“Mrs.
Lena Zimmerman Willems was born in South Russia in the Firstenland in Syejowka
on February 6, 1893, to Rev. and Mrs. H. H. Zimmerman, and departed this life
at the age of 70 years, 5 months and 24 days in a Tulare, California hospital.
… She came to Winkler, Manitoba, Canada, with her parents in 1903.” Obituary 1963
Grandma was ten years old when her family made the
long trip that took them from their home in South Russia to Canada where they
hoped to make a new home. The family
records I received from Aunt Mary state that the Zimmermans “left Russia, 28
July 1903 and arrived Halifax in August 1903.” I would love to know the name of that ship
and its port of departure but thus far, my search attempts have been
unsuccessful. The Zimmermann’s, unlike
the Willems and Boldt families, were not part of the 1873-1885 mass migration
of Mennonites from Russia to North America.
They were likely the only Mennonites on their ship. Its passenger list is not among those
collected in Mennonite archives. I have
tried Google, Ancestry.com, etc., but thus far have found no Heinrich
Zimmermann born even close to1866, his year of birth.
We do, however, have a small glimpse of the ship
that carried the Zimmerman family across the Atlantic. Aunt Rosie remembers Grandma telling her about
a ballroom where she peeked at the people dancing—a ballroom with dancing
couples sounds like a regular passenger liner, one with first-class
accommodations. I’m almost positive that
Grandma’s family did not travel first-class, but evidently they were not stuck
somewhere deep in the hold. Her memory
of watching the dancers is evidence that she had freedom to move around and
explore. I would love to know what she
looked like as she explored that ship.
Zwieback: The“Trusty Travel Companions”
“Toasted zwieback have
a very long shelf life. When properly
toasted, they do not turn rancid nor do they become moldy. Consequently, they make excellent travel
rations. Immigrant and refugee diaries
are full of references to travel baskets filled with toasted buns.”
Like the earlier generation of Mennonite emigrants
from Russia, Grandma’s family may well have carried large wicker hampers of
zwieback to eat on their long trip to North America. However, Grandma and her family probably
looked much less “Russian,” than the immigrants who traveled during the mass
migration of the 1870s. Pencil drawings
in an illustrated newspaper article about the Russian Mennonites arriving in
Kansas dated March 20, 1875, show a people who look very Russian, very
foreign. Women wear full, dark,
ankle-length skirts with white or black aprons.
White kerchiefs pulled low on their foreheads are tied behind their
heads, hiding all their hair. Men wear
great-coats, high Russian boots with blousy pant legs tucked into them and flat
Russian caps or high, straight-sided Astrakan hats. Photos taken in South Russia in the 1890s
and 1900s look very different. There
are no short skirts and distinctive white kerchiefs; no blousy pants tucked
into big Russian boots. Though many
women still wear aprons, skirts are long, down to the ground. Their hair is visible now, at times
completely uncovered, at others loosely covered with a shawl or topped with a
hat, some of which look very fashionable.
Men’s pant legs are narrow and straight, hang down to the tops of their
shoes. Some men still wear flat Russian
caps, but other hats are no different from those worn in North American cities
of the time. The young girls in those
photos look like those in photographs taken in North America during that same
period—dresses are prints and plaids with various decorative trimming, hair
pulled back into braids, heads uncovered.
Grandma probably looked much like other girls her
age on the ship. Her parents, however,
may well have looked more like immigrants—her father perhaps wearing a flat
Russian cap, her mother wearing an apron over a long dark dress, a shawl over
her head. They would have looked
European, I think, but not nearly as “foreign”—as “Russian”—as the Mennonites
who emigrated during the mass migration a quarter of a century earlier.
“They smelled trouble so they moved to Canada.”
“The end of the Crimean War in 1856 marked the start of a dynamic age of sweeping economic and social changes in New Russia that continued until 1914. In 1861 serfdom was abolished, removing one of the main obstacles to change. High birth rates and internal migration led to a rapid increase in population throughout the area. The steppe grasslands, where cattle and sheep had grazed, were now ploughed up for grain growing and new villages sprang up. Rail and steamship lines were developed to knit together the region, linking it to imperial centers in the north and to export markets in the south. Furthermore, rich seams of coal and iron ore running east-west along hilly ridges through the centre of the region enabled New Russia to play a leading role in Russia’s industrialization.
“As the
prairie soil was turned, rails laid down, mines dug, and foundries built, new
hamlets, railway towns, river and sea ports, and mining, manufacturing and
administrative cities came to dot the landscape. By the end of the century, this development,
coupled with fundamental administrative, social, and educational changes, made
New Russia into one of the most rapidly modernizing regions of the Empire. Change, however, was also cyclical, uneven,
even wrenching, and brought in its wake much instability and tension.”
To pick up and move thousands of miles from one
country to another is a huge undertaking.
It is not only very expensive, it takes enormous initiative to leave all
that is known and familiar for a place that is unknown, never seen. When the homeland is beautiful and loved, the
reasons for leaving have to be very strong before people will leave it.
The Mennonite colonies in South Russia had gone
through great change in the quarter century between 1875 and 1903. Photographs taken around the turn of the century
show beautiful brick schools and churches, hospitals, a psychiatric
institution, a nice looking orphanage—big buildings, the brick work
elaborate. There are also photos of large factories and mills. Industrialization had come to South Russia,
and Mennonites were in the forefront of that development. They built huge mills to grind the wheat they
grew on their farms into flour; they developed and built farm machinery that
they shipped and sold throughout the wheat growing regions. They read newspapers and books printed
outside their colonies; they knew what was going on in Russia and the larger
world, and they aggressively looked after the interests of the Russian
Mennonite world. The Mennonite colonies
in the 1890s—1900s were very prosperous, but that very prosperity brought
problems.
WWI and the Russian Revolution were
still many years away when the Zimmerman’s decided to leave Russia and move to
North America. However, the trouble Aunt
Mary says they “smelled” was very real.
James Urry in his recent book, Mennonite Politics and Peoplehood :
Europe-Russia-Canada 1525 to 1980, explains that “trouble”:
“Steadily the Mennonite commonwealth
began to take the shape of what would be spoken of as ‘a state within a
state.’ This self-perception of a separate
Mennonite political order within the Russian state was shared—but with an
increasingly negative sense—by conservative sections of Russian society and
contributed to the sustained political attacks on Mennonites and other
colonists from the late 1880s onwards.
“The new crises in Mennonite identity and its place
in Russia’s society were fuelled by developments in Russian nationalism and
pan-Slavism, which had begun before the
reactionary regime of Alexander III but which received official support during
his reign and that of his successor.
Conservative forces had been increasingly concerned with the negative
influence of non-Russian, non-Slavic, and non-Orthodox elements in the Empire’s
affairs, and such concerns also generated increased anti-Semitism against the
Empire’s Jewish populations. Russian
subjects of apparent German descent were singled out for attack in the Russian
journals and press. This was related to
the rise of Germany and Austro-Hungary as potential enemy states on Russia’s
western borders from the late 1870s onward.
‘German’ constituted a rather general category that included Baltic
Germans, who often held influential positions in the Empire’s government, and
descendants of foreign colonists such as Mennonites. From the late 1880s onwards, articles
attacking ‘Germans’ in Russia as a threat to the security of state and society
began to appear in the leading conservative Russian press. Their authors pointed to the failure of the
colonists to integrate into Russian society and accused the government of
favouring them through the granting of special rights and privileges. Wild accusations of disloyalty were made that
insinuated that although they were Russian subjects, the colonists secretly pledged
allegiance to the German Kaiser and Reich….
“Mennonites
featured strongly in many of these attacks.”[iii]
The Zimmerman’s left Russia in 1903. Eleven years later, in 1914, the series of
events began that destroyed the Mennonite world in South Russia. War with Germany was followed by the
Communist Revolution and the reign of Stalin.
The Mennonites of Russia suffered terribly in those years. Famine and mass starvation followed war. Crops and animals were destroyed, people
tortured and killed. Then, in the 1930s
came the deliberate dispersal of the Mennonite who had survived. Families were deported to Siberia and Central
Asia; leaders were arrested and never seen again. If the Zimmerman’s had not “smelled
trouble”—if they had stayed Russia—they, too, would have been caught up in
those terrible times.
University of Manitoba Press, 2006, p. 106.
