Reviews

Sprawling canopy spans 400 years

The Fehrs: Four centuries of Mennonite migration. By Arlette Kouwenhoven (WINCO Publishing, 2013, 264 pp. $29.95 Cdn.)

Family trees can be like their botanical namesakes — you can never be sure how wide their branches will spread and how far their seeds will scatter.

In the case of the Fehrs (or DeFehrs, as one branch of the clan is known) the limbs stretch across Europe to Russia, Manitoba and Mexico. In the deft hands of Arlette Kouwenhoven, a skilled writer and anthropologist, their story becomes a microcosm of the Mennonite journey. Follow one line (the Fehrs) and you end up in the Mexican desert where ultra-conservative descendants of 16th century Dutch grain merchant Gijsbert de Veer (born 1556) chose to “abandon the world and all its vanities” and live in a closed subculture isolated from electricity and cars. Follow another, and you find modern Canadian DeFehrs for whom the Anabaptist impulse readily included the embrace of modernity and active presence in the highest reaches of business and entrepreneurship.

Anthropologist Kouwenhoven found the story line fascinating and dove aggressively into the written and human records. She immersed herself in Anabaptist history, scoured archives, pieced together letters and diary fragments, and visited Canada and Mexico to assemble a modern parable of wanderings. For an author new to Mennonites, Kouwenhoven provides a remarkably thorough yet sprightly recasting of the Anabaptist story, stretching her narrative canopy over martyrs, merchants, brandy distillers, farmers, industrialists and pioneers. Along the way she sensitively explores how various segments of the Mennonite diaspora have chosen alternate approaches to tradition and change as they have sought to live out their faith. The story follows the de Veer descendants from Holland to the Danzig area of Prussia where they envisioned a free and secure future. Kouwenhoven’s depiction of this chapter in the Mennonite story is as succinct a narrative as you’re likely to find. While many Mennonites thrived there in business, farming, industry and shipping, they were never fully accepted and were unable to realize the flowering they desired. Thus they were poised to look favorably when Czarina Catherina II made a generous offer to settle the barren Russian steppes.

“The Mennonites received more than any other group,” writes Kouwenhoven. “Catharina, herself of Prussian origin, knew as no other what these colonists — in her eyes Prussians like herself — would be able to contribute. They would make the land fruitful and would serve as an example to other immigrant groups.”

The Fehrs (DeFehrs) were among those who went to Russia, and in time found themselves swept along by convulsive events in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They became migrants once again, moving to central Canada in 1874 and later, and then to Mexico (1925), Belize and Bolivia.

The story swerves dramatically as branches chose different paths with very different outcomes. Unlike their forebears who were invited to Russia to set an example of immigrant progress, the group in Mexico set another kind of standard.

“Times have certainly changed,” Kouwenhoven writes. “Once invited by the Mexican president himself,

Sensitive to immigrants

“As Art DeFehr explains, ‘Palliser [Furniture] is a microcosm of our globe. If you stroll through our plant you will hear 40 languages spoken and see 70 nationalities represented.’ He admits, though, that there could also be a degree of calculation involved in hiring so many immigrants because ‘immigrants are by nature a highly motivated group.’ And further, ‘one thing our churches don’t always realize, is that providing employment is one of the most important things we can do in a free-market economy. If you give a refugee a job, they don’t need much other help.’” — The Fehrs: Four centuries of Mennonite migration

the Mennonites were seen as an example for the uneducated and lazy Mexican people. Now nearly every Mexican can read and write and ‘modern’ Mennonites in the Cuauhtemoc area even prefer to hire Mexicans rather than their poorly trained brothers.”

At the other end of the cultural spectrum one finds the modern DeFehr clan who raised the entrepreneurial bar for all Manitobans, and to whom a separate final chapter in the English version of the book is devoted. C.A. DeFehr left his factory behind and emigrated from Russia in the turmoil following the revolution and started a Manitoba business selling cream separators, hardware and later retail furniture. He shared his prosperity and progressive mindset widely in the Mennonite community as he established an array of church-related institutions, including becoming one of the founding signatories of Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) in 1953.

Another branch of the clan launched a thriving furniture manufacturing company that became the largest private employer in Manitoba. Its founder, A.A. DeFehr, was also a founding member of Church Industry and Business Associates (CIBA), one of the organizations that fed into present-day MEDA. Succeeding generations of that clan spread their entrepreneurial wings widely, starting agricultural implement plants, poverty reduction efforts in post-Soviet regions, as well as colleges and institutions like the Canadian Foodgrains Bank.

This book is much more than a narrow family history. It is a fascinating story of Anabaptism in modern times, showing how the same original faith can be interpreted so differently by diverse strands of the same genetic and religious DNA. — Wally Kroeker

How it came to be

In 2007, Arlette Kouwenhoven received a cryptic message from her agriculturalist husband who had travelled to northern Mexico to investigate the purchase of yucca plants: “Cuauhtemoc, Mennonites. Look it up, something for you!”

Kouwenhoven — an anthropologist and author — was immediately intrigued. Interested in ethnography from childhood, she was soon immersed in learning about Mennonite migrations from Holland to North and South America. She had no idea Mennonites were linked to Holland.

“Amish are well known in Holland, but Mennonites not,” she said at a recent book launch in Winnipeg. How had Mennonites from 16th century Holland ended up in a “horse-and-buggy” colony in Mexico? And could a genealogical connection be made to their Dutch ancestral roots?

What began with a cryptic message from her husband resulted in a three-year journey of tracing the genealogical roots of the Fehr/De Fehr family line to16th-century Dutch grain merchant, Gijsbert de Veer in the Netherlands. The newest member of the family was born in Mexico during the course of a project that resulted in research trips to Poland, Ukraine, Canada and Mexico, and a book — The Fehrs: Four Centuries of Mennonite Migration.

The story seems incredible: Fifteen generations of Fehrs/DeFehrs searching for the ultimate place to preserve and practice their Mennonite faith. “It is a story about heretics and martyrs, grain merchants and brandy distillers, about farmers, pioneers and industrialists. It is also about tradition and change, inflexibility and adaptation, sorrow and hope and above all about the endless search for salvation,” writes Kouwenhoven.

The story is not just for the Fehr/DeFehr family, she insists. “The story captures the experiences of thousands of Mennonite families through the centuries.”

And it could not have been accomplished without the assistance of numerous historians and archivists — and in particular, the help of Alf Redekopp and Conrad Stoesz at the Mennonite Heritage Centre (MHC).

Kouwenhoven first discovered the MHC online. “The archive is an incredibly rich source of material and inspiration and your help was immense,” she said to Redekopp and Stoesz at the North “The story American book launch held at the MHC. captures the The project helped her begin to understand the experiences diversity of lifestyles among Mennonites, and some of of thousands the values for those who eschew all modern conveof Mennonite niences while others become fully integrated with modern society.families through But what will remain with her is how all the the centuries.” Mennonites she met in Canada and Mexico strive to live out their faith. They are always “...helping other people and always contemplating how to do the things in a way that other people also benefit from their actions,” she says.

“I think in Europe more people are very busy pursuing their individual needs and goals. In Canada foremost I see that Mennonite people still value the larger context of family and community. That made me very aware of the directions I should go and focus on the real important things in life.” — Dan Dyck, Mennonite Church Canada news service