From Booklist
An elderly resident of a nursing home in Manitoba, Canada, relates the story of her girlhood in czarist and revolutionary Russia to an anonymous interviewer. The daughter of the overseer of a prosperous Mennonite Russian estate, Katya Vogt naively believes the circumference of her relatively privileged position and lifestyle to be inviolate. Her fragile illusions are cruelly shattered when the Bolsheviks and the Russian peasantry aggressively turn against the affluent German-rooted Mennonite community. When most her family members and friends are murdered during the course of a brutal early-morning raid on the farm, she must learn some harsh lessons in survival to persevere in a world gone suddenly mad. This authentically detailed piece of historical fiction serves as an evocative reminder of a permanently vanished place, time, and way of life. Margaret Flanagan
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Library Journal, September 2004
In this compelling, beautifully descriptive novel, nature is a vital allegory for beauty, accomplishment, unity, and purpose.
Star Tribune, November 14, 2004
Birdsell. . . said she was inspired as much by the news of the day as her own family history.
Pioneer Press, November 14, 2004
It took seven years for Birdsell to research her novel. . . . Along the way, she learned something about grace.
Book Description
Katya Vogt is an old woman living in North America, but her rich past is in a Mennonite community in the Russian steppes, where her family's religion, their traditions, and her father's position as farm manager of a luxurious estate set them apart from the surrounding Russian community. As in a Willa Cather novel, the rhythms of the seasons are mirrored in the structures of a society in which everyone knows their place, even if they chafe against it. Then revolution comes. First the German army, then the anarchists, and finally the Communists overrun the land. Katya, schooled in Mennonite pacifism and the forbearance of her father, is tested by a world turned upside-down. She sees, too, how old structures of power begin to reassert themselves even in the midst of chaos. One of thousands of refugees, she not only survives but finds a way to thrive against all odds.
Katya FROM THE PUBLISHER
Katherine (Katya) Vogt is now an old woman living in Winnipeg, but the story of how she and her family came to Canada begins in Russia in 1910, on a wealthy Mennonite estate. Here they lived in a world bounded by the prosperity of their landlords and by the poverty and disgruntlement of the Russian workers who toil on the estate. But in the wake of the First World War, the tensions engulfing the country begin to intrude on the community, leading to an unspeakable act of violence. In the aftermath of that violence, and in the difficult years that follow, Katya tries to come to terms with the terrible events that befell her and her family. In lucid, spellbinding prose, Birdsell vividly evokes time and place, and the unease that existed in a county on the brink of revolutionary change. The Russländer is a powerful and moving story of ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times.
Author Biography: Sandra Birdsell was born in Manitoba and, until recently, has spent most of her life in Winnipeg. Her first novel, The Missing Child (1989), won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, The Chrome Suite (1992), and her most recent collection of short fiction, The Two-Headed Calf (1997), were both shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Her two previous short story collections, Night Travellers and Ladies of the House, were reissued in 1987 as Agassiz Stories. Her most recent novel, The Russländer (2001), won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction, the Saskatchewan Book Award for Book of the Year, and the Regina Book Award, and was a finalist for the GillerPrize.
Sandra Birdsell’s fiction has been anthologized and has appeared in literary journals and Saturday Night magazine.
She lives in Regina.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
Canadian author Birdsell (The Chrome Suite, 1995, etc.) chronicles the effects of the 1917 Revolution on a family of German Mennonites in Russia. Living in Canada, where she emigrated in the 1920s, the aging Katya recalls her early life for a historian. Her story highlights an unfamiliar chapter in Russian history: Mennonites who fled persecution in Germany in the late 18th century and established colonies on the Russian steppes. They thrived there, as did the wealthy Sudermann here. Even Katya's father, who was Sudermann's estate overseer, aspired to be a landowner. Katya recalls in lavish detail that long-ago life-the countryside, Christmas at the Sudermann manor, harvesting the crops-as she describes her own large family, living near the big manor house, and playing with the Sudermann children. But the Sudermanns kept their distance when the Vogts came too close, hurriedly marrying off son Dietrich, who had fallen in love with Katya's older and favorite sister, Greta, to someone more suitable. Such class distinctions quickly became meaningless as WWI began. The Mennonites were pacifists and would not fight for the tsar, but they did serve, like Katya's father, in the medical corps. As the war went badly, unrest grew in the Russian countryside, and then, as the revolution broke out, bands of anarchists, Bolsheviks, and peasants, who had long envied the Mennonites' prosperity, pillaged and plundered their properties. Katya and her two younger sisters miraculously escaped, though not before witnessing the brutal massacre, in 1917, of most of the Sudermann and Vogt families. Katya, then in her teens, was traumatized by the events, but she survived to make a life for herself, though onealways haunted by the past. Finely wrought, but leached of passion or dramatic tension.
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