Memoirs illuminate Mennonite history

My Early Years: An Autobiography. Robert Kreider. Pandora Press, 2003.

A Way Was Opened: A Memoir. Ruth Brunk Stoltzfus with Eve MacMaster, editor. Herald Press, 2003.

Although their lives do not cross in the pages of these memoirs, Robert Kreider and Ruth Brunk Stoltzfus are contemporaries in the Swiss–German Mennonite tradition. Each of them illuminates a significant historical movement within Mennonite history: the Mennonite response to World War II and the struggle of women to achieve public ministry in the church.

In a July 30, 1945 letter Kreider noted, “I often marvel that good Providence has set us down in such an eventful period of the world’s history . . . I think we shall have many interesting things to relate to our grandchildren . . .”

Many interesting things indeed, and the 600-some pages in his book cover only his first 33 years! Kreider traces his ancestral roots, then describes his childhood, studies at Bethel College and the University of Chicago, and his work with the Civilian Public Service and Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) in a coalition of relief agencies helping rebuild Europe after the war. He is curious and literate; his observations are astute and compassionate. If he summons too much detail at times, especially in the accounts of his forebears, it is also the details that make this book so valuable.

Quotations from his letters from Europe provide an in-the-moment sense of MCC’s involvement with refugees. The drama that characterized this period is no myth, but was deeply felt by all involved. Those acquainted with some of the notable Mennonite leaders of that period will enjoy his commentary, as in the note of chatting with “Benjamin Unruh, who again monopolized the conversation” or remarking that C.F. Klassen was “the nattiest dresser on the MCC Executive Committee.”

Those years with CPS and MCC were heady, not only because of world events but because of the positions given young men and women. In the emergencies occasioned by war, “elders accepted youth as their peers, trusted them, empowered them, and gave them responsibilities beyond all precedence.”

Ruth Brunk Stoltzfus faced many more barriers in the blossoming of her gifts than Kreider. Like him, however, she was raised in a supportive church family. Her father, a bishop, helped her hone her early oratorical skills. She later put these skills to use in “Heart to Heart” (a radio program to support Christian families), many speaking engagements, and pastorates. Brunk Stoltzfus was the first woman ordained by the Virginia Conference of the Mennonite Church, in 1989.

Her memoir unfolds as a series of anecdotes that take us from her childhood through her marriage and family life with five children, her various business ventures, the death of her husband Grant, and the difficult but eventually successful journey to ordained minister. It is fascinating to see how she pushed at the edges of her world, while still remaining firmly within it. Just one example: she got and enjoyed a radio when it was still against church rules, using it only when there was no likelihood of visitors.

Her life was a remarkable one in many ways and provided an early model for Mennonite women in public ministry. The reader often wishes, however, for a deeper understanding of how she came to her convictions and how she sustained them in the face of resistance.

Both books contribute to our understanding of Mennonite history. Robert Kreider refers to a Mennonite leader of Russian birth who declared that the story of the first Mennonites to America in the 1600s was “not our story”. Kreider writes, “This is not only my story, it is our story – just as the eighteenth-century trek of Vistula Delta Mennonites to the Ukraine is my story, just as the martyrdom of Russian Mennonites in Stalin’s Gulag is my story, just as the 1982 imprisonment of Ethiopian Mennonites is my story.”

The lives of these two leaders are also our story.