The Bolshevik Revolution enters the novel through family memory rather than a broad account of political events. It is the year, 1917, that anchors the Von Riesen family’s Siberian origins and the upheaval that preceded their migration to Canada; generations later, that history helps explain the family’s guardedness around Russia and the burden of inherited suffering.

Family Origins and Flight

Yolandi Von Riesen recalls that her grandparents came from a small Mennonite village in Siberia in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution. The account does not attribute particular acts to the revolution or explain the village’s political circumstances. Instead, it locates the family’s remembered catastrophe in that historical moment and follows its consequences through one survivor’s life.

Yolandi’s paternal grandfather survived the murder of his parents near their barn by hiding in a manure pile. A few days later, he was placed in a cattle car with thousands of other Mennonites and taken to Moscow; from there, he was sent to Canada. The account connects the revolution-era setting to displacement and the family’s eventual arrival in Canada without reducing the individual violence to a simple explanation of its causes.

Silence and Inherited Memory

The migration did not end the event’s presence in the family. Yolandi recalls that even the slightest mention of Russia could unsettle her parents. Her grandfather warned them against teaching their children Plautdietsch, a language associated in the family’s account with shame and the pressure to remain silent about the past. His experience persisted not only as a story of what had happened, but as caution passed down to the next generation.

Yolandi also describes her grandfather as carrying the memory of slaughter behind his green eyes even when he smiled. Her mother later understood suffering as something that can pass from one generation to another. The revolution-era history therefore remains active long after the family’s departure: its afterlife is visible in silences, anxieties, and inherited efforts to protect children from the past.

Historical Echoes in the Present

The family’s inherited silence appears alongside the restrictions imposed by the East Village Mennonite community. When Elfrieda Von Riesen sought to study music at university, church authorities treated a girl’s desire for higher education as a threat. The community also prohibited pianos, and the family had kept Elfrieda’s instrument concealed before the elders learned of it. These episodes are not presented as equivalent to the violence in Siberia; they place the family’s remembered history beside a later struggle over authority, education, and the freedom to leave.

That contrast gives the Bolshevik Revolution its particular narrative significance. The revolution is not dramatized as a public political episode but recalled through the family’s journey from a village in Siberia to Canada and through the habits of silence that journey left behind. Its effects form part of the inherited world from which Elfrieda’s and Yolandi’s generation must make their own choices.