by Al Reimer
The movements of history, as lived by human beings, are not neatly divided into hundred-year calendar segments called centuries, but run in uncontrolled waves like the sea, lapping at and overlapping each other. The Mennonite generation of my Grandma Kehler was in all essentials a nineteenth-century generation even though she and others like her lived well into the twentieth century.
Mennonite women of her generation lived utterly private domestic lives for the most part, spoke only Plautdietsch but also understood primitive church German, were schooled to suffer in silence, were endlessly resourceful in rearing their large families, including the inculcation of moral, ethical and spiritual values, and were unquestioningly devoted to their church and faith. They did not vote, were hardly aware that government existed, read only the German Bible and perhaps the Steinbach Post and had no direct contact with the “English” world outside the narrow confines of village, farm and community.
Born in Russia in 1866, Grandma Kehler came to Manitoba with her family in 1875 as Elisabeth Schultz, a girl of nine. In later years she couldn’t remember much about the Atlantic crossing except that she had been sea-sick at first but recovered in time to enjoy the sea biscuits she either received from a friendly crew member or snitched out of a barrel–I can no longer remember which it was.
She grew up on a farm at Hochfeld, not far from Blumenort, and at age 18 married my grandfather Jacob K. Kehler, whose family had also emigrated from Russia in 1875. For the first few years the young couple lived two miles east of Hochfeld, then moved on to their own farm at Ebenfeld (just north of Mitchell).
Grandma Kehler bore 13 children, of whom 11 survived into adulthood, my mother Elisabeth being the second youngest.
“Berliner” Kehler.
In 1923 Grandpa Kehler died of stomach cancer at the age of sixty. “Berliner” Kehler, as he was known throughout both Reserves, was by all reports a highly colourful character. Small, dark and round in his prime, he had a magnetic personality and was a wonderful raconteur famous for his quick wit and jovial manner.
How he acquired his unique nickname is an amusing story in itself. He knew that no Mennonite of his generation could escape a nickname. So when people began calling him “Bush” Kehler because of the large amount of scrub brush growing on his farm, he decided to select a more favourable nickname for himself. Having as a twelve-year-old boy travelled through Berlin on his way from Russia to Canada, he declared himself jestingly to be a
“Berliner.” The sobriquet caught on and the “Bush” was forgotten. Although without much formal education, Berliner Kehler spoke half a dozen languages and was much in demand as an interpreter for political candidates in local election campaigns. With a squad of eight husky sons at home to look after the farm, he could afford the time for such pleasant activities.
Elisabeth Kehler.
His wife Elisabeth was very different from her flamboyant, gregarious husband. She was a small, delicate woman, quiet and shy by nature, but she raised her large brood with calm efficiency.
The oldest was Marie, who died early after giving birth to a daughter. Then came a long line of boys: Jacob, George, Aaron, John, Peter and David. Then Susan, followed by Henry, Elisabeth and Neil. By the time Grandpa died the children were all grown up and most of the boys were on farms of their own. And busy raising their own large families.
When my parents were married in 1926, Grandma sold the farm and moved in with her youngest daughter, who was very close to her.
For the next 15 years she lived in our home, did most of the cooking and looked after us kids while my mother, as long as her health permitted, did the housecleaning, put up the preserves, and did a great deal of sewing for her growing family.
“Groosmame”, as we always called her, was a tiny lady who usually wore a black dress covered by a patterned apron, a kerchief for everyday and a Huw (the traditional flat, black lace cap) for dress-up, and soft, felt slippers (Schlorre). My earliest memories of Groosmame are of her feeding me at the table. Her delicately furrowed, small-boned face was the first human map I can recall exploring with my greedy little hands. And she fed me as she later fed my siblings, by following the ancient peasant custom of pre-masticating morsels of food which she would pop deftly into our straining mouths.
Baby foods? She had never heard of them and would probably have regarded them as unnatural and unhealthy if she had. I loved watching her cook and bake in our huge, wood burning kitchen range. When she pulled her fluffy brown loaves (Bultje) out of the oven she would slice off a crust (I love crust to this day) and let a generous spread of butter soak into it before she handed it to me. And when my mother wasn’t looking she might even let me have a sip of her coffee or Prips when she sat down to rest her bad legs. Those suppurating legs were the bane of Groosmame’s life, the physical cross she bore patiently and uncomplainingly all the years I knew her. Her bad case of varicose veins had never received proper medical attention, and so she had to keep her legs tightly wrapped from ankle to knee with strips of cotton that looked like a soldier’s puttees. When she unwound her red-scored dressings, the purple blotches and open sores of her lower legs shocked my boyish senses. But her stoical capacity to bear the pain and discomfort that plagued her days strikes me now as amazing. She usually remained on her feet for a full working day. When the pain got to be unbearable she would retreat briefly to her little room just off our living room, open her large, wooden chest and take out her bottle of Alpenkrauter. Sometimes she would give me a tiny sip too and I would share her misery in silent sympathy.
Groosmame’s coolness in a crisis, I recall, was dramatically and painfully illustrated during a violent thunderstorm one summer night. When the storm broke she got up to close the window in our dining room. Groping in the dark, she wrenched the window down so sharply that the pane shattered and a sharp dagger of glass pierced the artery in her leg. When I entered the room a few minutes later the first thing I saw was an ugly trail of spattered bloodstains running across the floor and up the wall right to the ceiling. While my father frantically tried to phone the doctor amidst blinding sheets of lightning and loud claps of thunder, Groosmame sat calmly and quietly in a chair with her finger clamped tightly over the hole in her leg.
But life for Groosmame was not all pain and suffering. She had worked hard all her life and did not like sitting around idle. I don’t recall ever seeing her reading and she could not listen to the radio because she did not know a word of English, even though she had spent all but the first nine years of her life in Canada.
Mennonite women of her generation lived in a world totally enclosed by Plautdietsch. She enjoyed cooking and was endlessly inventive in converting rather meagre foodstuffs into tasty meals during the lean thirties when my schoolteacher father’s monthly salary often went unpaid and even the barest groceries had to be charged. In summer our diet was enriched from the huge vegetable garden Groosmame tended with loving care. The size of our garden and orchard can be gauged from the fact that it provided lots for three houses in later years.
Groosmame Kehler seldom attended church for the simple reason that she was a “Sommafelda,” that is, she belonged to the conservative Chortitzer church, which at that time had no congregation in Steinbach. My guess is that she would have felt uncomfortable in our family’s Kleine Gemeinde (EMC) church.
I know that even my fun-loving mother, who had been allowed to attend barn dances as a girl, found the transition to the sober, no-nonsense Kleingemeinde difficult at first. But I suspect that Groosmame knew how to meditate spiritually at home on Sunday mornings while the rest of us were at church. I recall that on Good Friday and other high holidays she would sternly upbraid us children when we got boisterous or laughed out loud.
Entertaining.
Groosmame had her times of relaxed enjoyment as well. She loved to entertain an old friend or two at Faspa, especially on a weekday afternoon when the house was free of pesky grandchildren–at least until they got home from school. The intimate little Faspas she prepared for her close friends never varied in format: they consisted of thick slices of Bultje, preferably warm from the oven so that the pats of home-made butter could soak into their fragrant texture, and freshly baked, lightly crusted Tweeback served with slices of mild local cheddar cheese and home-made plum, raspberry or strawberry jam. For dessert there were the small, dark, store-bought gingersnaps she kept hidden in her chest to protect them from marauding grandchildren. These delicacies were, of course, served with cup after cup of unsweetened coffee. Of her regular Faspa guests the ones I remember are Mrs. Hiebert, Mrs. Nickel, and Mrs. Isaac (the mother of the eccentric “Isaacke Hauns”), all of whom lived farther up on Hanover. They were lively, talkative ladies in whose presence my reserved grandmother could bask and listen to neighbourhood gossip.
The one male friend I recall was old Mr.Funk, probably because to my childish eyes and ears he was a most unusual specimen. He was also a Sommafelda and smoked and I knew him from H. W. Reimer’s store, where he had some sort of employment even though he was getting on in years. It was said that he had a dry sense of humour and that he liked to play verbal tricks on unsuspecting farmer customers. One such trick was that as he carried a load of eggs or butter down the basement steps in the store he would say in his gravelly voice: “Nah, jo, Butta enn Eia gone aul wada ‘rauf– daut’s schod” (Yeah, butter and eggs are going down again–that’s too bad). And the naive farmers who overheard the remark would assume that dirty-thirties prices were going down again for their products. To me Mr. Funk’s presence at the Faspa table was unsettling, an alien presence that seemed to overwhelm my gentle little
Groosmame. His appearance was so unusual that I could only stare at him in helpless fascination. His face was long and plain, his blotchy nose enormous and his lower lip thick and pendulous. Across that lip rumbled a bass voice of alarming sonority. But Mr. Funk’s most arresting feature was his hair, for the old gentleman had found a way of defeating baldness by letting his hair grow out in the back and combing it forward across his shiny dome. His bangs in front were much like my own, I decided, except that his were more straggly and uneven. Whenever Mr. Funk was there I felt protective towards Groosmame, as though she were being threatened by a force quite beyond her strength to resist.
The Kehler Clan.
In contrast to Groosmame’s private Faspas, there were gatherings of the Kehler clan at our house that for sheer noise and size and turbulent chaos surpassed anything I have ever experienced since. Except for Uncle Neil and
Aunt Susan (“Taunte Saun de Wielasche”), who lived in Steinbach, all the Kehlers lived on farms in surrounding districts a few miles away.
They were fond of their little mother and came often to visit her, especially in summer. And when it came to talking and telling stories they were a match for old Berliner himself, except for the oldest two brothers, Jacob and George, who were more sedate and less vocal. Friendly, warm and personable, the brothers regaled each other, friends and acquaintances with an endless stream of jokes, anecdotes and stories. Everyone knew that the Kehler boys stretched the truth (not to mention Taunte Saun and my mother), but no one minded because they were so entertaining. The Kehlers stretched the truth so often; people said of them, that they must have the biggest rubber band collection in Manitoba.
Since most of my Kehler uncles were as prolific in producing offspring as they were in producing jokes and stories, our little bungalow could hardly hold them when they all came for special events like Christmas or Groosmame’s birthday, or even when they just came visiting spontaneously on Sunday afternoons.
Being at one of these Kehler gatherings was like being stuck on the top floor of the Tower of Babel, except that here everyone spoke the same language and everyone spoke at once. My uncles needed no artificial stimulants like alcoholic beverages. Whenever two or more of them got together they immediately shifted into vocal high gear, as though on cue from an invisible stage director. Indeed, it may well have been the spirit of the inimitable Berliner Kehler hovering over this social bedlam. He would have been proud of his sons in full cry, eyes rolling roguishly, neck veins bulging as they leaned forward for another merry sally, heaving waves of mirth and crying out in simulated astonishment as they told each other ever more whopping and outrageous stories, all the while threshing sunflower seeds and cracking nuts as their wives and children surged and streamed around them in one happy, excited mass of humanity.
In the eye of this social hurricane sat Groosmame, looking a little lost and bewildered amidst the din, and probably wondering whether the women folk in the kitchen were keeping the stove properly stoked or whether they had put the proper spices in the Heenasupp. Dressed in her Sunday best, she was expected to sit still for once and let younger family members complete the food preparations.
Had she been given a choice she would probably have preferred to bustle around the stove herself while the Kehler women, most of whom were as talkative as their men, regaled each other with their own feminine brand of gossip and playful banter. And the many grandchildren spread through every room of our house, twittering and poking, laughing and talking in effortless imitation of their elders. (Note: At a special gathering of the Kehlers in 1979, the clan already numbered 610 descendants of Grandpa and Grandma Kehler. By now that number may well have reached a thousand.)
The End.
Then, finally, they would all be gone and the walls and ceilings of our house stopped reverberating and came to rest again. And the silence would be deafening as you crunched your way through the solid carpet of sunflower and peanut shells that covered the living room floor and flowed out beyond to the dining room, kitchen and hallway. My dignified young teacher father would look shell-shocked as he ruefully recalled the raucous teasing he had once more undergone from his brothers-in-law for being a “lazy” schoolteacher instead of a “useful” farmer. Groosmame, also looking stunned, would sigh and reach for the broom while my outgoing mother, who loved these occasions, loudly deplored the look of the place with a face still animated from Kehler talk.
Those happy times became less frequent as Groosmame’s health began to fail. On one occasion, I remember, she was so sick that the whole Kehler clan gathered in our home waiting for the end to come. For once there was no laughing or joking and all those doleful Kehler faces and unnatural silences were eerie, to say the least.
But Groosmame survived, and gaunt and feeble she managed to get to her feet again. By 1941, however, my mother’s health had also deteriorated to the point where it was deemed necessary to have Groosmame move in with Aunt Susan Wieler, where she died on February 10, 1943, followed by my mother’s death three years later at the much too early age of forty-two.
The foregoing article appeared in “Preservings 10, June 1997” and is partly drawn from material previously published in the following articles: Al Reimer, “A Century in the Life of Steinbach’s Kehler Clan,” in Mennonite Mirror, October 1979, pages 11-13; and Al Reimer, “Grandmas are Forever,” in Mennonite Mirror, March 1973, pages 11-14.