By Harvey L. Dyck
In the lives of normal everyone is the truths of background. Such truths abound within the diaries of Jacob Epp, a Russian Mennonite school-teacher, lay minister, farmer, and village secretary in southern Ukraine. This abridged translation of his diaries bargains a remarkably brilliant photo of Mennonite group lifestyles in Imperial Russia in the course of a interval of stricken swap. Epp’s writings demonstrate a talented and sincere diarist of deep emotions, and inform a human tale that no traditional old account may wish to equal.
The diaries overflow with the main points of his workaday international. kinfolk, village, church, and neighborhood exercises are damaged through journeys to industry, visits to different Mennonite settlements, and a memorable steamer voyage to boomtown Odessa at the Black Sea. He chronicles his long-time involvement in an strange Imperial scan within which Mennonites have been “model farmers” in Jewish villages.
Harvey L. Dyck areas the diaries of their ancient, ethnocultural, social, non secular, monetary, and political settings. in accordance with archival study, interviews, travels, and consultations with different students, his exact and perceptive advent and research hint Jacob Epp’s existence and current a caricature and interpretation of his better kin, group, and Imperial world.
With amazing readability the diaries and advent jointly re-create a time and lifestyle marked through controversy and flux. They mirror major aspects of the event of ethno-religious minorities in Imperial Russia and of the advance of the southern Ukrainian frontier. specially, they fill major lacking pages of the good community-centred tale of Russian Mennonite life.
This ebook is richly illustrated with maps, black-and-white images, and watercolour work by means of Cornelius Hildebrand, Jacob Epp’s former village college student and later brother-in-law.