What’s So Funny About Borsht, Anyway?
review by Monique Paturel
Just finished Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home, an entertaining account of her time back in the fold of her Mennonite family. She begins with three events that had the collective power to send her home.
The first crisis involved a botched radical hysterectomy with the surgeon “accidentally punch[ing] a hole in two of [her] organs” leaving her incontinent, with husband Nick responsible for her care. The second crisis was a car accident a few months later involving a drunk driver. Broken bones and bruises she rolls around the house in casts in an office chair with one arm immobilized. Where’s Nick? Packing up to leave for his new lover Bob, whom he met on Gay.com. That would be the third crisis. What a crappy week. Rhoda gathers herself up and goes home to California, back to her Mennonite family and roots.
Janzen’s mother is a woman comfortable in her skin. Down-home goodness and honesty make the perfect foil for her daughter, who has spent too much time in an abusive marriage forgetting what authenticity looks like. Her father, frugal and handsome, is the model patriarch. Together they seem to remind Rhoda of everything she hated about her childhood.
Jansen’s resentment of the Mennonite culture creeps quietly through the book. Her humor is gratuitously mean-spirited at times. Her brothers, who continue to embrace the Mennonite lifestyle, marry and have children within the community. Why she is surprised that they don’t want to talk politics or beliefs with her is perplexing. Staying off uncommon ground seems a sensible strategy given their divergent lifestyles and history of theological boxing matches. Her sarcasm toward the sisters-in-law whose tastes and lifestyles are ridiculed made me cringe. This went nowhere, wasn’t that funny, and sounded bitchy. But she’s hard on herself too, with self-disapproval swathed in humor accompanying us throughout the book.
Even with the helpful primer in the back, I came away not really understanding the Mennonites as an ethnic religious community. Bits of tradition, mostly in food form, are on each page, but I never got the gestalt of the culture. The food bits were fun though. The image of a cabbagey bowl of borscht being opened in an elementary school cafeteria filled me with dread on her behalf. Surely kids have been tortured for less.
This review sounds like a pan, but I actually enjoyed reading Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Janzen is a funny and concise writer. (Though her vocabulary often overshoots the crowd.) While memoirs are typically based on memory, this book has the added strand of writing about her experiences in real time. There was something I liked about distant memory, recent memory, and yesterday playing off one another.
As the extent of Nick’s abuse and mental illness are exposed, we begin to understand that Janzen’s coming home to heal had less to do with recent events and all to do with her 15 years with a man who took advantage of her early training at subservience. With time she begins to soften and allow herself to remember that the faith and kindness of her past is not her enemy. That’s when she truly arrives home.
review by Monique Paturel
Just finished Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home, an entertaining account of her time back in the fold of her Mennonite family. She begins with three events that had the collective power to send her home.
The first crisis involved a botched radical hysterectomy with the surgeon “accidentally punch[ing] a hole in two of [her] organs” leaving her incontinent, with husband Nick responsible for her care. The second crisis was a car accident a few months later involving a drunk driver. Broken bones and bruises she rolls around the house in casts in an office chair with one arm immobilized. Where’s Nick? Packing up to leave for his new lover Bob, whom he met on Gay.com. That would be the third crisis. What a crappy week. Rhoda gathers herself up and goes home to California, back to her Mennonite family and roots.
Janzen’s mother is a woman comfortable in her skin. Down-home goodness and honesty make the perfect foil for her daughter, who has spent too much time in an abusive marriage forgetting what authenticity looks like. Her father, frugal and handsome, is the model patriarch. Together they seem to remind Rhoda of everything she hated about her childhood.
Jansen’s resentment of the Mennonite culture creeps quietly through the book. Her humor is gratuitously mean-spirited at times. Her brothers, who continue to embrace the Mennonite lifestyle, marry and have children within the community. Why she is surprised that they don’t want to talk politics or beliefs with her is perplexing. Staying off uncommon ground seems a sensible strategy given their divergent lifestyles and history of theological boxing matches. Her sarcasm toward the sisters-in-law whose tastes and lifestyles are ridiculed made me cringe. This went nowhere, wasn’t that funny, and sounded bitchy. But she’s hard on herself too, with self-disapproval swathed in humor accompanying us throughout the book.
Even with the helpful primer in the back, I came away not really understanding the Mennonites as an ethnic religious community. Bits of tradition, mostly in food form, are on each page, but I never got the gestalt of the culture. The food bits were fun though. The image of a cabbagey bowl of borscht being opened in an elementary school cafeteria filled me with dread on her behalf. Surely kids have been tortured for less.
This review sounds like a pan, but I actually enjoyed reading Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Janzen is a funny and concise writer. (Though her vocabulary often overshoots the crowd.) While memoirs are typically based on memory, this book has the added strand of writing about her experiences in real time. There was something I liked about distant memory, recent memory, and yesterday playing off one another.
As the extent of Nick’s abuse and mental illness are exposed, we begin to understand that Janzen’s coming home to heal had less to do with recent events and all to do with her 15 years with a man who took advantage of her early training at subservience. With time she begins to soften and allow herself to remember that the faith and kindness of her past is not her enemy. That’s when she truly arrives home.
. Mariner, 2010.
. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010.
. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.
, Riverhead Books, 2010.
. Nan A. Talese, 2010.
. Scribner, 2010.
. Spiegel and Grau, 2010.
. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.
