Among the Ashes

The letters collected in this book form the correspondence received and preserved throughout Jacob Peter Rahn’s lifetime (1910 – 1991). These letters were sent from the southern Ukraine, where the Rahn family continued to live after Jacob moved to Canada. From 1930 until 1942 the Rahn family experienced and recorded the entire spectrum of events in their village during the period of dekulakization and collectivization. These are not the letters of exceptional individuals accomplishing exceptional things but merely of people desperately trying to survive and even seeking, usually under duress, to contribute to the new system through their work and energy. That many of them did not survive or encountered a fate beyond what any human being should be expected to endure, is a searing condemnation of the methods employed in the institution of that utopian idealism and of its accompanying propaganda. The grass roots correspondence gathered together in this book conveys the experiences of the same ordinary people that the communist ideology claimed to be liberating.

Editor Peter J. Rahn’s lucid commentary on the letters and the history of dekulakization provides us with a comprehensive portrait of one family during a significant time in Mennonite history.