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. A decade and a half ago, on the strength of her author photo, the director Carlos Reygadas cast her as the beautiful, spurned wife of a farmer in his flm “Silent Light,” set in a conservative Mennonite colony in Mexico. Most of her role involved stoically suffering in long, wordless closeups; the scant dialogue was in Plautdietsch, her parents’ frst language, which she does not really speak, so she learned her lines phonetically.

There is a Plautdietsch term, schputting, for irreverence directed at serious or sacred things. In conversation, as in art, Toews is a schputter; she likes to puncture anything that has a whiff of pretension or self-importance about it. A few years after her experience in “Silent Light,” she wrote a novel, “Irma Voth,” about a Mennonite teen-ager who gets involved in a flm shoot near her family’s farm in Mexico. The director is given to grandiose pronouncements like “If you’re not prepared to risk your life, then leave now”; Irma, who serves as the Plautdietsch interpreter on set, cannily mistranslates the script so that, when the obedient wife is supposed to tell her husband that she loves him, she instead says that she is tired of putting up with his crap.

Lately, Toews has focussed her schputting on the city of Toronto, and her neighborhood in particular—too aloof, with its pet spas

3 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...

and hipper-than-thou boutiques. “I think my friends have heard me complaining enough about Torontonians not saying hi,” she said, but she can’t help herself. The other day, as she was brushing snow off her car, she had yelled out a big, chipper “Hey!” to a passerby who kept on walking as though he hadn’t heard a thing, and she was still annoyed.

She moved to the city ten years ago, from Winnipeg, where she had spent most of her adult life; her marriage was ending, her sister, Marj, was sick, Georgia wanted to go to standup-comedy school, and Toews needed a change of scene. To this day, she feels like a traitor. “Nobody moves away from Winnipeg, especially to Toronto, and escapes condemnation,” she wrote, in “All My Puny Sorrows,” her novel about her sister’s illness and death. “It’s like leaving the Crips for the Bloods.”

Elvira followed soon after. She lives on the frst foor of the house; Toews and Erik Rutherford, her partner of nearly a decade, live on the second. The domestic mood is that of an intergenerational dorm, with Rutherford as the house chef, and Elvira the resident sports nut; when the doorbell rings, it plays “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” In “All My Puny Sorrows,” Toews describes a character based on her mother as “a short, fat seventy-six-year-old Mennonite prairie woman who has lived most of her life in one of the country’s most conservative small towns, who has been tossed repeatedly through life’s wringer,” yet who remains “jovial and curious and delighted and oblivious to snottiness.” Elvira is eighty-three now, but otherwise little changed. A few weeks earlier, a wheel had come off her walker, and she fell in the kitchen at night. While she waited to be discovered, she sang German hymns, including—to tell it made her laugh and laugh—one with the verse “I won’t walk without you, Lord, / not a single step.”

Over a lunch of butter-chicken rotis, the conversation turned to Toews’s novels. An Elvira-like fgure appears in just about all of them, pragmatic, comical, full of good sense, though some of these incarnations are more fctional than others.

“I have no secrets left, and that’s O.K.,” Elvira said. “I stand behind Miriam one hundred per cent. She has a mind I don’t have, and I know that. And with what they call your coming-out story—”

“Coming-of-age story,” Toews said. “ ‘A Complicated Kindness.’ ”

The novel, published in 2004, is narrated by sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel, who has begun to rebel against the repressive religious culture of her small Mennonite town. It won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and became a best-seller, the kind of book that gets assigned in school and included on lists of novels that “make you proud to be a Canadian,” and it turned Toews, a niche, indie sort of Canadian writer, into a famous one. It is a master class in schputting; not even Menno Simons, for whom the faith is named, gets away with his dignity intact, and many Mennonites took offense.

“I read that book from beginning to end,” Elvira said, “and I told her, ‘Well, Miriam, it’s a good thing we’re Mennonites. At least you won’t get shot.’ ”

“But I was nervous,” Toews said.

Elvira brought up a friend who had met a group of Steinbachers on a Mennonite heritage cruise to Ukraine. “All he did was mention her name, and they just erupted. ‘Miriam Toews tells lies!’ I think I can actually be so bold as to say that there is hatred against Miriam, though what Mennonites don’t do is confront you.”

“It was Marj who also really helped me a lot, who told me, ‘Listen, people are going to come after you, people will be angry,’ ” Toews said. “She told me to say this thing I’ve said for so long, and so often, which is that it’s not a critique of the Mennonite faith or of Mennonite people but of fundamentalism, of that culture of control. I wish that people who felt that they were being personally attacked could step back and say, ‘Maybe she is really talking about the hypocrisy of the intolerance, the oppressiveness, particularly for girls and women, the emphasis on shame and guilt and punishment.’ ” Her voice was catching. “We all have a right to fght in life.”

“I knew people would talk about it, even if maybe not to our faces,” Elvira said, “and I didn’t want to just say, ‘Well, you can like it

4 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 not like it, it doesn’t matter.’ I wanted what, to me, would be an answer, and I didn’t have one until I went to one of Miriam’s readings in Winnipeg. There was my neighbor from Steinbach, from when I was a kid. I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And she said, ‘Elvira, when I knew that Miriam was going to be here in person I decided, I’m going. How could she write about how I felt when I was growing up in Steinbach?’ And that was my answer, too.”

Elvira has the only landline in the house; when it rings, it’s more often than not an old friend from Steinbach, calling to let her know that another of their cohort is gone. Later, upstairs and out of earshot, Toews did an impression of her mother on the receiver: “Oh, good. Oh, good. What a relief that must be. He’s with the Lord now.” She said, “I can sit on the stairs and listen in on these conversations like a little kid at Christmas, and think, Wow! Imagine that. That terror of death—they just don’t have it.”

hree days later, Toews was in southern Manitoba, driving from Winnipeg to Steinbach—“Shitville, as we called it,” she said, T staring grimly ahead. It was ffteen degrees below zero. Snow slithered across the lanes like smoke. The sky was a blinding blue, the prairie a dazzling white. Parallel to the highway, Maersk freight containers in child-bright reds and blues rolled steadily down a train track. Steinbach is forty miles from the city; forty years, too, the joke goes. Although Toews had readily agreed to show me around, she was feeling apprehensive.

“See that feed mill there, with all that rigging?” she said. “There was one in Steinbach that I would always pretend was a ship, like I was living in some port city and could sail away.”

We passed a sign for the Mennonite Heritage Village—Toews used to work there during the summer, churning butter for tourists—and one advertising the manufacturing business founded by Elvira’s father. He had left the business to his sons; his daughters had inherited a comparatively modest fxed sum, and had lived comparatively modest lives. “It doesn’t matter to me, except that it was unfair,” Toews said. Not long after Silvia was born, she e-mailed one of her cousins to ask if he might give them some good, solid windows from the company for the baby’s nursery, but he didn’t oblige. “And Owen said, ‘Well, a lesson in the patriarchy is more valuable for Silvia than a window.’ ”

In “A Complicated Kindness,” Nomi Nickel skewers her town’s homogeneity: “We all looked pretty much the same, like a science fction universe.” Steinbach has changed since Toews’s day. It is now classifed as a city—in Manitoba, any place with more than seventy-fve hundred people can be—and has a growing immigrant population. We drove by a Mexican joint, a sushi joint, a tattoo parlor. Three years ago, Steinbach hosted its frst gay-pride parade; the mayor didn’t attend, but Toews did.

She stopped for old times’ sake in the parking lot of Frantz Inn, the spot just outside the town limits where she went drinking as a teen. Her Steinbach had been dry. Now a business on Main Street advertised home wine-making kits. “You can make some wine, get a tattoo, and then go see a movie,” she said. “What would our forefathers think?”

It is not lost on Toews that her separatist ancestors’ fates have depended on those who wield worldly power, or that their pacifsm has often been contingent on the conquest of other peoples. The founders of Steinbach came from Russia in the eighteen-seventies, at the invitation of the newly formed Canadian government, which offered them land that had been wrested from people of the First Nations. The newcomers belonged to a particularly punitive sect of Mennonites. Harmonizing while singing hymns was considered sinful, and so was dancing. Trains might encourage contact with the outside world, so Steinbach had no station. Someone who was thought to have done or said something unacceptable could be shunned by the church, and cast out of the community.

By the time Toews was born, in 1964, shunning was no longer official practice, but the atmosphere remained oppressive, nosy, censorious. “It’s a town that exists in the world based on the idea of it not existing in the world,” Nomi Nickel says.

It was created as a kind of no-frills bunker in which to live austerely, shun wrongdoers and kill some time, and joy, before the Rapture. The idea is that if we can successfully deny ourselves the pleasures of this world, we’ll be frst in line to enjoy the pleasures

5 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...

of the next world, forever. But I’ve never really understood what those pleasures will be.

“That’s Elmdale School, where my dad taught,” Toews said, as we drove by a building so squat it seemed nearly sunken. She was his student in sixth grade, and didn’t know how to reconcile the alert, engaging man in the classroom with the silent father who often went directly to his bedroom and shut the door when he got home. Mel Toews had been diagnosed with manic depression at seventeen, and for long stretches did not speak at all; she could count on one hand the times that her father laughed. But she could sometimes get him to smile, and she liked the challenge of trying.

When she was a child, the rules were simple. “Don’t lie, and don’t throw stones,” Elvira told her; otherwise she did pretty much as she liked. The family’s sombre, conservative church bored her. Mel had a perfect attendance record; Elvira let her nap in the pews.

Somehow all the problems of the world manage to get into our town but not the strategies to deal with them. We pray. And pray and pray and pray.

But the church’s theology embedded itself in her mind. If everything was due to the will of God, what about terrible things? She had to avoid provoking some disaster. She created an obsessive private ritual, kneeling by her bed every night to beg God for forgiveness. “I had to pray for every little detail, every little infraction that I could possibly think of, and also express gratitude to God for everybody in my extended family, or something might happen to me in the middle of the night and I could go to Hell, obviously,” she said. She fnally stopped after Elvira discovered her kneeling with her head on the mattress, fast asleep.

It was Marj, six years older, studious and intense like their father, who took church seriously. “She started her personal rebellion— her personal development as a human being, really—much earlier than I did, and I think she suffered as a result,” Toews said. “She couldn’t ft into that town, but she didn’t really know how to pretend to ft until she could get out, which is what I did.”

Marj was troubled by church politics, and by all that talk of damnation and shame. She could not understand why pimply ffteen- year-old boys could get up and address the congregation, while mature women were forbidden to speak at all. “She would in a very earnest way confront people like my uncles, who were ultraconservative, and ministers, too,” Toews said. As a teen-ager, Marj withdrew her church membership and left to study history at the University of Manitoba. She wished that the minister had come to talk over her decision with her; if her soul truly was at stake, she thought that it should be worth a fght.

We pulled up across the street from the family’s old church. In front, the words “a time to listen and lament” were printed on a letter-board sign.

“They keep coming up with real zingers,” Toews said.

hen Toews was in high school, Elvira underwent what Toews came to call her personal Velvet Revolution. She considered W running for mayor of Steinbach, but worried that Mel would be mortifed if she disturbed the status quo.

One day she got out of bed and went into the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror and said, What will I choose? Freedom or insanity?

At forty, she joined Marj at the University of Manitoba and got a degree in social work. After graduation, she was posted to Steinbach with Child and Family Services, the only social worker who lived in town.

Elvira had always known that there was darkness around her. Her mother-in-law was an alcoholic, getting drunk on bottles of vanilla extract. And something had happened to Marj, too, when she was about ten. A group of boys, strangers, took her away in a car, returning her hours later; her new white hat had been so fouled that it had to be thrown away. But it wasn’t until Elvira got to Child and Family Services, and started knocking on doors, that she saw evil up close—how husbands treated wives, how wives shut their eyes to what their husbands did to their sons and daughters, how nobody spoke of what she had seen or heard. Later, as

6 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...

Toews wrote “Women Talking,” she thought of what her mother had told her about that time.

Salome’s youngest daughter, Miep, was violated by the men on two or possibly three different occasions, but Peters denied medical treatment for Miep, who is three years of age, on the grounds that the doctor would gossip about the colony and that people would become aware of the attacks and the whole incident would be blown out of proportion.

Eventually, Elvira opened a private therapy practice in Marj’s old bedroom. Her friends informed her that she was a feminist. She disagreed, categorically; her church said that feminism was sinful. Then she examined the evidence and decided that yes, in fact she was.

Toews’s own rebellion was more straightforward. She drank and smoked, bought a leather jacket, went to punk concerts in Winnipeg. She switched to a more lenient church, and eventually—undramatically—stopped going. As soon as she graduated from high school, she was gone: biking in Ireland, sleeping on beaches in Greece, learning French in Quebec.

She moved to Winnipeg to study flm in college, and had Owen when she was twenty-two. Her relationship with his father didn’t last long; he left soon after she gave birth. But she loved the chaotic, improvised joy of motherhood. She wasn’t some modest Mennonite housewife, subject to her husband’s will. She could do it her own way.

She met a Mennonite guy, lapsed like her, a street performer who ate fre and juggled machetes over people’s heads. He had a daughter, she had Owen, and soon they had Georgia. In the summer, they would pile the kids into their beat-up VW van, and travel to street-performance festivals all over North America—“a real seat-of-the-pants existence.” She didn’t believe in marriage —“like the existence of Heaven and Hell, it’s never really taken with me”—but, on a stop in Vegas, Georgia begged her parents to make things official. They said their vows in front of a fat-Elvis impersonator that night.

Toews had started writing during a year she spent studying journalism in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She’d been reporting a radio documentary for the CBC about single mothers on welfare—she’d been one herself, when she was alone with Owen—and started working on a novel about them instead. She was twenty-eight, and told herself that she would have the novel done by thirty. Books had been highly valued in her house; her father had helped found the town’s library. But writing one didn’t seem like something that a Mennonite girl from the prairie should, or could, do, and she avoided telling people what she was up to. Quietly, she sent her manuscript to Turnstone Press, a small Winnipeg publishing house, and “Summer of My Amazing Luck,” a picaresque account of two welfare moms having loopy adventures and getting by in the city, appeared in 1996. She dedicated it to Elvira.

The novel’s voice was amused, warm, curious, alive on the page. Toews won a prize for the most promising writer from Manitoba. She had a job in a bookstore at the time, and whenever she saw her novel on the shelf she’d think, Holy shit, I got away with it! So she did it again, and two years later published “A Boy of Good Breeding,” about a free-spirited young mother in a Canadian prairie town. Both books featured loving but befuddled fathers and comically determined mothers, but they didn’t mention Mennonites. That part of herself she didn’t want to touch.

Before “Summer of My Amazing Luck” was fnished, her father had a heart attack, and retired. Teaching had sustained him through his depression. Without it, he fell apart. He broke his perfect church-attendance record and stopped eating. Eventually, he was admitted to the hospital in Steinbach. Marj made the nurses promise that they would not release him, even if he told them that he felt fne. He could be very convincing, she said.

All his life, Mel had written to himself on yellow recipe cards, notes on topics he planned to research, or to-do lists that he put on top of his shoes before bed. In the hospital, too confused to do very much, he asked Miriam to write down words for him. She wrote, “You will be well again.” He had trouble understanding who “you” was, so she began to address him in the frst person, as if she could script his inner monologue herself: “I will be well again.”

7 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...

In May, 1998, two weeks shy of his sixty-third birthday, Mel got a pass to leave the hospital and hitched a ride to Woodridge, thirty miles away, a town that, unlike Steinbach, the train passed through. He walked onto the tracks. In his pockets were yellow cards, all blank.

s Toews grieved, she read everything she could about suicide. She started writing a symbolic sort of book involving a ghost, A but it was stilted and she gave it up. Then she remembered how she had communicated with her father in the hospital, writing to him in his own voice, and began again.

“Swing Low,” which appeared in 2000, is called a memoir, but the memories in it are Mel’s. She wrote in the frst person, from his point of view, and as she did she came to realize that his ordinary small-town life, with its quiet routines and occasional excitements and upsets, had been, for him, a triumphant achievement. She put words to his faith and to his pious fear, his bafflement at his worldly daughters, his love for his defant wife. Sometimes she wrote things that she knew Mel could never have thought, but that she wished he might have thought one day, to help both of them fnd peace.

If Elvira is not dead, if I have not killed her, if she is still thinking about freedom or insanity, mulling it over in the city where she’s resting, I would say to her: Freedom, sweetheart.

In Steinbach, we stopped at MJ’s Kafé for Mennonite comfort food. Toews ordered vereniki, chewy white dumplings flled with white cottage cheese and covered in a thick white sauce called schmauntfat, with a hard split sausage on the side. She checked her phone. She had an e-mail from Andrew Unger, a Steinbach high-school teacher with whom she has become friendly. He teaches “A Complicated Kindness” to his juniors and seniors, and had sent her a photo of one of his students’ copies, bristling with sticky notes like the scan of a brain with all neurons fring. Toews still gets letters from readers thanking her for the book. In Toronto, she had shown me one, from a ffty-two-year-old single father, who told her that he hadn’t so identifed with a teen-ager since reading “The Outsiders,” by S. E. Hinton.

Once she had given her father his voice, hers could be free. “I think I had probably always wanted to write that book,” Toews told me. “But I couldn’t write about Steinbach in any kind of critical way while my dad was alive. I didn’t want to upset or offend him, or make him sad. And it would have created fear in him, too.”

Unger runs a humor Web site called the Daily Bonnet, a sort of Mennonite Onion. A few years ago, he caused something of a stir with an article announcing that a massive statue of Toews was to be erected in the center of Steinbach. “We’ve done nothing as a community to recognize or honor her,” he told me later. “I think that if she had become an N.H.L. hockey star rather than one of Canada’s foremost writers, there would be a sign on the edge of town saying, ‘Welcome to Steinbach, Home of Miriam Toews.’ ”

Even so, Toews’s books are now on the shelves at the Steinbach library. We found them for sale, too, at the Mennonite Heritage Village gift shop, near a T-shirt that read, “Sure Mennonite girls can cook, but Mennonite boys can eat.” Back in the car, Toews was quiet. Then she said, “That was the best visit I’ve had in a long time.”

t the start of “A Complicated Kindness,” Nomi’s mother and rebellious older sister have left home under mysterious A circumstances that have to do with the church and its brutal, sanctimonious leader. Nomi lives with her father, a schoolteacher who cannot make sense of what has happened to his family and spends most nights sitting in a lawn chair, staring at the highway that runs past their house. Toews had wanted to give Mel life on the page one last time, but, as she wrote, she sensed that she was beginning to lose her sister.

Marj had suffered from crippling depression since adolescence, and her adulthood was marked by suicidal episodes. In “The Flying Troutmans,” Toews’s next novel, she appears as Min, a vital, intense woman who periodically wants to die: “It’s like she’s living permanently in an airport terminal, moving from one departure lounge to another but never getting on a plane.” The novel is narrated by Min’s dishevelled, disorganized younger sister, Hattie, who takes Min’s kids on a road trip to fnd their long-gone

8 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...

father. Toews’s marriage was ending; sometimes she would go to Marj’s house and lie with her, neither of them speaking, just keeping close. She wanted to write in homage to the good times that her family had spent in their van when the kids were young. Set against Min’s depression, the book’s goofy, buoyant spirit is almost unbearably bittersweet. When Marj read it, she said, “It’s a Valentine to me.”

Around the time, in early 2010, that Toews sent her editor the manuscript of “Irma Voth,” she learned that Marj had tried again to commit suicide and had been admitted to a psych ward in Winnipeg. Marj refused to eat or take medication. She wasn’t befogged, as their father had been. She was clear, rational, and adamant. She asked her sister to take her to Switzerland, where she thought she could be euthanized. Toews didn’t know what to do.

Can’t you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful? Get fat and start smoking and play the piano badly. Whatever! At least you know that you will eventually get what you want most in life—

What do I want most in life?

Death!

Their aunt, Elvira’s sister, came from British Columbia to help out, suffered a heart attack, had emergency open-heart surgery, and died in the hospital. Some kind of dark irony was at work. Toews begged the nurses not to let her sister leave on any pretext. Marj could be very convincing, she said.

Toews was in Toronto when Elvira called to say that Marj had been granted a temporary release to celebrate her birthday at home.

I got off the phone with my mother and sat down in the palm of a molded plastic hand-shaped chair that Nora had found in somebody’s garbage and said well, then, she’s gone.

In early June, 2010, the day before her ffty-second birthday, Marj left the hospital and stepped in front of a train.

“She said that she wanted to be in God’s corner,” Elvira said, after lunch in Toronto. Although Marj had left the church, she had never quite stopped believing. “Whatever that meant to her.”

“And she did want God to forgive her,” Toews said. “You saw the note she left, with all of our names, sending love to all of us, and saying that she hoped God would accept her.”

What’s a pacifst supposed to do with eternal violence if it can’t be volleyed back directly at the enemy?

Marj didn’t want to be buried in Steinbach. She was cremated, her ashes interred at a cemetery in Winnipeg. It comforts Elvira to know where she is. The funeral was held at a local community center; Elvira’s church in Winnipeg helped out, though by that time she had stopped going there, out of principle. “They had moved to a district that seemed not safe,” Elvira said. “So on Sunday morning, after the church people were in, they would lock the door. And that made me furious! I said, ‘Look, we have the Gospel, which means that we invite anybody and everybody in. I refuse to support this church if you have that door locked, and that’s the long and short of it.’ It was ridiculous! What good is a church with locked doors?”

Elvira went to the upright piano and played a hymn, “Children of the Heavenly Father,” that had been sung at Mel’s and Marj’s funerals.

When she fnished, Toews said, “I can’t hear it without crying.” She was holding Austin, bouncing him a little. She has recently begun seeing a therapist, a trauma specialist who recommends that she synchronize her breathing with her grandchildren’s. She worries what they might be carrying in their blood.

9 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...

“We have much to cry about in our family, and much to be thankful for,” Elvira said.

“It’s a lot of pressure, though, isn’t it?” Toews said.

In “All My Puny Sorrows,” Marj is Elfrieda Von Riesen, a celebrated classical pianist, and Toews is Yoli, a young-adult writer who is struggling to fnish a literary novel. Just about everything else is true to life. For all the horror and sadness and pain inherent in her story, the novel is hilarious, bursting with soul. It was important to Toews that the book be as funny as she could make it, because that is what life is like—brutal, comic, everything happening at the wrong moment. It was important, too, that it not end with the suicide. She needed to show herself and her mother making a new life for themselves in a new place, battered but still breathing.

In one scene, Yoli and her mother attend the funeral for her aunt. Afterward, there is a freiwilligis, a Mennonite tradition in which friends and relatives tell stories about the departed. As a cousin’s wife gets up to speak, her toddler crawls onto the stage and toward the urn:

He sat next to it and banged on it for a while and then, while his mother, oblivious, kept talking about Tina and all her charming qualities, her boldness, her tenderness, her zest for life, the little kid somehow managed to take the lid off the urn. We all watched, open-mouthed, as he started to sift through the ashes of Tina and then fing them around up there, having a heyday playing with his great-grandma’s remains.

The toddler begins to put the ashes in his mouth, and his mother stops talking. Then his father picks him up and brushes him off:

The mother, my cousin’s wife, turned calmly back to the microphone and fnished her story about Tina and her van and I learned another thing, which is that just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn’t mean you stop telling the story.

oews is an artist of escape; she always fnds a way for her characters, trapped by circumstance, to liberate themselves. Even so, T “Women Talking” was particularly taxing to write. It could be claustrophobic, spending so much mental time in that barn contemplating evil, listening to those confned women, trying to fgure out how they might get free. “I could feel the blood pounding in my body and my head,” Toews said. She thought she might have a stroke. “I know that everybody struggles when they write. Just, for me, this particular book had a ticking-time-bomb feeling to it.” She started her writing days with a sudoku puzzle, for the reassurance of organizing numbers instead of words, and lighted a sandalwood-scented candle, to encourage calm. Later, she went back and added episodes of action that serve as valves to release narrative steam, and humor, to deepen its favors, like salt. She dedicated the book to Marj, with an inscription in Italian, a language she loves—“ricordo le risate” (“I remember the laughter”)—and to her partner, Erik: “e ancora ridiamo” (“and still we laugh”).

Recently, touring with the novel, Toews has been approached at readings by people who tell her that they had heard rumors about what was happening at Manitoba Colony, and were told to pray about the problem. Toews understands. That is what she has done, in her own secular way. “You could say, ‘What difference is this going to make?’ Or you could say, ‘It’s thinking. It’s hoping. It’s asking.’ ”

But is forgiveness that is coerced true forgiveness? asks Ona Friesen. And isn’t the lie of pretending to forgive with words but not with one’s heart a more grievous sin than to simply not forgive? Can’t there be a category of forgiveness that is up to God alone, a category that includes the perpetration of violence upon one’s children, an act so impossible for a parent to forgive that God, in His wisdom, would take exclusively upon Himself the responsibility for such forgiveness?

If there can be said to be a protagonist of “Women Talking,” it is odd, dreamy Ona Friesen. She is afflicted with a nervous condition that other colonists call Narfa; they consider her tainted, unmarriageable, and keep their distance. Her younger sister, Salome, is fercely protective of her, but they don’t always see eye to eye. Salome wants to fght, to draw blood from the men who

10 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...

have hurt her; Ona wants merely the freedom to think. She is calmer than the thrilling, furious older sister of “A Complicated Kindness,” and more hopeful than the despairing one of “The Flying Troutmans” and “All My Puny Sorrows.” She wants to survive. And there is a man who loves her: August Epp, a shy, anxious outsider, treated contemptuously by the other men. Ona invites him to sit with the women as they conduct their conversation, to take the minutes, for posterity. He admires the women’s courage. Wherever they go, he can’t follow. They’ll meet again after death, or they won’t. No one can say. They know only that if they leave they won’t be turning back. ♦ Published in the print edition of the March 25, 2019, issue, with the headline “Beneft of the Doubt.”

11 di 11 09/11/2020, 17:23