Echoes of the Old Country: Growing Up German-Russian on the Northern Plains, by Jessica Clark, is a landmark work in German-Russian history published this year by North Dakota State University Press. The book launched to great acclaim at the meeting of the Germans from Russia Heritage Society last summer in Mandan. There I picked up my autographed copy, which was, in a way, returning a favor. More than a decade ago I signed the progenitor of Jess’s work as director of her dissertation in History at NDSU. This is an association in which I take a great deal of pride and satisfaction.
Since that earlier signature Jess has been busy raising a family and making a career; she’s now provost of a large university in Washington state. Lately, too, she has suffered some personal hardship, which is on my mind as I review her book.
Echoes of the Old Country, an oral history gathered from Germans from Russia in North Dakota, Saskatchewan, and neighboring territories, is “a study of their childhood memories and ethnic identity,” “on their terms and in their words.”
Well, yes and no. There is an important dynamic that emerges in investigative oral history, the narrator interacting with the collector. For instance, in regard to childhood play and leisure, any old German-Russian will tell you, Oh, we didn’t have time to play, we had to work all the time. You know that isn’t really true, right? But to get the story of play and leisure in Greman-Russian childhood, you have to hang around for hours, extend the conversation, break bread and drink coffee, and eventually your narrators will let slip some of the hijinks and frolics they enjoyed as kids—after the chores were done, of course!
The book is also highly revisionist. The given narrative as to German-Russian kids and education, for instance, is that, first, German-Russians despised learning, and second, the kids were traumatized by harsh measures taken in schools to promote assimilation. Well, in the first place, when you ask the kids-now-grown-up themselves, many of them delighted in schooling and school activities. Moreover, the schools did not eradicate German-Russian ethnic identity; instead, the experience “reinforced their shared memory and identity.”
Which was, after all, a changing identity through the second and third generations on the land here. The result was an adapted, “new” but not diminished, German-Russian identity, accounting for inter-generational change.
For instance, I’m writing in the Christmas season, which puts me in mind of the traditional German-Russian Christmas ogre, the Belznickel, who came to terrorize little boys and girls, sometimes even carrying them off in gunny sacks. Clark’s chapter on German-Russian holidays, however, opens with an encounter with a kinder, gentler Belznickel, sort of an amalgamation with the blessed Christkindle, who brings the children presents.
Much credit goes to Michael Miller and his Germans from Russia Heritage Center for supporting Clark’s far-flung collection of 199 priceless interviews with German-Russians of the northern plains. Like Clark’s book, those primary documents are a blessing to future generations of researchers, and to the still-vital German-Russian community.
