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Foreword
The Merging
How can a family background obscured in
mists of lightly documented migration become a palpable
picture? Can jarring myths such as those of the Swiss
archer Wilhelm Tell or the weaponless Dutch Martyrs
Mirror be woven into a usable Mennonite pattern in North
America? And how do healthy-minded descendants deal with
the ubiquitous quotient of human failings?
One can do what Evelyn King Mumaw does
here: take up what one has read and heard into a
narrative sequence, mark one’s place in it, and give
that spot in time the angle of one’s own vision.
Readers seeking genealogy can follow one thread; others
will follow the story-line; still others can savor
sensations.
Where one painter sees stark brilliance another may
render genial glow; one canvas may record sobriety where
another finds gloom. Either way, observers are drawn into
the experience less by correctness of judgment than by
passion of insight.
What rewards readers of this family
memoir is not critique but savor, not shadow but cheer.
There are indeed specific sharp sadnesses on the eventual
main location: a scrawny southeastern Pennsylvania farm
on an ill defined faultline separating three Mennonite
districts. But the stresses and strains remembered from
here and previous geographic locations are rendered
amiably. The delights become the main theme. If
experience has included ingrown toxic threads, they are
overstitched in the story by pleasant memories: a black
sweet cherry tree in mid-field, or the spanging of the
first milk in a bucket-bottom. If there is a flinty,
sharp-eyed bishop, he makes only a fleeting appearance.
If a revival preacher awakens guilt, it leads toward
spiritual healing. If the 1930s bring financial
austerity, there is the range-top resourcefulness of a
nurturing mother. If initially hospitable neighbors prove
narrow-horizoned, others unexpectedy come motoring from
farther away at harvest-time to hearten the ailing family
with the sound of corn-chopping.
Were this benevolent approach a mere
effect of hazy observation, the story would lose flavor.
But the many acutely rendered sensations of childhood
make another factor clear: the author’s bent to
claim all positive aspects of what to some might have
been a culturally, spiritually and economically
impoverished scenario. This is a charitable lesson many
people never learn.
About a century before author
Mumaw’s birth in 1920 a Lancaster Mennonite writer,
while observing that his spiritual family could benefit
by paying attention to writings from other circles than
their own, quoted a useful aphorism. As we read, he
wrote, we should imitate the bee, which takes the
“honey” from flowers and leaves “the
poison to the spider.”
This book sucks memory’s nectar
while leaving justifiable resentment overshadowed by
gratitude. It will thus prompt readers testing their own
memories to sort out for
themselves—charitably—the mergings that have
provided for each of our souls its own place in time.
—John L. Ruth, Vernfield, Pennsylvania
The Merging
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