Arthur Kroeger, Hard Passage (University of Alberta Press, 2007)
reviewed by Robert Martens

 “When I was growing up in Alberta in the 1930s and 1940s,” writes Arthur Kroeger, “there were some things about my family that puzzled me” (1). His mother, for example, warned that a time might come when he would be glad to find anything to eat. He was forced to hide his toy gun because his father would destroy it if it was found. What did these things mean? Kroeger’s Mennonite past “had been of hardly any interest to me in my earlier years. When I was an adolescent, my goal had been to become as much like my peer group as possible.... To have been an ‘ethnic’ was to experience the power of conformist pressures, and to grow up on the prairies with a German name during the war was to know the discomforts of being different” (2). In 1971, however, after the death of Heinrich Kroeger, his father, Arthur inherited a box of papers that Heinrich had collected over the years, and began to satisfy a growing curiosity about his parents’ story. The box contained diaries, postcards, letters, documents and photos. “As my reading progressed,” writes Kroeger, “my eyes would widen from time to time, and I would catch myself on the point of saying aloud, ‘Mother and Dad lived through that?’” (4)
 Hard Passage is the telling of the family story, but Kroeger emphasizes that it is much more than that. The Kroeger family experience paralleled the experiences of thousands of Russian Mennonite families, and Mennonite life on the Canadian prairies was much like that of other immigrants of the time. Hard Passage is a highly-skilled interweaving of the Kroeger story, of Mennonite history, and of immigrant participation in the development of Canada. It is a fast-paced narrative, detailed and simply told. As an individual who has rediscovered his heritage, Kroeger writes with a sense of recognition, of revelation, almost like an “outsider” of an ethnic past discovering that he is “in.”

 Heinrich Kroeger was related to the family that manufactured the well-known Kroeger clocks. Born in the village of Rosental in the Chortitza colony, he would have lived a modest and comfortable life were it not for the Russian Revolution. In 1911 he noted in his diary: “We threshed the load that was left over before breakfast. Then we went for the last two loads of wheat.... We went to the Dnieper for a swim towards evening. The hired man trimmed the straw stacks” (18). Although Arthur Kroeger chronicles the conflicts within Mennonite colony life, he sometimes rather idealizes it: “If in the 1920s the Bolsheviks had chosen to examine Mennonite practices – which they decidedly did not – they would likely have found a model of community agricultural management that worked, unlike the collective farms that Stalin imposed....” (20)

 In 1912 Heinrich married Helena Rempel, a lively and loving woman of relatively low economic status. They lived a satisfying life together, with Heinrich becoming a partner in a wagon factory, but World War I ended the tranquility. Heinrich served as a medical orderly on a train. During this time he stopped making entries in his diary and began to look backwards to happier years; this was a state of mind that would linger into his old age. Then came the Russian Revolution and the ensuing civil war. The Mennonite colonies descended into chaos. Heinrich wrote: “Had [Red Army] soldiers billeted and fed them. 99 rubles and 10 rubles for butter, then for laundry and repairing 5 rubles, 25 rubles for food” (50). The terror of the Makhno years followed, and soon many Mennonites were clamouring to leave the USSR.

 There were those who wanted to stay. Heinrich’s brother Abram argued that times would get better. Mennonite leader BB Janz, however, was not fooled by Communist promises, and did the perilous work of facilitating Mennonite emigration. There was also the problem of finding a country willing to accept Mennonite immigrants. In Canada, for example, Prime Minister Robert Borden passed an Order-in-Council prohibiting the entry of Doukhobors, Hutterites and Mennonites “...because, owing to their peculiar customs, habits, modes of living, and methods of holding property, they are not likely to become assimilated...” (76) Then Mackenzie King, who had grown up in the Waterloo area and was well-disposed towards Mennonites, won election in 1922 as prime minister and the doors opened for the Russl?nder. David Toews worked incessantly on behalf of these Russian Mennonite refugees, and cut a deal with Colonel John Dennis and Edward Beatty of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) to sponsor their passage. “It is hard to visualize a 21st-century chief executive matching the compassion and extraordinarily enlightened corporate self-interest displayed by Sir Edward Beatty over more than two decades.” (93). Between the Russian Revolution and 1929, when Stalin shut the doors to emigration, more than twenty thousand Mennonites managed to escape, mostly to Canada. They were, however, as Arthur Kroeger emphasizes, merely a small fraction of the nearly 3 million refugees that fled the USSR during those years.

 The final two thirds of Hard Passage is devoted to the archetypically Canadian story of immigration, poverty, and resiliency. The Kroegers arrived in their new land just before the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. Many Mennonites, including the Kroegers, were settled on unprofitable prairie farms often abandoned by their owners. The Kroegers eventually homesteaded with Davey Jones, a soft-spoken “bachelor,” one of a number of prairie settlers “who were single and would remain so all their lives.... Protracted isolation, particularly during harsh prairies winters, had turned some of them into harmless eccentrics” (129). The Kroeger family faced an intense, nearly incomprehensible poverty in the “great lone land.” When a badly-bruised shipment of apples arrived in nearby Naco, Saskatchewan, “Helena asked for and was given the peels and cores, which she brought home and boiled. For the next two days, the family lived on apple sauce” (136). Through all this, David Toews laboured tirelessly to raise money on behalf of the Reiseschuld, the debt incurred to the CPR for transportation of Russian Mennonites to Canada. In 1946, on his final sickbed, Toews was brought the news that the debt had been paid off. “Then, when the realization sank in that the huge moral burden had finally been lifted from his shoulders, Toews wept uncontrollably” (170).

 The poverty was so great that Heinrich Kroeger eventually seemed to give up energy and hope. He and Helena remained permanently and heavily burdened with their past. In fact, Hard Passage itself, even in its final pages recounting the successful life trajectories of Arthur Kroeger’s siblings, seems elegiac and smitten with sorrow. A family photo of Heinrich with his sons (219) shows confident, forward-looking young men with their ill-at-ease father at the centre. Heinrich, Kroeger writes, “would walk downtown to see what was happening at his sons’ garage, but he viewed events there in a detached way. The world around him was somewhat interesting, but it was not his world” (234). Helena, as well, could be paralyzed by her past. In 1958, after a local murder, she died because the killing “brought back the years of anarchic violence that she and Heinrich had lived through in Russia after 1917.... For Helena, news of the violence ... was a nightmare from the past, and that trauma took her life” (243-4).

 Little now remains of the former Mennonite life in Russia. Visitors to Ukraine “who are searching out their Mennonite roots are greeted with great hospitality and warmth, but few of the local residents have any sense of what the visits are really about” (231). The chronicles of Hard Passage are rich and vivid, but Kroeger seems to perceive history as a vanishing shadowland. Of what value is remembrance? In 1998 Arthur Kroeger visited the site of the Davey Jones farm where his family had lived for several years. “The only remaining evidence of habitation was a rusting bedspring in the prairie sod where Davey’s house had once stood” (254).