Elfrieda’s departure for study in Oslo

Elfrieda Von Riesen’s departure for study in Oslo is both a literal journey out of the family home and a decisive break from the restrictions of her Mennonite community. At seventeen, she leaves for a recital in Norway and further piano study; her eleven-year-old sister, Yolandi Von Riesen, remembers the airport farewell as a moment when separation becomes real, even as Elfrieda asks her to keep writing. The departure follows years of musical discipline, conflict with community authorities, and a family history shaped by migration and silence.

Education and the decision to leave

The departure is prepared by Elfrieda Von Riesen’s exceptional academic and musical achievement. She has finished high school early, at Christmas, earned honours in every subject, received six piano scholarships, and won a Governor General of Canada prize for the highest marks. Her success intensifies the elders’ alarm rather than easing it: their opposition to higher education is especially strong when the student is a girl, and they fear that learning will give her ideas and draw her away from the community.

That conflict has already played out inside the family home. When the elders arrive to challenge Elfrieda Von Riesen’s plan to study music, her father, Jake Von Riesen, receives them while her mother, Lottie, stays in the kitchen rather than serving them. The confrontation is interrupted when Elfrieda Von Riesen begins playing Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor, Op. 23. The piano itself has long been contentious: it is prohibited in the town, but her parents secretly brought one home after a doctor recommended a creative outlet for her. Once the elders discovered it, they allowed it to remain only on the condition that it be used as an instrument for the Lord. Her playing in front of them makes the piano an audible assertion of a life beyond those limits.

Her plans also touch a history her parents struggle to speak about. The family’s grandparents came from a Mennonite village in Siberia in 1917, and mention of Russia brings distress to Elfrieda Von Riesen’s parents. Her paternal grandfather survived the killing of his parents, was transported to Moscow, and was sent to Canada with other Mennonites. He warned the next generation not to teach their children Plautdietsch if they wanted them to survive. Yolandi Von Riesen understands this silence as part of a trauma passed between generations. When Elfrieda Von Riesen mentions that she may visit Russia while in Europe, the idea meets her father’s immediate opposition. Her departure therefore sets artistic ambition and the wish to explore family origins against an inheritance organized around fear and silence.

The interview on the way to the airport

Yolandi Von Riesen recalls the journey to Winnipeg airport as an improvised interview for a school newspaper. Their parents sit in front, with Jake Von Riesen driving, while the sisters ride in the back. The road is covered in black ice, and the landscape passes in fields and snow. Yolandi Von Riesen asks whether Elfrieda Von Riesen is never coming back; Elfrieda dismisses the question as poorly prepared, then turns the interview toward the piano.

Her answer describes performance as a sequence of emotional choices. A pianist, she explains, should establish tenderness near the beginning, allowing tension and drama to build until the audience remembers that earlier gentleness and longs to return to safety. From there, the performer can briefly return to tenderness or continue through the violence, pain, and tragedy to the end. Either choice is valid: one leaves the audience comforted and innocent again, the other restless and yearning. Her account makes musical interpretation a way of deciding where to leave listeners, and gives Yolandi Von Riesen a vocabulary for the expressive force that has helped carry her sister beyond home.

The farewell and its promise

Before passing through the frosted airport security doors, the sisters play one last game of Concentration, with the hand-clapping and leg-slapping that accompany it. Elfrieda Von Riesen calls Yolandi Von Riesen by her nickname, Swivelhead, and asks her to write letters. Yolandi Von Riesen worries that her life will give her nothing to write about; Elfrieda answers that life does not need an event to count as life. When Yolandi Von Riesen agrees to try, Elfrieda presses her to make a real promise, saying that she is counting on her.

The request gives the separation an obligation as well as a sadness. Yolandi Von Riesen’s ordinary days, which she fears will make dull letters, are precisely what Elfrieda Von Riesen wants preserved. As the flight is called, their parents stand smiling bravely and dabbing at their eyes. Elfrieda Von Riesen is crying too, but turns her head so her younger sister will not see. Yolandi Von Riesen notices the concealed gesture and thinks of recording it in a section of her letters devoted to observations of things meant to be hidden. The wish to write becomes a way to attend to what the family cannot easily say aloud.

After the departure

On the drive home, Lottie takes the wheel while Jake Von Riesen lies in the back seat with his eyes closed and Yolandi Von Riesen sits beside her mother. Snow limits their view to the flakes in the headlights and a small stretch of road. Lottie says she will tap the brake to test whether the road is still icy; before Yolandi Von Riesen can stop her, the car spins out and lands upside down in a ditch. The departure is thus followed immediately by an accident, though the account’s emphasis remains on the altered family journey and the farewell still unfolding in memory.

The scene gives the departure its lasting shape: a young musician leaves a community wary of women’s education, while her sister is left with the task of making a life’s uneventful details matter on the page. The final game, the promise of letters, and the hidden tears do not undo the distance. They establish a form of connection meant to cross it.