Book Review: Homespun, Amish and Mennonite Women in Their Own Words
“Ever wish you could visit with a group of Amish or Mennonite women over a cup of coffee? In the pages of Homespun, Amish and Plain Mennonite women swap stories and spin yarns while we listen in. Lorilee Craker, bestselling author of Money Secrets of the Amish, collects these personal writings about hospitality, home, grief, joy, and walks with God. Hear from one woman who struggles with feeling inferior to her sister, from another about her longing for a baby, and from a third who accidentally bought stretchy material to sew her husband’s pants. Each woman’s story is a testament to the grace of God and the blessings of community. Behind Amish romance novels and tourist spots and television shows stand real people, with longings and loves just like the rest of us. Every Amish and Mennonite woman has a story. In Homespun, you get to hear some of them.”
Homespun is a collection of stories from women living in the Amish and Plain Mennonite communities. They share their life experiences including faith, home living, grief, and stories to make you smile. What I realized reading these is that we tend to focus on what sets apart from the Amish and the Plain Mennonite community rather than what we have in common.
These women have families to feed, or, families they long for. They struggle with jealousy, insecurity, grief, and questions of faith. That was something I never gave thought to, so I really appreciated these women opening up their lives as they have. These are stories that gave me a break from a busy summer to engage in a simpler, but not perfect life. I liked that different topics were covered, including different emotions. Lorilee Craker did a wonderful job editing these stories to a memorable book I think readers will find as satisfying as an Amish pie.
Here’s an excerpt from Homespun: Amish and Mennonite Women in Their Own Words
Lorilee Craker, editor
Excerpt ©2018 by Herald Press
I’m just a simple Mennonite girl from the prairies.
This is what I tell people, and it’s true. As a two-week-old adopted infant, I was brought to the home of my Mennonite
parents, Abe and Linda Reimer, on a slushy April day in 1968. From that moment on, I was their daughter, grafted into
the family tree and over four hundred years of Mennonite history.
On my mom’s side, we are country folk, descendants of Mennonite pioneers who traveled from Ukraine in the 1870s,
carrying scoops of hearty winter wheat from the Old Country to plant in the New. The Loewens and the Brandts of
Rosenort, Manitoba, still speak Low German (Plattdeutsch) and partake of Faspa (a late afternoon lunch) on any given
Sunday. The ties of language, food, and culture that bind them to their pioneer great-great-grandparents are startlingly
durable. The Isaacs and Abrams and Sarahs and Lydias of old, who lugged steamer trunks halfway across Canada on Red
River carts and abided in sod huts, would be so proud.
My dad was born in 1937, in a Mennonite colony in Ukraine. He was born into a holocaust waged by Stalin against his
own people. By the time my dad was ten months old, he had lost his twin sister, Anna, to starvation. At age six, he fled
with thousands of other refugees across Ukraine by foot, fleeing Stalin. He arrived by boat in Canada in 1947, a ten-year-
old immigrant Mennonite boy.
You see, I knew from early on that there were lots of different kinds of Mennonite stories.
But I didn’t know until I went away to college in Chicago at the age of nineteen that there was anything peculiar about
being Mennonite. Hey, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where I was raised, you can’t throw a Fleisch Perishky (meat bun)
without beaming another Menno on the head. Upon arrival in Chicago, I quickly realized, much to my surprise, that most
people outside of Mennonite communities assumed I had come from buggy-driving, bonnet-wearing, butter-churning
folk. Everyone seemed to think that being Amish or Old Order Mennonite and being my kind of Mennonite were one
and the same.
This assumption led to lots of explanations on my part about the difference between my modern Mennonite upbringing
(“like Baptist, with a German accent and special foods”) and those other related subcultures. It also led to me writing a
whole book about the Amish, who I came to realize were more closely tied to me and my upbringing than I had ever
dreamed.
As I visited Amish homes and barns in Michigan and Pennsylvania for my 2011 book, Money Secrets of the Amish, I
recognized bits of their dialect, Deitsch (Pennsylvania German), from my spotty grasp of Low German. The Amish
women’s hair buns and long skirts, not to mention the tantalizing aromas of fruit strudels (Platz, to me) baking in their
ovens, reminded me of my beloved grandma Loewen. I recalled my little dynamo of an Oma (grandmother) tsk-tsk-ing
me about the length of my skirt. She always had a twinkle in her eye as she chided me, but I still made sure to go for full
coverage as I interviewed the Amish.
Among the Amish, there was a feeling of welcome, of peace and simplicity. I felt oddly at home among my spiritual and
cultural cousins. Both Amish and Mennonites are Anabaptists, a Christian group that began during the 1500s and
continues in a variety of forms today.
These combined elements in my background prepared me well to curate this book you hold in your hands. I was excited
to cross those hospitable Anabaptist thresholds again, if only through the writers’ words. I knew I would find a gentle
spirit in the writings of my Mennonite and Amish sisters, and I was right.
Even though some of these writers drive cars and hold jobs like the rest of us in the world, their rootedness in their
Anabaptist heritage sets them apart from that world. In these writings, most of which are drawn from two Anabaptist
women’s periodicals (Daughters of Promise and Ladies’ Journal), I found a sisterhood of women with shared values. As I
read dozens of essays and devotional pieces and true stories, all written by women, some themes arose.
Welcome. A deep sense of hospitality is fundamental to these women. Yet it’s not hospitality in the HGTV, your-house-
needs-to-be-perfect kind of way. “It is easy to overthink hosting,” writes Vicki Kaufman. “There’s no formula for the
perfect menu, the perfect conversation, the perfect music playlist. Our Lord Jesus made it look quite simple, and his
hosting style can be described in one word: love.”
Abide. Hospitality is sacred and spiritual, but it doesn’t mean these writers don’t want to have an appealing home space
in which to dwell. They want to abide in an abode, if you will, that nurtures them and feeds their spirit. “Keep it simple
but significant,” says Bethany Hege in “White Space.” The writers here expound beautifully on what home means to
them.
Testimony. Story makes the world go round. When we hear the stories—the testimonies—of others, we are better able
to understand our own story and our place in the world. These narratives stirred different emotions in me. My heart
ached for Ervina Yoder as she described what it was like for her to be the mother of a longed-for but stillborn baby: “I go
grocery shopping and no one knows I’m a mommy,” she writes, from a to-the-bone level of honesty. I was inspired and
encouraged by Danielle Beiler’s trust in God as her provider. “If God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, he can take care
of my needs.” And I giggled at Mary Yoder’s secondhand testimony of an Amish man whose pants were just too stretchy.
Poor guy was definitely in a “ferhoodled” state of mind!
Wonder. The blazing faith of early Anabaptists is evident in the openness of these writers to all things wondrous. This
short-but-sweet section easily could have been filed under “Testimony,” as the four pieces are true stories of miracles,
phenomenal happenings that don’t make sense from a human perspective. But these tales deserve their own section, as
they highlight the possibility of the miraculous happening all around us, in big ways and small.
Kindred. A core value of both Mennonites and Amish is the preeminence of family—kinfolk, whether they be kindred or
not. I grew up with dozens of cousins between two close-knit families, and I thought that’s how it was for everyone. Our
kin shape us in ways both known and unknown, good and bad. These essays and stories speak to the tremendous
influence of family, from our great-grandparents to our children. Writing about family trees, Gert Slabach offers this
pearl of wisdom: “Whether we’re part of the tree from our beginning or whether we were grafted in, we belong. We not
only belong to the tree; the tree is a part of us. Those knots and gnarled limbs? There’s a story behind them.”
Beloved. As I sifted through these essays, I was struck by the faith shining through. More than once, tears came to my
eyes, and I lay down the piece I was reading to meditate on it a bit. These essays enthused my soul, and I came away
feeling as if I had just been to church. My cup had been filled. There is something wonderfully elemental and childlike
about the devotion expressed here, devotion even in doubt. These pieces drew me closer to the One who calls all his
daughters “beloved.”
In closing, my wish for you as you read these wunderful gut pieces of writing is that you will enjoy them as much as I did.
You don’t have to be a simple Mennonite girl from the prairies to do so. All you need to do is open your heart and let the
homespun words of these women enlarge your worldview, extend your heart, and increase your friendship with the Creator of all good and gut things.
Purchase Homespun HERE.
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I received a copy of Homespun from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
