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Miriam Toews Reckons with Her Mennonite Past | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/25/a-beloved-can... Life and Letters March 25, 2019 Issue A Beloved Canadian Novelist Reckons with Her Mennonite Past How Miriam Toews left the church and freed her voice. By Alexandra Schwartz March 18, 2019 Miriam Toews writes irreverently of the sacred and the serious. Photograph by Grant Harder for The New Yorker 0:00 / 44:40 Audio: Listen to this article. To hear more, download Audm for iPhone or Android. efore Miriam Toews can sit down to write, she needs to walk. Something about the body in motion limbers up the mind and B suggests that it should get moving, too. When she is working on a book, she exists in a state of heightened suggestibility, as if everything she sees and hears were hers for the taking. In her twenties, when she went to journalism school to learn how to make radio documentaries, she loved spending hours with audiotape, a razor blade, and chalk, seamlessly stitching together the voices she had gathered, trying to keep her own voice out of the mix. But she found that she wished she could embellish, add thunder and lightning where there had been only a gentle rain, and that is why she writes fction. 1 di 11 09/11/2020, 17:23 Miriam Toews Reckons with Her Mennonite Past | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/25/a-beloved-can... A few years ago, Toews was walking around Toronto, where she lives, turning the idea for a novel over in her mind. She had been thinking about it on and off since 2009, when she read about a series of crimes that had taken place in a remote Mennonite community in Bolivia known as Manitoba Colony. Mennonites belong to an Anabaptist movement that took shape in the Netherlands during the Protestant Reformation. Today, they number about two million worldwide. Though most now live modern lives, they, like the Amish, have traditionally kept themselves at a strict remove from the sinful world, and some still do. Members of Manitoba Colony aren’t on the electrical grid. They make their living from farming, but they put steel rather than rubber on the wheels of their tractors, since rubber tires, which move faster, are forbidden. Their frst language is Plautdietsch, or Low German, an archaic unwritten dialect that dates back to sixteenth-century Polish Prussia, where many of their ancestors settled after persecution drove them from home. After Prussia, they went to Russia, then to Canada, and then to Mexico and points south, not intermarrying with the local population, leaving each place when its laws or customs impinged on their commitment to separation. Toews learned that between 2005 and 2009 more than a hundred women and girls in Manitoba Colony had been raped at night in their homes. It took some time for them to understand what was happening, because they had almost no memory of the assaults; they would wake in the morning in pain, bruised, with blood in their beds. Some colonists said that the women were being attacked by demons sent to punish them for their sins. They were suspected of lying to disguise adultery. Then, one night, two men from the colony were caught trying to enter a house. Along with six others, they were convicted of the attacks. They had sedated their victims by spraying them with a cow anesthetic made from belladonna. Toews, who is ffty-four, is one of the best-known and best-loved Canadian writers of her generation. She grew up in Steinbach, a town founded by Mennonites in the province of Manitoba, for which the colony in Bolivia was named. (“Toews,” which rhymes with “saves,” is as recognizably Mennonite as “Cohen” is Jewish.) Her fction has often dealt with the religious hypocrisy and patriarchal dominion that she feels to be part of her heritage, and with a painful emotional legacy, harder to name but as present as a watermark. Her father and her sister both died too young, and she sees a certain Mennonite tendency toward sorrow and earthly guilt as bearing some responsibility for their deaths. On the other hand, she and her mother are still alive. But for the vagaries of history, Toews thinks, they could have been like the women of the other Manitoba. She had no interest in describing the crimes. She tried to imagine how the women might have responded when they learned the truth, but her own emotions kept breaking in. She craved revenge. She wanted the women to make the men of the colony feel fear in their bones, fear of being attacked, of being killed, of being tortured or egregiously violated. Maybe they could use the belladonna to knock out the men and commit brutal—brutal what? The idea seemed hokey, not to mention absurd. Mennonites are pacifsts; one reason they have moved so often throughout their history is to avoid being conscripted as soldiers. No matter what had happened to the women, she knew, they weren’t like her. They would keep their faith. Her characters began to speak to her, almost as a chorus. She chose to let them address one another instead, to ask the questions she had and see if answers would come. The women are eight members from three generations of two closely connected families, the Friesens and the Loewens: mothers and daughters, grandmothers and granddaughters, aunts and nieces, cousins. She put them together in a barn loft. Their attackers have been jailed, but the other men of the colony have gone to post bail. The women have two days to decide what to do: Greta explains that these horses, upon being startled by Dueck’s stupid dog, don’t organize meetings to determine their next course of action. They run. And by so doing, evade the dog and potential harm. Agata Friesen, the eldest of the Friesen women (although born a Loewen) laughs, as she does frequently and charmingly, and agrees. But Greta, she states, we are not animals. Greta replies that we have been preyed upon like animals; perhaps we should respond in kind. Do you mean we should run away? asks Ona. 2 di 11 09/11/2020, 17:23 Miriam Toews Reckons with Her Mennonite Past | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/25/a-beloved-can... Or kill our attackers? asks Salome. (Mariche, Greta’s eldest, until now silent, makes a soft scoffing sound.) The women argue with and shout at one another, and joke and laugh. They think about salvation, freedom, safety. When they need a break, they sing hymns. The teen-agers in the barn goof off, braiding their hair together and miming killing themselves from boredom. Their choices are to do nothing, to stay and fght the men for a more equal position in the colony, or to leave. The colony’s bishop has asked them to forgive their attackers. If they don’t, he says, they will be just as guilty in the eyes of God. They have two lives to consider: the one that they are living on earth and the eternal one that they hope to spend in Heaven. Toews called the book, her eighth, “Women Talking.” It was released in Canada last year, and will be published in the U.S., by Bloomsbury, next month. She likes the declarative simplicity of the title. When people tell her they are surprised to fnd that her novel mostly just consists of women talking to one another, she thinks, Yeah, well, I warned you. Once, after a foreign publisher turned down one of her novels owing to “a fatal lack of plot,” she suggested that the phrase be used as a cover blurb. In place of plot, she creates pressure, steadily intensifying the novel’s atmospheric conditions until it becomes clear that something must either collapse or explode. n a slushy, treacherous January afternoon, Toews was sitting on her living-room rug, holding her grinning six-month-old O grandson, Austin, in her lap. The house, a narrow Victorian in Toronto’s Queen West neighborhood, was in a comfortable disarray of throw pillows and baby toys. Toews was young when she had her children—Georgia, who is Austin’s mother, and Owen, whose daughter, Silvia, had just turned one—and she has become a devoted grandmother, eager to babysit. “I loved being a mother,” she said. “I am a mother, but I mean raising children. I know that sounds so retrograde and bullshit, but it’s true.” Toews’s own mother, Elvira, faced them in a recliner, holding a pile of books on Mennonite history, their covers illustrated with bonneted, wide-skirted women and men straining at hand plows. “We’re all interrelated,” she said. “Literally. Let’s see, how am I related to you, Miriam? She’s my daughter, for one thing.” “But my parents were second cousins,” Toews said. “Her father and I were second cousins, so Miriam and I are second cousins once removed!” “Oh, that’s gross,” Toews said. Her Canadian “O”s are as round as frying pans, her voice musical and even. “I never even thought of that.” She pulled her straw-blond hair into a loose bun, out of the baby’s reach. Toews is Russian Mennonite, a slight misnomer; her Frisian ancestors arrived in Canada by way of Russia, but they did not intermarry, and it is easy to imagine coming across her pale oval face, with its sharp nose and light, frank eyes, in a Dutch portrait gallery.

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