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Erica Jantzen -- Night Table Recommendations

Tuesday, Jul 13, 2010 at 10:23am

To many people, Central Asia is a far-off part of the world that conjures up images of the fabled cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, the wild exploits of Tamerlane, and the legendary Silk Route. It was also the site of Stalin's cruelest deportations, and more recently, the site of political unrest.

By a quirk of history, my parents were born (around 1900) in the beautiful, fertile Talas Valley of Kyrgyzstan, one of the countries in the area of Central Asia formerly known as Turkestan. In 1929, when confronted with Soviet land reform and facing loss of life or deportation, my parents fled the country of their birth-consequently sojourning in five other countries. They grieved the loss of their cherished homeland until the end of their days.

We, their children, were born in three different continents and lived in our respective countries only a few years. Consequently, the meaning of a homeland held little significance for us. What made Kyrgyzstan so special for our parents? I was determined to find out and listened to the stories the relatives told who left Kyrgyzstan seventy years later. The result is my book Six Sugar Beets - Five Bitter Years (2003), the story of my aunt who survived the Stalin era. I travelled and I taught in Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan and wrote Sheer Survival: From Brazil to Kyrgyzstan (2007), my memoir and the writings of my parents. It was a delight to translate the biography of my relative Hermann Jantzen who spent most of his years in Kyrgyzstan-my book In the Wilds of Turkestan (2009).

Colin Thurbron, author of several travel books, in The Lost Heart of Asia (1995), writes about his endeavour to learn what happened to the small group of German Mennonites who settled in Ak Metchet (Uzbekistan) in 1880. "Not even one person remained," the locals told him. "The Soviets deported them all."

Ella Kini Mailiart, a Swiss woman, dared to travel by herself in Central Asia in the 1930's and wrote about her experiences. She refers to meeting the German Mennonites who had settled in the Talas Valley and in Ak Metchet. The German translation, Turkestan Solo (1934) is a most amazing book of 312 pages.

Hope is Our Deliverance (2005), by Alexander Rempel and Amelie Enns details the tragic story of the Mennonite Elder Jakob Aron Rempel-his arrest, exile and sojourn in Central Asia.

Another excellent source is the book Auf den Spuren der Ahnen (2000), written in German by Robert Friesen. In great detail and with many photos, he describes the 110-year history (1882-1992) of the German Mennonites in the Talas Valley-the place that became their homeland.

Then there is Fred Belk's doctoral dissertation of 1973, published in 1976 with the title, The Great Trek of the Russian Mennonites to Central Asia 1880-1884. He presents the argument that the group followed the charismatic leader Claas Epp, who declared Central Asia as the place of refuge in the end times. Belk's position is being questioned. It is now generally assumed that the trek would have taken place even without Claas Epp. These Mennonites were searching for land for their growing families and for freedom from military service. And this, in 1880, they hoped to find in the remotest reaches of Central Asia.

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Erica Jantzen is a citizen of two countries: Brazil, the country of her birth and Canada, the home of her family from their arrival in 1948 from Germany. She has studied at and received degrees from the University of Western Ontario, the former Mennonite Brethren Bible College in Winnipeg, and the University of Toronto. Erica has taught and worked across the globe, in England, Somalia, Japan, China, Krygyzstan and elsewhere. She spent three years with MCC in Germany, working on the resettlement of Mennonites from the former USSR. Erica is now retired in Waterloo, Ontario and busy with volunteer jobs and writing.

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