to my selection when I wore it home. This obviously had hit a nerve linked to a Mennonite’s instinctive objection to military paraphernalia and anyone’s normal instinctive objection to paying for stained, threadbare clothing. A tough negotiation ended with splitting the difference. We went together to the shop and exchanged my pride and joy for a less ragged jacket. As a bonus, she agreed to sewing a marijuana leaf patch on the shoulder and I was on my way to a life unfettered by Mennonite family baggage.
So it seems a bit surprising that only 25 years later I would find myself with my mother on the SS Mennonite Heritage Cruise floating down the Dnipro River in Ukraine listening to lectures on our ancestral history and touring old pickle factories.
My grandparents had owned a fruit-tree nursery in Memyrk in what was then the Soviet Union and is now Ukraine. My mother wanted to see if we could find it. Mennonites in the 1770s had bartered with the Russian Empire exchanging their agricultural skill for the freedom to practise pacifism on the fertile and sparsely populated soil of the western Eurasian steppe.
Mennonites are a migratory species … my ancestors’ flock started their migration in the Netherlands at the time of the reformation when their insistence on adult baptism and pacifism got them targeted by both the Catholics and the emerging Protestants. Somewhere along their 240-year trek from the Netherlands to Russia, via Danzig, they seemed to have forgotten their Dutch origin and by the time my family arrived in Canada they spoke German and broken Russian.
They were certainly perceived as German by the Soviet regime when the Russian Revolution and the First World War arrived simultaneously and that put the Mennonite communities in a tough spot. Mind you, being Kulaks and stubbornly attached to their religion they were already viewed with hostility both by the state and by neighbours. By 1929 Stalin was inciting violence against not only land owners but also non-Russian ethnic groups and religious groups; the “Golden Age” for the Russian Mennonites was over.
What little the family knows about this period came after my Oma and Opa died and Opa’s journal came to light. He had used no adjectives in his recounting but it was obvious the events leading to me being born Canadian had been hair-raising. My mother’s motivation to undertake her trip came from reading this journal and from the memory of her mother crying while the CBC announced the start of the Second World War, knowing that the rest of her family and her community would not survive. Sure enough, one of the things we learned on our floating lecture hall was that the remaining Mennonites in the USSR were forcibly moved to Siberia or what is now Kazakhstan, never to be heard of again.
My grandfather went to the Post Office in Memrik one day in 1928. A local party official was napping on a bench. Legend has it the official once worked for my grandparents and they were on good terms. He heard my grandfather’s voice, and without raising his head, told him it was time to leave.
This is where things get a bit murky as the written record is much sparser than the collective family legend but let’s take it for mostly probably almost true.
Opa goes home, has a quiet word with Oma and the move is on. Dinner is put on the table, stove is stoked and family slips out in the dark to a train station in the neighbouring town. Mom claims Oma had a pillowcase full of dried bread to sustain her, Opa, and my uncles, Jacob and Johann.
The surveillance state must not yet have achieved its full efficiency as they caught a train to Moscow, but you have to figure their hearts were in their throats. Oma was eight months pregnant. They stayed in Moscow somehow or other while Opa applied to the Canadian Colonization Immigration Board and Oma gave birth to my uncle Heinrich.
To make a long story short, the Neufeld clan eventually got through the necessary Canadian and Soviet hoops and somehow made it from Moscow to a port somewhere and then to another port in Great Britain, took a train across the country to maybe Liverpool and then caught a ship which eventually dumped them on a dock in Montreal. Soon they were all settled near Leamington and working as labourers on an onion farm where my Mother was born. By the time I met them, they were once again owners of an apple orchard.
Which brings us back to me lying on the sofa in Sudbury pining for something but with no clue what it was and without much gumption. For a couple of years, sneaking around smoking Export A cigarettes and low-grade pot of exaggerated exotic provenance had to suffice. At least this gave me a bit of a link to all that evocative stuff in the music we were listening to. I knew something was happening here, but how I could get in on it was not exactly clear.
Towards the end of high school, my sulking wore thin and I managed to fall in with a crowd who had their sights on university. I think it was like a peloton which creates a draft pulling the weaker or exhausted rider along with the group. Some friends in the group headed off to Europe with their back packs and suddenly I saw a goal worth pursuing. I finished high school, to the surprise of many, and rushed off to Europe and eventually my career in international development.
But the point I want to make is that, until my travels with Mama Anna down the Dnipro River, I would brag that I was the first Neufeld in history to travel abroad. This was an astonishing lack of understanding of what my family had endured. It would be nice if I could go back to the young guy mouldering on that couch in Sudbury, flick the smoke out of his pouting mouth, and deliver him a bit of a history lesson.
Ken reports he has successfully shed youth and is in hot pursuit of wisdom. Marrying Cheryl and retiring are his two wisest moves to date.
