1917

1917 is the historical anchor for the Von Riesen family’s account of its Mennonite origins in Siberia and the trauma carried from that history into later generations. The novel gives the year a personal rather than documentary significance: it marks the beginning of a family story of violence, forced migration, silence, and memory that continues to shape how its descendants understand their past.

Historical Anchor

The family’s grandparents came from a small Mennonite village in Siberia in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. The account identifies that place and time as the beginning of a history of terrible events, but does not assign every later occurrence an exact date. The year therefore serves as a point of origin, connecting the family’s Russian roots to the upheaval and suffering remembered by its descendants.

Survival and Migration

The account focuses on the paternal grandfather’s childhood. His parents were killed near their barn, while he survived by hiding in a pile of manure. Days later, he was put in a cattle car with thousands of other Mennonites, taken to Moscow, and sent on to Canada. The route from Siberia through Moscow to Canada makes migration part of the family’s survival story: displacement is not an abstract inheritance but a journey imposed on a child after the destruction of his family.

Inherited Silence

The family’s history is transmitted not only through events but through what people avoid saying. Plautdietsch is described as a language of shame, and Mennonites are portrayed as having learned to keep silent and shoulder their pain. The grandfather advised that the children should not be taught the language if they were to survive. Later, Yolandi’s mother learns that suffering can pass from one generation to the next, a formulation that gives the family’s silence a psychological as well as cultural dimension.

The Past in Later Generations

The past becomes visible in the parents’ alarm whenever Russia is mentioned. When the teenage Elfrieda suggests visiting Russia to explore her roots, her father reacts with immediate fear, exposing how incompletely the family’s history has been laid to rest. The family’s local Mennonite community also resists women’s higher education and treats the piano with suspicion; these pressures form part of the setting in which the daughters negotiate inheritance and departure, though the novel does not present them as direct consequences of the events of 1917.

Years later, Yolandi revisits the family history while reflecting on the church’s condemnation and the harm caused by inherited fear. She recognizes that her father, Elfrieda, and other family members were children shaped by a past they did not choose. In this way, 1917 remains active in the narrative not as a fully reconstructed historical episode, but as a remembered source of fear and silence whose effects continue to demand interpretation.