Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: Rhoda Janzen's Memoir of Going Home

When I worked at Publishers Weekly, my mailbox was constantly filling up with people’s therapeutic memoirs of recovering from conservative religions. These writers had left evangelicalism, Orthodox Judaism, Mormonism, Christian Science, you name it. All of these memoirs had a flavor of the counter-apologetic: This is why I left my childhood faith, and how my life has changed dramatically for the better since I came to my senses. Many were well-written, and some were thoughtful. But there was a sameness about them.

 

Rhoda Janzen’s memoir is different, and refreshing, in its affection for the Mennonites who raised and formed her. This is a woman who appreciates her family and her heritage even though she is no longer a believer, who holds her insular childhood religion up to the light of the larger secular world and finds in it many useful and beautiful things to carry her forward. The book doesn’t end with her coming back to the fold in a religious sense, but in a familial sense, she never really left.

 

I should back up and tell you her story, which opens with the demise of her marriage. Although a spendthrift himself, her husband Nick shows a remarkable practicality where Rhoda is concerned: when she asks his advice about a proposed hysterectomy, he reminds her of the family policy to throw out anything that hasn’t been used in over a year—organs included.  She has the operation, but it doesn’t go well, and during her weeks of recovering from a punctured bladder (fun!), Nick leaves her for a man he’s met at gay.com. In the ensuing weeks, Rhoda has a serious car accident and crippling financial problems—all of which is a whole lot funnier in the book than it sounds in this barebones relay of information—and heads home to California to recover in the arms of her Mennonite family.

 

I love the way she depicts her family. The portraits are hilarious, but they are not caricatures. Her parents are provincial in their Mennonite heritage, but they are also globe-trotting ambassadors for their faith and for social justice. Her sister Hannah is a model of intelligence, passion, and humor. Even her super-conservative brother gets mad props for allowing his daughter to pursue her love of dance despite its being verboten in Mennonite circles. This is a family of love.

 

The memoir includes some hysterical reminiscences of growing up Mennonite, from the eye-popping tightness of Mennonite braids to the top five “shame-based foods” in a Mennonite child’s school lunch. (By this, she means the most embarrassing and smelly foods that Mennonite kids did not want to be caught dead eating in front of their peers.) And while she has issues with the way her Mennonite childhood failed to equip her to challenge male authority (and may have enabled her disastrous decision to remain with Nick through years of his bipolar disorder and verbal abuse), she also credits her upbringing with a strong support system and unconditional love. And hey, she knows how to make 1,000 different recipes out of a head of cabbage. That has to be worth a lot.

 

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