“It was from the relative
safety of Sana Basel’s house
that Mary first laid eyes on
Ronald Dornn.”

Mary Maendel, age 18,
New Rosedale Colony.

ONE
“Der G’hört Mein!”
“He’s mine!”

New Rosedale Hutterite Colony, Western Canada November 1952

MY MOTHER, MARY Maendel, rose early Sunday morning and gently pushed back the feather quilt on her side of the bed, careful not to wake her niece, Sarah, who lay motionless beside her. No one stirred in the alcove just a few feet away, where her other nieces, Lena, Katie, Susie, and Judy, were still enveloped in sleep. She collected her clothing from a nearby chair and slipped on her cropped white shirt, or Pfaht; her vest, or Mieder; an ankle-length, gathered skirt, or Kittel; and a pleated apron called a Fittig. Then she quietly proceeded downstairs.

Yesterday was cleaning day on the colony, and the floors and furniture had been thoroughly washed down and wiped. But in a culture where cleanliness and godliness were revered virtues, Mary was determined that today, one of the most important days of her life, the house would be spotless. A bar of homemade lard soap called Specksaften, resembling a square of butter, slowly melted into her pail of hot water, filling it with sudsy bubbles. Down on her hands and knees, she began washing the floors, her deft, young hands moving easily around the Schlofbänk, or sleeping benches, filled with children deep in slumber. The soundless movement of her washrag kept time with their breathing, and the house soon responded with the sharp scent of wet wood and wax.

By 7:00 a.m. she had finished her chores. Outside, the wind was tossing the lifeless branches of the old oak trees that separated the colony’s neat semicircle of homes from the barns and machine shop.

Through the front window she could see lines of adults and children scurrying over to the community kitchen for breakfast. Bearded men wearing black, homespun jackets and trousers, and women in ankle-length patterned skirts and vests, some still knotting identical polka-dot kerchiefs under their chins, strode purposefully and in single file toward a large central building that drew them together three times a day for sustenance. Young girls in Mützen (bonnets) and long, flowered dresses, and boisterous boys looking like miniature versions of their parents trailed after them, drawn, it appeared, by some invisible string. To Mary, the scene was as familiar as the sunrise, but to an outsider the setting and period costumes, adopted from sixteenth-century peasants, would have seemed staged, as if the players were on a film set where a centuries-old story was about to unfold.

Peering through the window, Mary could have been taken for an actor waiting for her cue, but this was not a movie. This was life on the New Rosedale Hutterite Colony in southern Manitoba, and the one hundred men, women, and children who lived there were the cast of characters whose lives echoed those of their European ancestors of nearly five hundred years ago.

“Mein Himmel, eilt’s! Good heavens, hurry up!” shouted Mary’s brother-in-law, Paul Hofer, who was hastening his brood of children scattered throughout the house. Mary’s sister, Sana, was the head cook, and she had been up since dawn over in the community kitchen, boiling choice cuts of beef for today’s special noon meal and supervising the breakfast of boiled eggs, hot buttered toast, and plates of Schmuggi—soft, homemade cheese sprinkled with caraway seeds.

The thirteen Hofer children brushed past Mary to join the procession, and she shivered as a gust of crisp November air blew through the open front door. On an ordinary day she should have gone with them, but today was an exception. Today was her wedding day. After the morning Lehr church service, she would be making her formal vows of marriage, elevating her status from Diene, a young woman, to Weib, a wife, and increasing her worth and workload in the community.

The twenty-one-year-old started up the narrow wooden staircase to her bedroom, grateful for the seven years of shelter her sister had provided but eager to leave the overburdened household for a place of her own.

Until age thirteen, Mary had lived at the Old Rosedale Hutterite Colony sixty miles to the northeast, where her father, the well-respected Joseph Maendel, was the manager of the largest and most successful colony in Manitoba. It was to him that many other colonies had come for financial assistance. Old Rosedale’s prosperity was rooted in its diversity and in its management.

Joseph Maendel had been a shrewd administrator, ensuring that the colony made an enviable profit from its field crops and livestock. In 1931, a devastating drought year for most prairie farmers, Old Rosedale’s income was a princely $60,000 from grain and other enterprises. These included 900 hogs, 250 geese, several hundred cattle and sheep, and an apiary that produced 40,000 pounds of honey a year.

His devoted wife, Katrina, was the head gardener and special cook for the sick, but when she died suddenly of a gallstone attack at age forty-five, she left a husband and colony in shock, and sixteen children, including one-year-old Mary, without a mother.

A devastated Joseph Maendel poured out his grief in a letter to his sister-in-law at the James Valley Colony.

Oh dear sister-in-law, it was very, very sad for us to be hit like this. We stared in disbelief as our desperately needed and precious mother lay dead in front of our eyes.

Her sister Rebecca cried out loud, “Oh Almighty God, how can you take a mother like that out of this house!” But nothing helped. Our dear mother was in eternity with God. I told our daughters and all the children, “Let’s diligently pray to God so that no other calamity should befall us.” How sad it would be if I, their father, couldn’t be with them anymore either. We hope and beg and pray that the Almighty God will have mercy on all widows and widowers and their orphans.

A year after his wife’s death, Joseph Maendel began to write to mature, eligible women and widows from other colonies to secure a mother for his younger children. After a handful of rejections, Rachel Gross, a widow with six children from the Maxwell Hutterite Colony, agreed to marry him, enlarging his family to twenty-two. Despite her best efforts, mild-mannered Rachel simply wasn’t able to adequately nurture so many children, and Mary, left in the care of her older sisters, clung to her father, who gave what parental love and grounding he could.

Two years later the blended family was dealt a dreaded blow when fifty-year-old Joseph was diagnosed with intestinal cancer and underwent major surgery in Winnipeg. He was a steadying influence during times of turbulence at Old Rosedale, and his illness threatened the political stability he had worked so tirelessly to forge within the community. As the ravages of the disease drained his energies, Marilein, or “Little Mary,” was often turned away from his bedside. One warm afternoon in September, as she was out playing in the bluffs of trees that surrounded the colony, she felt a sudden compulsion to go home and found the adults in an upheaval. “Where have you been?” they cried. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you!” Her father had wanted to say goodbye to her, but she had come too late. Overcome, the young girl buried her hands in her face and cried.

At age five, Mary was essentially an orphan. In succession, her three adult sisters—Sana, Anna, and Katrina—married, and each time was like losing her mother all over again as she was shuffled off to the care of the next sister. She escaped from her loss during the day when she could run and play in the vast open areas of the colony, and in the late afternoons when she would take a little stick and join the other children in rounding up the community’s geese from the riverbank. Each of the ten families at Old Rosedale was in charge of seven geese, and Mary loved to shoo the Maendel geese home so they could lay their eggs in the wooden nests her father had built around their house. She knew each of them by name and could tell exactly which ones belonged to her family.

During the day she was always occupied, but at night, alone in her bed, she couldn’t suppress the ache of loneliness that lingered in the pit of her stomach. She longed for her mother and tried to envision her face, to remember the smell of her skin and the safety of her arms. Under her covers, she practiced saying Muetter, or “Mother,” out loud to the darkness. But then the tears would start, and every time she cried like that, she’d see a vision of her mother, Katrina, at the end of the bed, holding a lighted candle. Every night Katrina would come to her daughter this way, but the small child became so frightened she couldn’t fall asleep. It was only after she willed herself to stop yearning for her mother that the haunting visitations ended.

After Joseph Maendel’s untimely death, a change in leadership ignited years of smoldering conflicts within the community. His oldest sons had hoped one of them would replace their father as colony manager, but when they were outvoted by the Waldner and Hofer families, the bitterness escalated until the two factions could no longer live together. In the summer of 1944, Mary’s brothers decided to leave Old Rosedale to establish a new colony in southern Manitoba. They named it New Rosedale and took most of their extended families and supporters with them. Thirteen-year-old Mary and her two teenage brothers, Darius and Eddie, became part of their sister Sana’s household.

It was from the relative safety of Sana’s house that Mary first laid eyes on Ronald Dornn. “Der g’hört mein! He’s mine!” she wisecracked to her teenage nieces as they peered out of an upstairs window. She was eighteen years old and had a quick wit and a devilish sense of humor. “We’ll tell him you said that!” the girls teased, but she knew they lacked the courage to follow through on their threat. Down below, the wiry frame of a handsome stranger emerged from the colony vehicle onto the sandy soil of the Assiniboine River valley. It was obvious from his square, black hat, lovingly referred to as the “washtub,” that he was from the Lehrerleut in Alberta, one of three distinct sects of Hutterites in North America.

The cultural and religious differences between the three groups were minor, confined more to dress code than religious principles. To an outsider the discrepancies would hardly be discernible, but to the Hutterites they were so significant that intermarriage between the groups was rare. The Dariusleut in Saskatchewan were committed to simple buttons on their shirts and jackets, but the Schmiedeleut in Manitoba, which included New Rosedale, considered buttons too flashy, and opted for invisible hooks, eyes, and snaps. The Lehrerleut were the most conservative, insisting the zipper of a man’s pants be at the side rather than the front, in case some unmindful man forgot to zip up. All three groups did agree on one thing: pockets on the back of a man’s pants were far too worldly. Store-bought pants with “ass pockets” were strictly off-limits.

The new visitor from the Lehrerleut created significant excitement in the community, and people looking out of their large picture windows wanted to know which colony in Alberta he was from, how long he was staying, and why he was here. To the great surprise of no one, Mary’s sister had had a hand in orchestrating his visit. Sana Hofer was known to everyone as Sana “Basel,” or “Aunt” Sana, and her congenial nature was legendary. No one would think it out of the ordinary to find some new lodger sleeping on a cot in her living room or safely tucked beneath the kitchen table, out of the way of perpetual foot traffic.

Fate had introduced Sana Basel and Ronald in the summer of 1949 at the Rockport Hutterite Colony in Alberta. Her clout as head cook had earned her a once-in-a-lifetime trip to pay a social call to some of the Lehrerleut colonies in the province, including Rockport. Ronald, on the other hand, had spent his youth at the Rockport Colony and had just returned for the first time in seven years to discuss his family’s future with the colony minister.

When Ronald confided to Sana that in a few days he would be taking the train back east to an uncertain future, she didn’t waste any time rearranging his schedule. “Come for a visit to New Rosedale Colony in Manitoba,” she insisted in her charming way. “Give us a call from the train station in Portage la Prairie, and we’ll come to get you.” Gostfrei Sana Basel was beguiling and had a heart for those whose lives were troubled with ambiguities and indecision. Ronald found himself drawn to the open face and loving manner of this forty-year-old woman who embodied the warmth and caring of a mother and comfort of an old friend. She made him feel cherished, and he hadn’t felt that way in a long time. Her compelling invitation was hard to resist.

Once home in New Rosedale, Sana Basel soon received word that her visitor had arrived at the station and quickly dispatched her husband, Paul “Vetter,” or “Uncle” Paul, and son Paul Jr. to fetch him. They returned in time for Lunschen, three o’clock lunch, the only time families ate together in their own homes. When Ronald entered the house, Sana Basel’s face lit up and she greeted him enthusiastically, pulling out a chair for him and taking his hat from his hand.

“Reinhold, sog wos! Ronald, say something!” Sana said eagerly as she handed the hat to one of her daughters. He was suspected of having heard or seen particular things of interest since he had just traveled across several provinces, and she expected to be entertained. Sana Basel’s raised eyebrows were poised for a juicy tidbit of almost any sort, but her visitor proved a disappointment in the gossip department. Ronald preferred to listen rather than be heard and didn’t seem to appreciate the fine Hutterite tradition of Tschelli draufschmieren, “adding jam” to an unexceptional story. Some would have called him Maulvoll or “mouth lazy”—too sparing with his words to be considered entertaining—but in the secluded Hutterite world, his mere presence invited curiosity.

The Hofer boys drifted in from their farm chores, and a handful of regulars stopped by to fraternize and to inspect the strange man in the “English” leather jacket and the black lamb’s-wool hat. Mary piled gingersnaps and oatmeal cookies on two Dura-Ware plates and placed them in front of the visitor with the steel-blue eyes and thick, auburn hair, neatly parted down the middle. Back behind the safety of the steaming kettle, she noted that he could use a new pair of pants. She watched Ronald dip the tip of his tablespoon into the jar of honey, tasting it before stirring the rest into his hot cup of chamomile tea. She observed the methodical way he tidied the cookie crumbs on the heavily varnished wooden table, cupping them into his left hand and placing them on his plate. Mary secretly wished she could have served him something better. The fresh lemon pies piled high with meringue and Queen Elizabeth cakes portioned out on Thursday, the colony’s baking day, hadn’t lasted the weekend at the Hofer house. With seven beautiful daughters who attracted their fair share of interest from eligible Buben (young men), Sana Basel’s house was always a gathering place, filled with young people who would convene every evening to socialize and sing.

Ronald came for a week and stayed for good. Sana Basel’s crowded quarters became his retreat and she a surrogate mother who sympathized with his inner struggles. He lived in a room upstairs with the Hofer boys while Mary lived across the hall, in the girls’ room with her nieces. Mary cleaned his room and made his bed every day, but there was never a hint of romance. The only evidence to suggest any concern for his welfare was that she had repaired his tattered pants and left them neatly folded on his bed.

Ronald was consumed with the plight of his father and siblings back in Ontario. His Russian-immigrant parents had joined the Rockport Hutterite Colony in Alberta when he was nine years old, and the family lived there for almost a decade. But when Ronald was seventeen, Christian Dornn had cut his ties with the Hutterite Church, gathered his eight children, and joined a Hutterite-wannabe community in eastern Canada. The mission and the move were disastrous, as the leader turned out to be a dictator who treated the people in his commune abusively and harshly. When Ronald met Sana Basel, he was on a mission to bring his beleaguered family back to the Rockport Colony, but his hopes were dashed when the colony minister bluntly informed him that he and his siblings were welcome, but their father was not.

At his new home in the New Rosedale Colony in Manitoba, Ronald found relief in toil and in the sanctuary of nature. Strong and fit, he cleared the one thousand acres of land that New Rosedale had recently purchased for four dollars an acre. He removed the oak and poplar trees with a TD-14 Caterpillar tractor and broke up the virgin soil with a Rome plow in preparation for the colony to seed barley and wheat. In the evenings he spent most of his time in his room, reading his Bible.

Two years after his arrival, Ronald came up to Mary’s room, unannounced, and asked if she would consider being his girlfriend. She had noticed a shift in the way he was looking at her lately, and once, when she was alone in the house, he had returned from the field early and they’d shared a cup of instant coffee. Caught off guard by his question, she wasn’t prepared to give him an answer. “I’ll have to think about it,” she stammered, lowering her head to avert his piercing blue eyes.

When this was leaked to members of the community, it stirred up a storm of controversy. Ronald was promptly moved out of Sana Basel’s residence into a tiny two-room house of his own, and Mary’s job of cleaning his room was assigned to someone else. Mary’s brother, Jake Maendel, the assistant minister at New Rosedale, wasted no time enlisting Elie Wipf to pursue his sister. Elie was the son of the senior minister at Fairmont Colony, and Jake had gone out of his way to introduce the pair when Mary was barely a teenager. It had been six years since she had seen Elie, but within days of Ronald’s proposal, Mary was summoned to her other brother Peter’s house, where Elie was waiting. He still possessed the same dark good looks, easy manner, and mischievous smile.

When Mary had met Elie six years ago in Fairmont, she had felt awkward. Elie’s sister had invited Mary to join her for tea and cake, and while they ate, Elie had come home from the carpentry shop to catch a glimpse of the young visitor. She remembered feeling intimidated by his imposing frame as he stood in the doorway and teased her that he could run faster than she could.

Mary was no longer a teenager, but she was uneasy sitting on the chesterfield next to him, making small talk about what he was building in the carpentry shop and whether Fairmont had a big garden this year. Elie hadn’t come all this way to talk about the colony’s cucumbers, but he waited patiently for her to finish. Just as he reached for her hand to tell her she came highly recommended, Peter’s wife, Sara, entered the room to offer them a plate of purple grapes. The grapes were a special treat purchased only a few times a year by the colony manager, and Mary would have loved to sample a handful, but she knew eating from the same dish as Elie would imply they were a couple. When Elie said he wouldn’t eat the fruit without her, Mary reluctantly broke off a stem, fueling the rumor that they were indeed an item.

Elie returned two Sundays later for a second visit. He arrived in time for the noon meal and had no sooner taken his place with the other men in the adult dining room when tongues began to wag. “She ate from his plate, and now she says she doesn’t want him!” said one woman as she took a long reach to pull a drumstick off the roast duck. “Jung und dumm. Young and dumb,” clucked the neighbor. “She doesn’t know what she wants.” Newspapers, radios, and television were strictly forbidden on the colony, but people’s private lives provided more than enough entertainment with plots as intriguing and unpredictable as a Hollywood soap opera.

Mary wished she was invisible when bits of the conversation drifted to her table a few feet away. She knew many colony members believed she was throwing her luck away if she rejected the carpenter from Fairmont, but for reasons she could not explain and logic she could not defend, she was drawn to the reserved newcomer. She thought about the time they both lived at Sana Basel’s house and how she would lie in bed at night and listen to the drone of Ronald’s tractor as he worked long hours in the field. At midnight she heard its steady lament as it came closer and closer to home and finally pulled into New Rosedale’s machine shop. She heard Ronald open the door and waited for his heavy footsteps on the stairs. She heard the splash of water in the small bathroom sink, the thud of soap against the porcelain as he washed the day’s dust from his hands and face, and finally, the click of the bathroom light before he entered the room next to hers and fell into bed, exhausted. She desperately wanted to wait up for him, but with so many people in the house, a private conversation would be impossible. Mary had thought about sneaking out to the field some afternoon to take him a piece of apple pie, but she knew someone would see her, and fresh rumors would fly. It had been almost eight months since Ronald had made his overture, but she had no way of knowing if he still cared for her or if he had become disheartened by Elie’s advances.

She dreaded the next encounter with Elie. Mary knew he was the man her brothers wanted her to marry, and she desperately wanted their approval, but she also knew she could not accept his inevitable proposal. She was preparing to go to Gebet, the evening church service, when she got word of his return. Grabbing her Wannick (jacket), she slipped out of the house, head downcast, and followed the well-worn path toward the church. She was almost at the church door when Ronald and Elie, both hurrying from different directions, unintentionally collided with her—and each other. The confrontation was more than she could handle, and she raced home to hide in the closet upstairs in the boys’ room. There in the solitude, with the ironed shirts and polished, black Sunday shoes, Mary wondered what advice her father would have given her. She had heard about his thoughtful counsel to her sister Katrina after she turned down a proposal of marriage from Dafit Wurtz of Deerboine Colony. It was shortly after their mother’s death, and Katrina felt duty bound to look after the family.

“Do you love him?” Joseph Maendel had asked her directly.

“Yes,” Katrina replied, “but I am needed here at home.”

“If you love him, then you must marry him,” insisted her father. “We’ll get by.”

Weeks passed and Mary kept busy with women’s work on the colony. One Friday she was in the bakery, measuring out the flour, eggs, and lard for twenty-five dozen buns and fifteen loaves of bread. When the large pillow of dough had swollen to twice its size, she rang the kitchen bell to call the women to roll the buns and shape the loaves. Left to watch them rise and bake in the large industrial stainless steel ovens, Mary’s mind drifted back to Elie and the way things had ended between them. She felt bad when she learned he had cried when no one could find her the evening they’d all crossed paths. Ronald, it appeared, had given up on her that night too.

Mary washed the last of the pans and looked forward to her afternoon coffee break. Hot and tired, she began to untie her baking apron when her brother Samuel burst into the bakery, waving a letter in front of her. “Ronald sent me here,” he announced to the buns and the bread and an astonished Mary as he tossed the letter on the counter and left. A week earlier, Samuel had given Ronald a new felt hat as an incentive to marry his wife’s sister, so the matchmaker secretly hoped the letter’s message would put an end to Ronald’s prospects for his natural sibling.

Mary stared at the unaddressed white envelope. She trembled as she carefully opened one end and removed a single sheet of precisely folded paper. “Du Maria,” it began. She was wounded by the harsh “you.” “I am not pleased with the stories going around,” it continued. “I am writing to you this once, and if you keep this letter to yourself, then there is some hope for us. If not, it’s over.” It was signed in large, bold script, “Ronald.” The letter was as cold as a reprimand from the German schoolteacher, not the kind of note you’d expect from a potential husband. Worse, it implied she was a source for some of the gossip about her and Elie.

Mary stumbled outside the community kitchen into the arms of a beautiful summer day. In the distance she could hear the laughter of children playing tag near the henhouse and the steady hum of the colony’s two lawn mowers. Becki Hofer and Martha Baer emerged from a hidden path that led to the river, their stained hands clinging to tin honey pails brimming with saskatoon berries. The predictable patterns of community life remained unaltered, but Mary’s world was crumbling around her like the walls of Jericho.

Sana Basel was serving her family chocolate bars and coffee for afternoon Lunschen just as her young sister pushed past her, ran up the stairs, and threw herself on her bed, unable to contain her sobbing. “Wos geht enn für? What is going on?” a baffled Sana Basel asked Paul Vetter, then followed her sister up the stairs. Standing in the doorway of the bedroom, with a half-eaten Oh Henry! candy bar in one hand, Sana demanded to know what was wrong. Mary had no intention of showing the devastating letter to anyone, but her sister commanded the status and authority of a mother; to refuse her would be a sign of disrespect.

A small red ant scurried across the folds of her bedspread. Mary envied the insect its freedom as she slowly pulled the letter from her apron pocket and handed it to her sister.

Sana Basel adjusted her horn-rimmed glasses and read the confidential correspondence. “Geht’s rüft’s in Jake Vetter!” she instructed her daughters when she read the note, and they ran off to find their uncle. “He’ll know what to do.”

By the time Jake Maendel arrived, everyone was crowded into the kitchenette downstairs, including Mary, her eyes red from crying. Sana Basel produced the letter and insisted Mary read it out loud. Mary stumbled over Ronald’s warning to not share its contents with anyone. When she was finished, the colony’s assistant minister didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. The controversial relationship between his sister and the Russian-born outsider was over.

Over the next two weeks, Ronald didn’t take any of his meals in the community dining room because of a bad chest infection. He was at home in bed when Samuel Maendel dropped in to break the news that the bake house letter had received a public reading. Ronald was crushed.

A few days later, when Sana Basel brought him a pail of chicken noodle soup to nurse his cold, she discovered a man with a broken heart. “Ich bitt Dich, verzeich’s Mir. I beg you to forgive me,” she said when she saw the pain in his eyes. Ronald looked up at the woman whose warmth and kindness had convinced him to join New Rosedale Colony and give community life another chance. “What good is your apology? I don’t have her anyway,” he replied.