A Mennonite Family in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, 1789-1923

'A Mennonite Family is a remarkable book. A balanced combination of scholarly research and family reminiscence, the book opens up new vistas on one of Russia's most important yet neglected religious minorities, the Low-German speaking Mennonite colony of the Dnieper River region of the southern Ukraine. The main author, David Rempel, was a talented historian with a mission in life: to use his own multi-generational family story to recreate the social and cultural history of the larger ethno-religious group to which he belonged. With the posthumous assistance of his daughter, Cornelia Rempel Carson, who added some sections of her own to the manuscript and whose superb editing of the long and unwieldy original was truly a labor of love, Rempel succeeded admirably in fulfilling his life's dream. He has unearthed an amazing array of sources, mainly in German and some in Russian, and, drawing on his own memories and family papers for the more recent period (roughly the 1890s to 1923, the year of his emigration to Canada), Rempel and his daughter have woven them into a compelling narrative that is both readable and enlightening. The ethnography is as interesting as the political history, but most gripping of all is the account of the terrible ordeals faced by the colony during Russia's years of bloody civil war and famine (1918-23), as largely unpolitical and often pacifist Mennonites were drawn into the vortex of war, revolution and counterrevolution. Written with restraint and without special pleading, this wonderful book deserves a large and varied audience.'

John B. Toews, Professor Emeritus, University of Calgary