When Rudy Wiebe read at MEI in November 2006 from his boyhood memoir, he remarked to his listeners that his story is not, like many others today, a litany of cruelty and abuse. On the contrary, it is a happy, nostalgic recalling. In recent years, Mennonite memoirs have proliferated to the point that they are almost routine. Wiebe's Of This Earth will now surely be the touchstone for the genre. The book tells the story of his childhood years, spent mostly in the homesteading community of Speedwell, Saskatchewan. It is a forceful and poetic remembrance. The simple poignance of the prose may be welcome to those who sometimes find Wiebe's intense style difficult. Of This Earth is a spare and unembellished telling of a childhood desperately poor but paradoxically joyful, of a life fully lived. "Threescore and ten years ago my life began on the stony, glacier-haunted earth of western Canada. Seventy years of refuge, under the shadow of wrath. As my mother said, 'Now it is time.'" (4).

Wiebe's early years were innocent and secure, spent in the context of an embracing Mennonite community. "In all the strangeness of Canada and 'de Englische,' the English, which to [Mennonites] meant anyone who did not speak Low German, they found groups of Mennonite people they could live and work with and, even more important, a church where they could worship. This was the most powerful way in which they came to feel at home in Canada" (40). Surely an insular way of life, but one for which Wiebe retains great affection. "The light and dark I lived in as a boy were the day and night of the sun; it was changed very little by barn lanterns or the solitary kerosene lamp with its elegant glass chimney on our kitchen table. But wherever I was, I was inside family..." (58). A community of Russian Mennonite refugees, expressing in Sunday morning prayer their immense sorrow and loss. "Prayer after prayer, this became utterance beyond words, beyond persons. I remember the whispers, the cries passing over us
as we knelt on that board floor often moved even us little boys, bent over the front bench, to tears" (138).

Wiebe's fondest memories of his boyhood years are those of women. A chapter is devoted to a deeply moving telling of the early death of his "sweet sister" Helen. But his mother dwells at the centre of his heart, an immigrant woman who endures so much hardship. "My stern and loving Mam always so afraid of sin for her children, arms warm and tight around me, is in dreadful pain when she eats, though she says nothing" (19). Wiebe's father is relatively emotionally distant, and appears in a sense at the periphery of Wiebe's narrative. His mother, however, a simple believer in a theology of a perhaps "simpler" time, never ceases to embrace creation. "I then thought of my mother's life as contradiction: her abiding fear at the immanence of divine, eternal wrath, yet she herself lived a life devoted to goodness and love..." (364).

The notion of divine wrath recurs frequently in this book. One day a solitary stranger appears in Speedwell, paints scripture of judgment upon rock, and then vanishes into the northern woods: "THE WRATH OF GOD ABIDETH ON YOU." "This was no gentle Präedja Enns mildly reading a Bible verse; rather, as Jesus once had prophesied, suddenly the very stones were crying out. Here, in our stony country" (81). But the aspens of Wiebe's beloved boreal forest speak to him, even as a child, of a loving, embracing God. "But ... if you lay flat on your back in the furry snow staring straight up, the grey columns reached high, they sprayed out over you and their countless fingers moved in a canopy of grey on blue: a blue ocean of continuous, circular rhythm; all the trees over the whole earth were always and continuously moving. They creaked, they groaned, but in summer they would whisper as well. Or shiver. Something too immense to imagine was always breathing over them. That could only be God" (122).

Wiebe has perhaps been stereotyped as a sombre writer. In Speedwell, however, he was something of a "class clown," but this was not, he laments, later reflected in his writing. "[W]hen in my late teens I began to write stories, I discovered they were rarely funny" (236). Why? Partially because "Life is serious, especially for Mennonites having fled a world destroyed by Communism; God's revelation only underscores the heavy, mostly murderous, history of mankind" (237). Of This Earth, though, is blessed with "barnyard humour," especially in the telling of Wiebe's sexual awakening. "Why does he do that?" young Rudy asks his mother, after having watched the violent mounting of rooster upon hen. "He's just saying hello to her," his mother replies (146).

Wiebe never saw the lights of the big city until the age of eleven, and urban life seemed simultaneously a miracle and tragic loss. "Overwhelming as it was, Vancouver was in a way ridiculously simple: nothing to do for light or heat or water, just find a switch or sit on a toilet and everything happened.... It was a Schlarafenlaunt, a fool's paradise, my mother said, all you need to live here auls eene Mohd emm Schmäah, like a maggot in fat, was money" (290). And the ethnic community of Speedwell inevitably disappeared, victim to the lure of a better and more comfortable life in mainstream Canada. Wiebe's description of the emptying of this tiny northern village is heartbreaking.

Now it is time to remember. "It seems that when you have lost the place on earth where you come from, when your ancestral name has been ground out of existence, you suffer damage" (369). Mennonite memoirs nearly always follow an arc of poverty to wealth, failure to success. The naivet? of Wiebe's childhood was succeeded by success as a writer, but while Of This Earth tells this part of this story, it seems to end rather abruptly, almost randomly. To some this may appear a weakness, but then living doesn't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Rudy Wiebe's book is written in a style that is often circular, that lacks a straightforward trajectory, but it is perfectly suited to the vagaries of forgetting and memory. At his Abbotsford reading, Wiebe chattered happily with old friends in the audience and frequently broke out in Low German. He felt himself fortunate, it seems, to have lived the childhood that he did. Of This Earth is a narrative of an unrecoverable but treasured time. Concerning his parents, Wiebe writes, "When together they sang such a soaring hymn, carried by heart for centuries across continents and oceans, they sounded like lovers, though I do not remember seeing them kiss" (318).