In early September Vern and I were privileged to attend the Bat Mitzvah celebration of a granddaughter of very good Jewish friends of ours in New Jersey. During the Service the congregation sang a folk song which our friend had sung to his daughter when she was a little girl. Now her daughter, Anna, had requested that this song be sung at her Bat Mitzvah Service. Loosely translated from the Yiddish, the words went something like this:

“A flame burns in the fireplace and the room is warm.
The teacher drills the children in the alphabet.
When you grow older you will understand
that this alphabet contains the tears of our people.
When you grow weary you will find comfort in this alphabet.

Learn your lessons well.
Remember precious ones
the letters of God’s law.
Chant once again and yet once again
your alphabet.”

The words, the haunting melody, touched me deeply. Ever since Walter asked me to give a meditation on ‘remembering’, and why it is important ‘to remember’, I have been preoccupied with my Mennonite Alphabet. What I have to say is ultimately quite personal and grows out of my own lingering interest in my particular roots and family connections.

As a ‘footnote’ I would like to say that in this reflection I have borrowed heavily from the Jewish tradition and thought. Our Jewish friends have paved the way in Holocaust Remembrance, and we are indebted to them as we are in so many aspects of our Judeo-Christian heritage.

In Exodus 20:12 the Bible commands us to honour our Father and our Mother so that our days may be long in the land which God has given us. We are called upon by Biblical injunction to respect, to show reverence, to pay homage, to recognise, to give prominence to our parents and forebears. In the Psalm of Remembrance prepared by Alan Peters, the preface states: “A litany in honour of those who perished in the Stalin inferno.” At the train station in Lichtenau, where tearful farewells were taken by our forebears, Dr Wilmer Harms called us together on the station platform “to honour our parents and grandparents with a short service”. And when we finished singing So nimm denn meine Hände und führe mich Dr Harms sent us back to the bus with the parting comment “…and now you can go home and tell your grandchildren.” I dare say, a very important piece of advice.

Did you know that in the Hebrew Bible, the first five books of the Old Testament, God instructs His people to remember their past 169 times? It is a divine imperative for an entire community of people. Through remembering we respect the experiences of our forebears. As we make this pilgrimage through the Ukraine, the land of our forefathers, the stories we have heard become real: they aren’t fairytales. These are real events that were experienced by real people, our parents and grandparents. It is vitally important for us to know how our parents and grandparents lived the Mennonite Holocaust. It is important for us to know, to remember, to respect. It is a story of the survival of the human spirit; it is a story of great faith, and it is a story of ‘God working in history’.

In his initial lecture, Paul Toews proposed that the Russian experience as it pertains to this cruise ‘is a transforming experience’. In going back he suggested we are filling a memory bank. Furthermore, we begin to find out who we are, and what is our soul. He predicted that ‘it will shape how you think in the future’. The past gives us the value system by which we live today. We can understand ourselves and our parents more fully when we connect with our past. Finally, we find parts of ourselves when we find and remember our past.

These past four days we have experienced and witnessed overwhelming emotion. In his Remembrance of Things Past, the French writer Proust, describes the anxious search for a time that has been lost. I sensed this in myself and my fellow passengers. The joy, the sadness, the tears when travelling companions visited the villages; the search for a house, a school, a church, a gravestone, an artefact, as Paul Toews said ‘that physically linked us to the past’. And finally, when there was nothing that remained of previous villages, we were content to take a photograph of the beautiful Ukrainian landscape and leave the rest to our imaginations.

Did you notice how beautifully the individuals in the group shared in these experiences? In remembering we are not alone. We do this together and we are the richer for it. After hearing Dr Harms describe the farewell experience on the railroad platform, and after singing So nimm denn meine Hände, will you ever hear that hymn again without feeling overwhelming emotion, thanksgiving, and faith?

I said earlier that I was drawing upon Jewish tradition and thought. A very important Jewish remembrance is celebrated in the Seder Supper. In the course of a meal around the family table, ritual and liturgy are orchestrated to transmit a vital past from one generation to the next. The Seder Supper  commemorates a three-act drama: slavery, deliverance, and ultimate redemption. It is here I find the parallel with the Mennonite experience. On this our journey of remembrance, we are celebrating our Seder Supper. In the Psalm of Remembrance which Alan will lead, we will remember our beloved ancestors:
- who suffered the terrors of communism and Stalinism
- who suffered executions and massacres
- who were exiled to concentration camps.

We also remember deliverance:
- the miraculous escapes
- the train journeys out of the land of Russia
- our parents crossing their Red Sea.

We need to remember and honour our Moses, BB Janz, JJ Tiessen, Noble’s father, PC Hiebert, Paul’s father, JB Toews, men of faith and vision who took enormous risks.

We remember redemption:
- Canada, the USA, ‘the land of milk and honey’
- And for the thousands who died, ultimate redemption.
- ‘God shall wipe away every tear’

And always, ‘The Lord upholds all who are bowed down. Thanks be to God’ And so, through the Litany, remembrance is renewed, restored, and our hope is sustained. With hope, with trust in God, we can take heart.

In his book Zakhor,  the Hebrew for the command ‘Remember!’, the Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi expresses his concern for the world in which we live today, where we have experienced:

   “…the aggressive rape of whatever memory remains,
the deliberate distortion of the historical record,
  the invention of mythological pasts in the service of
  the powers of darkness.”

He goes on to say that it is essential that we guard against:

“… the agents of oblivion, the shredders of
documents, the assassins of memory, the
revisers of encyclopaedias, the conspirators
of silence,… against those who, in Kundera’s
wonderful image, can airbrush a man out of a
photograph so that nothing is left of him but his hat.”

I dare say that all of us can identify in some way with this revisionist history, with the blotting-out of a relative. My great-grandfather disappeared in 1938 never to be heard of again. Not, that is, until Perestroika in 1990, when the records were once again opened. He ‘did not exist’ as a member of the human race for over 50 years! There is a multitude of similar stories.

We are privileged to be on this Mennonite Heritage Cruise. Marina, Walter, Paul, Rudy, Wilmer, the Zaporozhye guides, Chervona Ruta---all of you, are making it possible for us to get in touch with our past. You are helping us in our journey to recover and remember our past. It is very necessary that we do this because the opposite of remembering is forgetting, and there is a very real ‘terror of forgetting’. Memory flows through two channels, ‘ritual’ and ‘recital’. Today in this ceremony, we are participating in an interplay of ‘ritual and recital in the service of memory’.

The Rabbi, the ‘Teacher’ in the Bat Mitzvah Service to which I referred earlier, said that the hands of the clock cannot be turned back, the tapes cannot be re-wound. He went on to explain that each and every day God renews Creation. As well as looking back, we must look ahead to today, to tomorrow. God is:

“…the Lord, the God of ‘our’ Fathers
  the God of  Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…”

“…the God who brought (Israel) out of  the
land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”

God is the God of ancient Israel, and as such He is God ‘working in History’. Now, if that is true, then memory, or as Shakespeare writes, “a remembrance of things past” does become pivotal to our faith, and a vital necessity for its very existence.

And so, dear friends, I go back to where I started at the outset of this Meditation:

“A flame burns in the fireplace and the room is warm.
The teacher drills the children in the alphabet.
When you grow older, you will understand that
this alphabet contains the tears of our people.
When you grow weary you will find comfort in this alphabet.

Learn your lessons well.
Remember precious ones
the letters of God’s Law.
Chant once again and yet once again
your alphabet.”

“The Lord upholds all who are falling
And raises all who are bowed down.
THANKS BE TO GOD!”

Bibliography

Bat Mitzvah of Anna Elizabeth Newman, Temple Beth Rishon, Wyckhoff, New Jersey. September 12th 1998. Presiding Rabbi, Dr Kenneth A Emert.

Bible, Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press (Oxford, UK. 1970)

Lecture 1. Dr Paul Toews. Mennonite Heritage Cruise, 1998. Dnieper River, Ukraine.

Memorial Service, September 28th, 1998. Prepared by Alan Peters. Mennonite Heritage Cruise 1998. Dnieper River, Ukraine.

‘Ofyn Pripitchock’, Yiddish folk song. Words & Music, Mark Warshawsky.

Ravvin, Norman. A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory. McGill-Queens University Press. (Montréal, Kingston, London (Ont), Buffalo. 1997)

Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. University of Washington Press. (Seattle. London. 1996)
 

See also the Psalm of Remembrance by Alan Peters
Gerhard Christian Hamm - my father, by Marguerite Bergman
an Introduction to the Memorial Service by Walter Unger
and The Widows' Trail by John W. Martens

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