Peace Shall Destroy Many - Softcover

Wiebe, Rudy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0676973426 ISBN 13: 9780676973426

Verlag: Vintage Canada, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

In 1944, as war rages across Europe and Asia, famine, violence and fear are commonplace. But life appears tranquil in the isolated farming settlement of Wapiti in northern Saskatchewan, where the Mennonite community continues the agricultural lifestyle their ancestors have practised for centuries. Their Christian values of peace and love lead them to oppose war and military service, so they are hardly affected by the war – except for the fact that they are reaping the rewards of selling their increasingly valuable crops and livestock.

Thom Wiens, a young farmer and earnest Christian, begins to ask questions. How can they claim to oppose the war when their livestock become meat to sustain soldiers? How can they enjoy this free country but rely on others to fight to preserve that freedom? Within the community, conflicts and broken relationships threaten the peace, as the Mennonite tradition of close community life manifests itself as racism toward their “half-breed” neighbours, and aspirations of holiness turn into condemnation of others. Perhaps the greatest hope for the future lies with children such as Hal Wiens, whose friendship with the Métis children and appreciation of the natural environment offer a positive vision of people living at peace with themselves and others.

Wiebe’s groundbreaking first novel aroused great controversy among Mennonite communities when it was first published in 1962. Wiebe explains, “I guess it was a kind of bombshell because it was the first realistic novel ever written about Mennonites in western Canada. A lot of people had no clue how to read it. They got angry. I was talking from the inside and exposing things that shouldn't be exposed.” At the same time, other reviewers were unsure how to react to Wiebe’s explicitly religious themes, a view which Wiebe found absurd. “There are many, many people who feel that religious experience is the most vital thing that happens to them in their lives, and how many of these people actually ever get explored in modern novels?”

The concept of peace is an important theme in Wiebe’s first three books. The attempt to live non-violently, one of the basic tenets of the Mennonite faith as taught by the sixteenth-century spiritual leader Menno Simons, is what has “caused the Mennonites the most difficulty in their relationship with everybody,” forcing them to move again and again. The theme of peace versus passivity is further explored in The Blue Mountains of China, where inner peace, a state of being, is contrasted with the earthly desire for a place of public order and tranquility where the church is “there for a few hours a Sunday and maybe a committee meeting during the week to keep our fire escape polished,” as Thom, the protagonist puts it.. Wiebe has said, “To be an Anabaptist is to be a radical follower of the person of Jesus Christ . . . and Jesus Christ had no use for the social and political structures of his day; he came to supplant them.”

While Peace Shall Destroy Many takes place in a Mennonite community, its elements are universal, delineating the way young idealism rebels against staid tradition, as a son clashes with his father. In the face of violent confrontations between beliefs all over the world, the novel remains as compelling now as it was nearly forty years ago.

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Rudy Wiebe was born on October 4, 1934, in an isolated farm community of about 250 people in a rugged but lovely region near Fairholme, Saskatchewan. His parents had escaped Soviet Russia with five children in 1930, part of the last generation of homesteaders to settle the Canadian West, and part of a Mennonite history of displacement and emigration through Europe and Asia to North and South America since the seventeenth century. In 1947 his family gave up their bush farm and moved to Coaldale, Alberta, a town east of Lethbridge peopled largely by Ukrainians, Mennonites, Mormons, and Central Europeans, as well as Japanese, who ended up there during WW II.

Rudy Wiebe read as much as possible from an early age; his first reading materials were the Bible, the Eaton's catalogue and the Free Press Weekly Prairie Farmer; he also recalls listening to his parents’ stories of Russia. By Grade 4, he had read through the two shelves of books available in the one-room schoolhouse. Growing up, he enjoyed Les Miserables, Toilers of the Sea, David Copperfield, Tom Brown's Schooldays, Greek myths and Norse legends. Later an admirer of Faulkner, Márquez, Borges and Tolstoy, Wiebe has always held to the fundamentals of plot, character and, above all, story. He believes stories should begin in the specific and local but expand into “a human truth larger than any individual.”

Wiebe won his first prize for fiction while studying literature at the University of Alberta, where he enrolled in a writing class and began producing poems, plays and stories. His winning story in a Canada-wide contest recounted a young boy’s response to the death of his sister – based on Wiebe’s own experience – and was published in the magazine Liberty in 1956. After earning his B.A., Wiebe left for the ancient University of Tübingen in West Germany on a Rotary Fellowship to study literature and theology, an experience that increased his respect for older and richer communities. Tena Isaak of British Columbia joined him there and they were married. The couple travelled in England, Austria, Switzerland and Italy before returning to Edmonton, where Wiebe completed his M.A. in creative writing. His thesis grew into his first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many.

In 1962 Wiebe earned a Bachelor of Theology degree from the Mennonite Brethren Bible College; he considered becoming a minister. He was editor of Winnipeg’s Mennonite Brethren Herald when Peace Shall Destroy Many was published. Many conservative ministers and Mennonites in small towns objected to the novel's frank and at times unflattering portrait of community life, and there was considerable opposition to the book. “I wasn't exactly sacked as editor . . . but the committee came to me and said ‘Ahem.’ I resigned.” The strength of this reaction made him think hard about the power of the written word, and reinforced his sense of wanting to be a writer.

Wiebe then was invited to teach at a Mennonite college in Goshen, an agricultural town in Indiana with a large Mennonite and Amish population, where he would be Assistant Professor of English from 1963 to 1967. Goshen College was a lively and stimulating intellectual community where Wiebe committed himself to writing, study, teaching and travel. “I encountered men and women of real perception . . . really literate Christians who saw themselves as Jesus's followers and at the same time were acquainted with the thoughts of others and had brought that kind of understanding to bear on what it means to be a Christian. The best thing that ever happened to me was the meetings we had every two or three weeks in one home or another – seven or eight of us, a psychiatrist, a couple of theologians, a couple of literary people. There were the best theologians there, I think, the Mennonite Church has ever had.”

Wiebe published his second novel, First and Vital Candle, and began to explore the western United States and the Mennonite settlements in Paraguay. He returned to Edmonton as a professor in creative writing and English at the University of Alberta, and immersed himself in Canadian literature. He wrote reviews, essays and articles, edited anthologies and was soon established as a major figure in Canadian letters. In 1973, his novel The Temptations of Big Bear won a Governor General's Award. Since then he has continued to win the highest praise for his books of fiction and non-fiction. He has written numerous film and television scripts, lectured internationally from Denmark to India, and given readings from Adelaide to Puerto Rico to Helsinki and Igloolik. For thirty years he taught literature and creative writing at colleges and universities in Canada, the United States and Germany. Now retired from teaching, his former students include such accomplished writers as Myrna Kostash, Aritha van Herk, Thomas Wharton and Katherine Govier.

Wiebe was called the first major Mennonite writer to place his community’s experience in a broader framework. Mennonites assert the fundamental authority of Scripture, especially the New Testament, as a practical guide to life. But while Wiebe imbues his work with a deep moral seriousness, his focus has always been on narrative. “I never consciously think of writing a so-called Christian novel. I don’t think Albert Camus ever thought of writing an existentialist novel, either. I think of getting at, of building, a story.” As a prairie writer, he has often concerned himself with Native stories, feeling place of birth to be more important than blood ancestry. “Those Mennonite villages in Russia are my heritage, but not my world. The world I feel and sense in my bones is the bush of northern Saskatchewan, of prairie Canada.” Native spirituality, with its vital links to the physical world, has always attracted him. But his fiction manages to transcend nationality and locale to explore the struggles of communities and individuals; his books and stories have been translated into nine European languages, as well as Chinese, Japanese and Hindi.

Whatever Wiebe’s focus in a given work, he has always chosen ambitious themes, and his work rewards readers with an intensity seldom rivalled. He is a voice of Canadian fiction that cannot be ignored, and whose work promises to endure.

Aus dem Klappentext

war rages across Europe and Asia, famine, violence and fear are commonplace. But life appears tranquil in the isolated farming settlement of Wapiti in northern Saskatchewan, where the Mennonite community continues the agricultural lifestyle their ancestors have practised for centuries. Their Christian values of peace and love lead them to oppose war and military service, so they are hardly affected by the war except for the fact that they are reaping the rewards of selling their increasingly valuable crops and livestock.

Thom Wiens, a young farmer and earnest Christian, begins to ask questions. How can they claim to oppose the war when their livestock become meat to sustain soldiers? How can they enjoy this free country but rely on others to fight to preserve that freedom? Within the community, conflicts and broken relationships threaten the peace, as the Mennonite tradition of close community life manifests itself as racism toward their half-breed neighbours, and as

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CHAPTER ONE

The yellow planes passed overhead swiftly and in thunder. Thom Wiens had heard their growing roar above the scrape of the plow on stones, but the trees hedged them from his sight. Then suddenly, as he twisted on the halted plow to look back, they were over the poplars, flying low and fast. The sense of the horses’ sweated trembling was in his rein-clenched hands as he stared the yellow planes out of sight to the north.

Fly, you heathen, he was thinking. Fly low, practise your dips and turns to terrify playing children and grandmothers gaunt in their rocking chairs. Practise your hawk-swoops, so you can gun down some equally godless German or bury a cowering family under the rubble of their home. To get paid for killing. To be trained to kill more efficiently. If you shoot down five Germans you get a medal. If you kill twenty at once, you get a Victoria Cross and the King himself shakes your hand. What will you do when all the Germans have been killed and the only work you know is shooting men? Acclaimed murderers everywhere!

They were gone, flying in a tight triangle like ducks going north for nesting. Thom slid to the earth and worked his short crow-bar under the stone which had staggered the plow just before the planes appeared. Loosened, it came easily and he walked across the plowing, holding the heavy stone against his stomach. The heap of rocks along the fence ground together as he dropped it. With the edge of his hand he knocked at the dust on the white-worn front of his overalls.

Before him the fence stretched tight over the humped land. He could see a third of a mile of it bordering the open field, every post belly-deep in stones. The planes passed so quickly and, standing there with his hand raised for a last brush, Thom suddenly experienced, like a water-bucket emptied over him, the weeks and months spent gathering rocks from the field and piling them, one by one, along the fence until only enough post showed for a top wire. To grow something took a long time, and the machines for it were slow. There were no machines to pick rocks. But the machines for death were wind-swift. For a moment he felt he had discovered a great truth, veiled until now: the long growing of life and the quick irrevocableness of death.

The heaped rocks recalled him, and he turned to stride rapidly towards the plow. To just stand, thinking! He glanced about, happy for the rugged world that had hidden his dreaming. Pulling his feet up hard with each step, he sensed within himself the strength of his forefathers who had plowed and subdued the earth before him. He, like them, was working out God’s promise that man would eat his bread in the sweat of his face, not pushing a button to watch a divine creation blaze to earth.

As the four horses moved under his urging, he settled his broad limbs to the jolting ride. He cringed then as, with a flare of conscience, he recalled Brother Goertzen’s clipped German phrases: “We are to follow Christ’s steps, but we do not have pride. By God’s Grace we understand what others do not. As we cannot imagine Him lifting a hand to defend himself physically, so we, His followers, conquer only by spiritual love and not by physical force. Always only love: for those who love us, for those indifferent to us, for those who hate us, for those who would kill us, which is the same thing; all are included when He says, ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another even as I have loved you.’”

Thom could not doubt such sermons. He had grown up hearing these statements and if someone had asked him when he had first known that Christ bade His disciples love their enemies, he could no more have answered than if he had been asked to consciously recollect his first breath. All week the stentorian voice had ruled the hushed church: “Have you not heard our country loudly proclaim that we must protect the innocent from the ‘trampling boots of tyranny’? The whole land is geared to destruction so that it will not be destroyed. The glorious end justifies any means we use to attain it. For the Christian, the righteous means are more essential than comfortable and apparently necessary ends. What do we gain if we retain our bodies here on earth an hour longer, but lose our everlasting souls? We can ignore the black power and his fiendish earthly workers who can destroy our bodies but cannot touch our souls.” There was no argument against that.

And truth necessitated following.

The horses were wheeling in their awkwardness at the corner of the field and stopped at his touch. Home was beyond the hill and a line of trees. Thom felt the ground warming with expectation, the ripeness of the earth’s belly pushing itself up against the steel of the shares. When he lay with his face in the sandy loam, arms and legs yearning, he was beyond himself. It seemed to Thom that every man must feel the smallness and the greatness, his face in the dirt when the clouds were sheep with their heads down in the sunshine of the open sky and the larks chanting from their post-perch and the burdened horses nodding their heads to earth with sweat black in straggles down their thighs. Lying there, he felt doubts settle in his mind like mud in the hollows of the spring-soaked land. He could not actually imagine that men should wish to kill one another; yet they must, for how else could they give themselves into the murder that was the Army? The earth holding him, he thought, If only there were enough trees and hills and rocks in all Saskatchewan or all Canada or even all the world to hide us from a Hitler who has tasted power like a boar’s first gulp of warm blood. But once a man has tasted power, you cannot pen up or dispose of him like a blooded boar, and he the greater danger. And Thom felt the persistent, recurring prick: sometimes you think you should help try, anyway.

He rose quickly and the horses heaved in unison. He knew the shape of every tree along the rock-heaped fence without lifting his eyes from Jerry’s hocks treading the furrow. Why must something as remote as being required to kill another human become as forcibly real as the plow’s hump against stone beneath him. But it had become so. Could he but know himself strong, like Peter Block! To stand alone before the judge in a courtroom crowded with gimlet-eyed women whose husbands and lovers and sons were flying like yellow hawks, somewhere over the bend of the world, and to say clearly, “It is against my conscience.” Never having considered even for an instant that there might be another way. If he could but know himself strong!

The whoop behind him perked the horses’ ears. As Thom turned on the iron seat, the tow-headed “Indian” transformed himself into a small fighter-plane, and with arms outstretched, lunch-pail rattling, bare feet flashing in the turned earth, came soaring in gasps to trip and sprawl beside the slow plow. The boy was up even as he rolled.

“The planes–we saw ’em, Thom! Three big ones flyin’ low and makin’ the biggest noise! Boy, they were ’way longer than Wapiti School–longer than Beaver even–and they were bangin’ like anythin’. Maybe they’ll bang apart, huh? When I’m real big I’ll fly some–wow!”

Thom looked down on Hal walking in the following furrow. He said, brotherly casual, “Why do you want to fly one if it might bang apart?”

“Oh. I’d get one that goes smooth, like brrrsssh–” and the small boy spread his arms, made several rolling swoops with the upper part of his body, and then, to avoid running into the plow, threw himself beside it as he tipped forward.

“You’ll spread your nose all over the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Vintage Canada
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0676973426
• ISBN 13: 9780676973426
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar