"We built our houses on the corners of our land so we wouldn't get lonely," my genealogist uncle was told when he interviewed older relatives about life in the early rural settlements in Wisconsin. Back in their homeland of Pomerania, a German-speaking region on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea, farmers were accustomed to living in villages and walking to their fields each day. Men, women, and children enjoyed daily contact with friends and neighbors in backyards, along village streets, and in each other's kitchens. That was generally the pattern throughout much of Europe. But in America a single farm could be a half mile on a side, and a house built in the middle of the fields would be too far away from the next house for there to be casual interaction with neighbors, a sure recipe for loneliness.
One of the characters in Elma Schemenauer's charming novel Consider the Sunflowers expresses a similar insight about farm life in the Prairie Provinces of Canada when she observes, "We Mennonites lived close together in Russia, not in the wilderness like here."
Mennonite farmers in Canada with recent experience living in Russia make up the society depicted in Sunflowers. As the story progresses, we get to know the protagonist Tina as a career girl in a coastal city and later as a young farm wife in a remote area of Saskatchewan. During the 1940s, she navigates the struggles of coming of age, finding a husband, and settling in to married life. Throughout, she takes refuge in her deeply held Mennonite faith. Meanwhile, her handsome husband Frank grapples with his own challenges. He experiments with working in a copper mine across the border in the U.S., chooses his best friends outside the Mennonite community, and takes a job off his farm where his wife and child still live. Underlying everything for Frank is his simmering resentment against mistreatment he perceives because of his mixed ethnic background. Frank's mother was a Russian Gypsy.
The author presents the story with a generous helping of local and historical detail that brings the home front of World War Two era Canada alive. With sparkling metaphors like "dill-pickle crisp morning," "snoring like a threshing machine," and "eyes as curious as a village matchmaker," Schemenauer helps us see, hear, and even taste the features of life on the Canadian prairie. Details about farming techniques and the rhythm of the days and seasons place us firmly in that environment, but the novel also gives us a glimpse, like a fading memory, of life as it was in faraway Russia. The book is peppered with humor and deftly drawn minor characters that delight at every turn. Schemenauer can convey a great deal about a personality with a small detail of a habit or a quirk. I came to care about the engaging and sympathetic Tina, and while I was reading the book, I always looked forward to my next opportunity to find out what happens to her around the next corner.
A useful timeline of Mennonite history in an Appendix helps place Tina and her people in the context of their church and the wider world.
Consider the Sunflowers will appeal to people interested in family life, relationships, love and marriage, farming life and rural culture, 20th century history, and the diversity that is Canada. The book is available through Amazon, Chapters Indigo, and the publisher, Borealis Press of Ottawa. More information is at http://elmams.wixsite.com/elma .
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