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Hard Passage: A Mennonite Family's Long Journey from Russia to Canada.

Article Excerpt
Arthur Kroeger. Hard Passage: A Mennonite Family's Long Journey from Russia to Canada. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007. xii + 176 pages. $60.00 cloth, $34.95 paper.

Hard Passage reads like an epic novel: a family saga spanning two continents and two generations in turbulent times. Arthur Kroeger, a well-known figure in Ottawa who served as deputy minister in several federal departments in the 1970s and 1980s and as chancellor of Carleton University from 1993 to 2002, is the Alberta-born youngest child of Russian Mennonite immigrant parents. It is their story that he has pieced together from personal documents, family recollections, and a good deal of research into the historical context of their lives.

Mennonites are a well-known presence in multicultural Canada, various waves of differing origins having arrived in the early part of the 19th century, the 1870s, the 1920s, and the post-1945 period. Kroeger's parents belonged to the so-called Russlaender wave of the 1920s. The Russlaender Mennonites came from the Chortiza and Molotchna colonies in Ukraine. Over several generations of a life charmed by special privileges, they had built 400 prosperous villages and established a distant yet peaceful relationship with their much poorer Russian neighbors. Starting in the period of the 1870s, which saw Russification in the Ukraine, Mennonite...

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