England

England is the setting of August Epp’s exile from the Molotschna Colony and of the education that later enables him to record the women’s deliberations. His life there brings literacy and professional training, but also political expulsion, imprisonment, bereavement, and isolation. England is therefore more than a place of refuge: it is where August becomes able to interpret and document a world from which his family had been cut off, even as he comes to feel he has no home there.

Exile and Family History

August was twelve when his parents were excommunicated by the bishop of Molotschna at the time, Peters’s father, and the family moved to England. The departure left a lasting mark on him. He recalls that nobody said goodbye. For years, he believed the family had been forced to leave because he had been caught stealing pears from a farm in the neighboring Chortiza Colony. The explanation he carried as a child turned the family’s expulsion into a punishment he could attribute to himself, although the account identifies his parents’ excommunication as the reason they moved.

England also became the place where August learned to read and write. As a child there, he tried to make himself legible to God by spelling his name with stones in a large green field, hoping God would find him quickly and complete his punishment. He also tried to spell confession with stones taken from the garden fence. Monica Epp noticed that the wall between the family’s garden and the neighbors’ was disappearing. These acts link August’s new literacy to the guilt and religious fear he carried from childhood, while his mother’s attention to the missing stones anchors that private effort in family life.

Education, Political Involvement, and Imprisonment

August later attended university in England. In his fourth year, he experienced a nervous breakdown, referred to as Narfa, and became involved in political activities. Those activities eventually led to his expulsion and a period of imprisonment. His account gives the sequence without specifying the nature of the activities or the circumstances of his imprisonment; England is presented as the setting for both his higher education and the disruption of the life he had begun there.

While imprisoned, August completed a teaching degree through correspondence. The achievement did not resolve the precariousness of his circumstances. His mother died during his imprisonment, and his father had disappeared years earlier. August explains that he had no siblings because his mother’s uterus had been removed after his birth. By the time he was released, he understood himself to have no one and nothing in England. Homeless and in severe distress, he considered ending his life. His education and qualification thus coexist with loss and material insecurity rather than providing a straightforward path to belonging.

The Return to Molotschna

A librarian listened as August spoke at length about Ona Friesen and the childhood they had shared. He described their games, their attention to the changing length of daylight, their imagined roles as misunderstood disciples later celebrated as heroes, and their mock contests on horseback with fence posts. Their shared play and conflicts made Molotschna, in August’s recollection, a place where life had once made sense, if only briefly and within an imagined world.

The librarian suggested that August return to Molotschna and ask Peters, the current bishop, to accept him as a member of the colony. That suggestion recasts England as a place from which he might depart, not simply a destination his family had once chosen. August did not tell the librarian everything he believed the request would entail: he understood that seeking membership would also require asking Peters to forgive his parents’ sins. The account leaves the particulars of those sins unfinished, but makes clear that a return would involve more than geography. It would mean negotiating the religious authority and family history that had shaped his departure.

England in the Women’s Narrative

August’s experience in England gives him the literacy and command of English needed to explain himself and to write down the women’s discussions in Molotschna. He explicitly identifies his English education as the reason he can read, write, and understand the language. The contrast matters in a community where the women cannot read the Bible for themselves and question interpretations of it delivered by men. August’s ability to make a written record comes from a life outside the colony, while the debate he records concerns whether the women should remain there or leave.

England also forms the background to the vulnerability August describes when the women face the prospect of expulsion. He knows what it is to be separated from Molotschna and to live without secure family ties, but the women’s situation is not identical to his: they must organize together under a short deadline, while August’s recollections center on childhood exile and later personal crisis. The women’s decision to leave, if they take it, is a collective response to danger rather than a repetition of his family’s earlier departure. In this way, England stands at the edge of the book’s central conflict—as the place that made August an educated outsider, and as part of the life history through which he helps preserve the women’s account.