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Summary
Summary
Katya's story begins in Russia in 1910, on the brink of revolutionary changes that will upend Katya's world.
Born into a Mennonite community on the Russian steppes, Katya and her family live on the large Sudermann estate. Their religion, their traditions, and the luxurious green of their fields set them apart from the Russian workers who toil on the estate.
Katya's father, foreman of the estate, has been promised a land of his own to farm, but each year the Sudermanns put him off. 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, in the wake of the First World War, revolution comes. First the German army, then anarchists, Bolsheviks, and Communists sweep across the land. Katya is tested by a world upended.
In lucid, spellbinding prose, author Sandra Birdsell vividly evokes time and place, and the unease that existed on the brink of revolutionary change.
Author Notes
Sandra Birdsell was born and raised in Manitoba the 5th of 10 children.
She began publishing in 1982 at the age of 40 and has since published 3 books of short fiction, and 3 novels, including; Missing Child, The Town That Floated Away, The Two-Headed Calf, The Chrome Suite, Ladies of the House and Night Travellers
Birdsell was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, for The Two-Headed Calf, in 1997. She was also shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, for The Chrome Suite. Birdsell won the Marian Engel Award, the Writers' Development Trust, for major contribution to literature in 1993, the McNally Robinson Best Book of the Year, for The Chrome Suite in 1993, as well as the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award, for The Missing Child in 1990.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
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 one always haunted by the past. Finely wrought, but leached of passion or dramatic tension. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
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 Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
This historical novel juxtaposes the serenity and nurturing qualities of family, community, and nature with the violence and wanton destruction of an anarchistic peasant revolution. Katya and her family live in a small, pacifist Mennonite community in the oasis of the Russian steppes. In a single-page quasiprolog, Birdsell (Agassiz) unfurls a gripping tension that persists throughout, as Katya and her family are caught in the tide of the Russian Revolution: discontent breeds random violence, which ultimately destroys her close-knit family and village. Though Katya is an adolescent at the time of the events, the reader moves back and forth through time and space via her eyes. In this compelling, beautifully descriptive novel, nature is a vital allegory for beauty, accomplishment, unity, and purpose; conversely, in the hands of marauding usurpers, it becomes a metaphor for mayhem, devastation, and death. Recommended for all collections.--Sofia A. Tangalos, SUNY at Buffalo (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
