Mennonite in a Little Black Dress
I recently read Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen. The book has become a bestseller and many people have written reviews, so I’m sure someone has said what I think. The title is misleading, not that anyone but Mennonites would care. Her stories are at times funny, at times a bit mean, and sometimes just repetitive. How many times do we need to hear about her former husband, his charm, manic-depression, and that he “left her for a guy named Bob”?
The book did prompt some thoughts. For example, I could identify with the strong sense of being different, or odd, as a child because my parents were Mennonite (the kind who thought Janzen’s Mennonite Brethren were “worldly”) and my grandparents were members of the Conservative Mennonite Church having left the Amish when my parents were young. Now, if I ask my students at Iowa Mennonite if they have ever felt different because they are Mennonite, they look at me as if I am some kind of moron. “Why would they feel different because they were Mennonite?”
I’m not sure exactly why I felt different. I didn’t dress much differently from the Catholic kids at Kalona Elementary, I ate the school lunch, and as third graders we weren’t drinking, smoking, or having sex, but still I felt different. It only got worse as I got older. Most of my relatives did not have TV. We did, but were not allowed to watch certain shows because they might be too violent. On the other hand I was one of the few kids allowed to watch the Smothers Brother’s.
The book also reminded me of a lot of the young Mennonites we met when we lived in Philadelphia. They were often from a conservative or plain family in Lancaster, PA. They had gone to a Mennonite college and done well and now they were in the city for grad school or med school, or their first professional job. We usually didn’t get to know them well. The first time we would meet them was the Sunday morning the weekend they had moved to the city. Their parents had helped them move, had stayed the night, and before leaving their child alone, they sought out our little Mennonite church.
We usually wouldn’t see them again until their parents came for another visit three months later. The smart ones at least came the weekend before. If they were really smart they found out when we were having a potluck and came for the meal. Then when they came with their parents we could act like we knew them and that they were part of us, and their parents could leave, reassured that their child had found a church home.
Some of these folks wanted nothing to do with Mennonite’s, even one’s who made up our congregation, where no topic was to sacred to be argued about and where we were proud in a Mennonite sort of way of our openness. They wanted to get away from the rules of their childhood, the foods, the clothes, the whole works. Others liked to hang around the edges. Some I think valued what the little congregation was trying to do and what it represented. For others, it was just good to have a close reminder around of what they didn’t want to be and what they were trying to flee.
That is what Janzen's book seems to be. An acknowledgment that it is nice to have this Mennonite "stuff" around because, for one, some of its not so bad, and besides who doesn't feel better after making fun of their stodgy, backward, and repressed background, especially when it lands you on the bestseller list.
