The name my parents gave me was Katie, a plain German-Mennonite name. I didn’t like it growing up because it didn’t sound sophisticated enough to suit my ambitions. To me it brought up images of Schlorre (simple footwear), drab clothing, and dull living of another country and era. A Russian girl in our little community of Blaine Lake had the same name but called herself Katya and later changed it to Katherine. My name seemed so plain, so unimaginative. I couldn’t understand any parents saddling a child with such a burden. I considered my Russian-born parents an uncreative lot. I wanted a name with flair.

“Why didn’t you give me a real name?” I complained to my mother.

“But we did,” she replied. “We named you after my mother, Katarina Boldt.” Mother also had a sister named Katarina, always referred to as Tina.

“Why then isn’t Katarina on my birth certificate?”

In her thinking I was Katarina. In my thinking, only what appeared on paper counted.

So I was called Katie or derivatives of the name like Trien or Tina that lent themselves to being shrieked loudly and at a great length when someone wanted me. In step with the custom of their ethnic community, my parents picked names from a small list of traditional names like Henry, Peter, Jacob, John, Susie, Helen, and Annie. I don’t think the Mennonites in south Russia had more than two or three dozen names in circulation.

A child was frequently given the same name as a deceased sibling—and many children died in infancy. Second names were not important unless they were a patronymic. My ancestors loved diminutives, nicknames, and terms of endearment in the small villages where everyone knew everyone else. A child didn’t need a second name. So I was plain Katie Funk. And I was born in Canada.

I checked the family genealogy in my grandmother’s handwritten book. Between 1865 and 1920 there were nine Katharina (Katarina) Funks, three by marriage, but no Katie. Katharina was not Katie. My birth certificate name was Katie, plain as could be. I must have had a birth defect to be forever hampered by Katie. It had no magic, no mystery to it, no association with greats of the past like Catherine the Great. I wanted a name like that of school friends, whose names exuded romance and beauty: June, Blanche, Fern, Shirley, and Mona.

The right to name a child belongs to parents. That name, to a certain extent, thereafter defines the child. Different things are expected of a Matthew or Mary than of a Khrysti or Felicity. But the responsibility to establish an identity with that name belongs to the child. The African-American writer Ralph Ellison, in his essay, “Hidden Names, Complex Fate,” writes that our names being the gift of others aren’t really ours until we make them our own. Then we become our names. He didn’t like being named after the famous Ralph Waldo Emerson because of the expectations it loaded on him, but in time he learned that before this name became his own, he had to fill it with his own hopes, hates, loves, and ambitions, not those of Emerson. When his name represented his own values and traditions, it didn’t matter whom he was named after.

That was the lesson I needed to learn. It took me many years.

When I left Blaine Lake for the city in 1942, I called myself Kay, a name that sounded more modern. My sisters gave me a gold bracelet with “Kay” engraved on it, which I still have. My new name matched the new image I had developed for myself—sleek pageboy haircut, camel-hair coat with fox-fur collar, bright red lipstick when Dad wasn’t watching, high heels, and boyfriends. I felt I could safely shed my immigrant past.

Over a period of years Kay disappeared and Katie returned. As a young married woman, once the lipstick and high heels became less important than books and friends, my interests turned to the world of ideas, spiritual development, theology, and church life. I returned intentionally to being Katie even when people misspelled it and called me Kathy or Katharine on their own accord because they didn’t believe Katie was my complete name. I had an obligation to my parents to fill the name they gave me with worth and integrity. It didn’t matter who I was or wasn’t named after.

The harder I worked to fulfill my destiny as Katie Wiebe, a silent, submissive Mennonite woman who accepted her destined life as wife and mother, the harder I struggled, especially after my husband, Walter Wiebe, died, and his goals, which had also been my goals, grew dim. In my book The Storekeeper’s Daughter I wrote of a pilgrimage I made back to Blaine Lake, my childhood home, to the house with the fence and gate, to the store with the wrinkled green shade on the front door.

Dad wasn’t there behind the counter, but I saw his image, standing there in his sand-colored smock, adding up the day’s receipts. I wanted to say, “Dad, you made me a Mennonite when you gave me the name of one, Katie. You had the chance here in Blaine Lake to pass us off as Russians or Germans, but you didn’t take it. You loaded your Mennonite background on us children. You seduced me with your stories of a people enduring pain and suffering for the sake of their beliefs.

“I wanted to believe all of it. I wanted that faith that suffered hardship courageously and endured to the end. But now I find nothing but narrow authoritarianism and ecclesiastical pomposity out there. Dad, you escaped the bonds of the past by living here in Blaine Lake all these years. You could observe the situation from afar. But I married into it. I can’t get out. Dad, what do I do with this craving inside me to write—to wrap the experiences of life in words and let others see what my life has been? Didn’t you ever feel anything like that? You told me never to forget I was a Funk. What did you mean by that?

“Why didn’t you and Mother give me a real name? You called me Katie—a peasant name, not a writer’s name, not a name for this land. And I have to use it all the time, exposing my past. You offered me the freedom of living in Blaine Lake, but at the same time wrapped a chain around me forged by your past experiences.”

As I wandered the streets of my childhood, I heard a voice whispering above the rattle and roar of cars and trucks looking for a parking spot: “I did give you a name, Katie, child of the prairies, child of the Russian steppes, child of many wanderings. But your name, being the gift of others, must be made your own. You didn’t select your parents, your nationality, or your name, but you have to choose what you make of these experiences of your parents and of their parents and of all those who searched for freedom of faith. Sometimes that search ended in failure for them. Sometimes it succeeded. It was a triumph of the spirit when those people accepted the gift of their heritage—the weaknesses, faults, mistakes, and the strengths, conquests, and joys—and gleaned from them what was needed to move ahead with courage.”

I recalled one of my father’s last letters. He wrote me often, mostly short notes. “Yes, Katie, I made many mistakes in life. You only get experience after you have lived, but you need it before you live. And that is why a person makes mistakes. When I look back, I ask myself, why didn’t I do it differently? I can’t answer. All I know is that I didn’t have the experience to do it differently with the little education I had. Life is a struggle.”

At that point I embraced my roots–the Mennonite ones nurtured by the soil of the Ukraine and those grafted in by this variegated community of Blaine Lake where I had lived for eighteen years. My ancestors had not been complacent, accepting blindly what others told them to believe about God, life, and themselves. They had chosen. Mother and Dad had chosen a new way of living in a new country. That was their gift to me. I too could choose. As I lived alone with four children, I had to make wise choices. This writing is a record of the choices I made over the decades that made me the person people know as Katie Funk Wiebe.

But I’m interested not just in my family roots but also in the theological and social factors that formed me and drove me to express my thoughts in writing. Reviewing the past to write this autobiography has been an invigorating and provided new understandings of my roots, early environment, and their contribution to the making of Katie Funk Wiebe, author. Other girls could be Kay, Kae, Katherine, Kathryn, Kathleen, Kaylene, and Kathy. The name Katie might have been the name of a peasant in the Ukraine. Now it is my name. I wear it proudly.

In 1989 I made a strange discovery. I traveled to the former USSR to study my roots, and if possible, to find Mother’s relatives left behind when other family members immigrated to Canada. In Moscow I met my elderly aunt Aganetha Janzen Block, a mentally alert woman, full of stories. As we talked , she brought out a few surviving pictures of my family my father had sent her when I was a child. I turned one over. On the back my father had written the names of us three older girls: Frieda, Annie, Katarina.

I had always had a real name. Now I didn’t need it. I had made Katie my real name.

I have often told groups that after you have lived your life, why hang onto it? Why not share it with others? This book represents aspects of my life after I left home to attend Bible college that I want to share with readers. I have traced the dominant themes that twisted in and out of my life. The telling is not always linear. As I observe in chapter 20, “The Old Testament writers keep retelling the story of the Israelites, first from one aspect, then another, to keep reminding the Israelites how God has dealt with them. . . . I do the same with my past.”

The telling is also not complete. That would have taken several volumes. I hope you find yourself also, however, in the themes I have highlighted. —Katie Funk Wiebe, Wichita, Kansas