The beloved Canadian novelist Miriam Toews grew up in a town founded by Mennonites, with an oppressive, censorious atmosphere. Now, she writes irreverently of the sacred and the serious:
“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.’ ”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.
Three days later, Toews was in southern Manitoba, driving from Winnipeg to Steinbach—“Shitville, as we called it,” she said, staring grimly ahead. It was fifteen 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.
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.
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. Marj was troubled by church politics, and by all that talk of damnation and shame. She could not understand why pimply fifteen-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.
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.
She met a Mennonite guy, lapsed like her, a street performer who ate fire 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.
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 first person, as if she could script his inner monologue herself: “I will be well again.
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