Download PDF by Harvey L. Dyck: A Mennonite in Russia: The Diaries of Jacob D. Epp,

In the lives of standard everyone is the truths of historical past. Such truths abound within the diaries of Jacob Epp, a Russian Mennonite school-teacher, lay minister, farmer, and village secretary in southern Ukraine. This abridged translation of his diaries bargains a remarkably bright photo of Mennonite neighborhood lifestyles in Imperial Russia in the course of a interval of bothered swap. Epp’s writings exhibit a talented and sincere diarist of deep emotions, and inform a human tale that no traditional old account may possibly desire to equal.

The diaries overflow with the main points of his workaday global. relatives, village, church, and neighborhood workouts are damaged via journeys to industry, visits to different Mennonite settlements, and a memorable steamer voyage to boomtown Odessa at the Black Sea. He chronicles his long-time involvement in an strange Imperial scan during which Mennonites have been “model farmers” in Jewish villages.

Harvey L. Dyck locations the diaries of their old, ethnocultural, social, non secular, fiscal, and political settings. in response to archival learn, interviews, travels, and consultations with different students, his special and perceptive advent and research hint Jacob Epp’s lifestyles and current a caricature and interpretation of his greater kinfolk, group, and Imperial world.

With remarkable readability the diaries and advent jointly re-create a time and lifestyle marked by way of controversy and flux. They replicate major elements of the event of ethno-religious minorities in Imperial Russia and of the improvement of the southern Ukrainian frontier. peculiarly, they fill major lacking pages of the nice community-centred tale of Russian Mennonite life.

This e-book is richly illustrated with maps, black-and-white images, and watercolour work through Cornelius Hildebrand, Jacob Epp’s former village tuition student and later brother-in-law.