“When I was 5
years old we were driven by an Uncle Gade to the Molotshna to the home of my
grandparents Jakob Dever. We were there
at my grandparents’ about 4 ½ years,
until there was a break. We had to leave
my grandparents’ home because everything was being sold. We moved to Klippenfeld by Regehren into the
small bedroom. It was pretty
crowded. We had lived there about 3
months when my Momma married Abraham Penner from Serjegevka. Things went well for us for the first two
years, but then the bad time began.
After five years it pleased the dear Lord to fetch my mother home. She died in the clear consciousness that it
was the Lord who called her. Now we were
also free and we went to the Kuban to our friends. We stayed there three years. My sister Anna got married during that time
to David Panretz and I went back to Serjegevka in order to work there in the
factory.”
H.H. Zimmermann’s father died when he was only
four months old. His mother was left a
widow with two small children living on a piece of undeveloped land in a
territory that has described as wild and dangerous, a place of exile. The year was 1866. The Kuban colony was barely started, still
struggling. The family in some kind of temporary
housing when Heinrich’s father died.
Whether from accident or illness is unknown, but one thing is
certain—the death of her husband left that young widow in a terrible fix. It takes little imagination to feel the fear
and despair she must have felt.
The loss of Heinrich’s father was the overwhelming
fact of his childhood and youth. It
meant being dependent on relatives; it meant a life of being a burden, of being
shuttled from one place to another.
Reading what he wrote about his childhood one feels the sense of his
knowing that others are thinking and saying to each other, “What’s to become of
them? What are we going to do about
them?” Exactly where the widow and her
children lived in the Kuban, in their own place or with relatives, is not
mentioned in HHZ’s letter. The years
they lived in the Kuban are a blank.
Then, when HHZ was five, which
would have been 1871, “an Uncle Gade” drove the small family to
the village of Prangenau in the Molotschna where his grandfather, Jakob Dever[ii],
had a rented house and blacksmith’s shop[iii]. That was a long trip, about three days
according to accounts in letters written by early settlers. Traveling by wagon, the family had to head
north about 250 miles to get around the Sea of Azov before heading west and
traveling another 200 miles to the Molotchna .
For the next 4½ years, Heinrich, his mother and sister Anna lived in his
grandparent’s house. Then there was some kind of “break.” His grandfather’s home was sold; Heinrich,
his mother and sister Anna could no longer live there. They moved to “Klippenfeld by Regehren”,
(Molotschna Colony), where they moved “into the small bedroom.” HHZ says that “it was pretty crowded.” Whether the house was his grandparents’, or
the house of another relative is not clear.
But I would guess that Jakob Dever sold the original place in order to
retire, and that the widow and her two children accompanied her parents. Heinrich would have been about nine in 1875,
the year the move to Klippenfeld took place, the same year the Willems family
left Russia for North America.
The family stayed only a very short
time in the crowded Dever house in Klippenfeld.
About three months after the move his mother remarried, her new husband,
an “Abraham Penner from Serjegevka.” The family moved again, from Molotschna to
the village of Sergeyevka in the Fuerstenland Colony, a distance of about a
hundred miles. For two years “things
went well.” “But then the bad
time began.” HHZ doesn’t give
details about that bad time, but his comment later in his letter that he was
apprehensive about seeking a wife because “I knew how things had gone at
home” gives a sense that there was trouble in his mother’s marriage to
Abraham Penner . It also sounds like his
mother’s health deteriorated, was part of that “bad time” and that her death
came as a release, an end to Heinrich’s mother’s struggle and unhappiness. Her death also brought freedom for Heinrich
and his sister Anna.
Anna and Heinrich did not hang around their
stepfather’s home in Sergeyevka after
their mother’s death. Although Heinrich
was only about 15, and Anna not much older, they picked up and traveled over
400 miles back to their friends in the Kuban.
They may not have traveled by wagon this time. The railroad came to the Kuban while they
were living in the Molotchna. The line
to Vladikavkaz in the Caucasus
Mountains went by the Mennonite settlement.
It was finished in 1875. The year
the brother and sister returned to the Kuban would have been 1881, and they may
have had enough money from their mother’s estate to pay the rail fare.
According to Mennonite inheritance practice,
enforceable by law, half of a married couple’s property belonged to the
wife. When a married woman died,
guardians were appointed to represent the interest of her children. Her husband was then required to draw up an inventory
of the couple’s property in consultation with village and church officials. Half of the property was then distributed to
her children. The Orphans’
Administration would have overseen all of these proceedings. I doubt Heinrich’s mother had much of an
estate, but it might have been enough to help Heinrich and Anna act on their
new freedom.
Anna
married a man named David Panretz soon after the return to the
Kuban. Heinrich stayed in the Kuban
three years. Soon after his sister’s
marriage, he decided to go back to Sergeyevka “in order to work there in a
factory.” The year he returned would
have been 1884. Heinrich turned 18 in
March of that year.
Heinrich’s letter makes no further
mention of his sister Anna’s life in the Kuban.
She may well have spent the rest of her life there. If she lived long enough, she would have seen
the destruction of the “great prosperity” the settlement achieved before war
and the Soviets destroyed it.
HHZ’s last reference to his sister
comes at the end of his letter to the Zionsbote. He concludes by saying, “I ask Uncle
Kornelius Fehr to give these lines to my sister to read and to send me news.”
[i]
Translated by Linda S. Pickle, 3 January 1997.
[ii] The
name Dever is also spelled Devehr, De Fehr, Defehr, Fehr.
HHZ addresses an “Uncle Kornelius Fehr” at the end of his letter. He would have been a male relative of his
mother—a brother or uncle perhaps.
[iii] The
name of the village, Prangenau, comes
from his obituary. The information about
the house and blacksmith shop was found in the 1864 List of Families
Intending to Settle in the Kuban Colony, “as found in the records of the Guardianship Committee for Foreign
Settlers in Southern Russia (fund 6, Inventory 5, File 278) in the Odessa
Region State Archives, Odessa, Ukraine” (translated by Tim Janzen).
