Spelling and Geography...

As a middle schooler, I briefly became my grandfather's proof reader and spell checker for his business paperwork. He owned a carpentry business, and when the time came to send out bills with a description of services performed, he felt limited by his command of the English language. He had been educated in Hungarian in school, spoke a hybrid of German and Slovak at home growing up and later learned English when he came to the United States. Whenever I corrected his frequent spelling errors, he would usually go off on a tirade about how English was a confusing, complicated language. My mom said that part of his problem was that the languages of his youth were mostly phonetic languages. A word was spelled how it was pronounced. If the pronunciation varied, so did the spelling. Easy peasy...or not...

I think this is as good a time as any to talk about the spelling variations, name variations and changes in the geopolitical landscape that I came across in my research. It can get confusing. Take my own personal ethnic heredity as an example. My mother considered herself Slovak. My father's family was Czech. Growing up in the middle of the 20^th century, I identified as being someone of Czechoslovakian descent. Then, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the freeing of the Soviet bloc countries from Soviet influence, Czechoslovakia, in 1993, became two separate countries – the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Was I still of Czechoslovakian descent or was I now half Czech, half Slovak? And it only gets more complicated the farther back in history I looked...

In the 1500s, Jacob Hutter, from whom the Hutterites would get their name, became leader of a group of Anabaptists living in Tyrol (that would become part of Austria) who had most likely migrated from Bavaria (that would become part of Germany) and would soon move to find more religiously tolerant villages in Moravia (that would become part of Czechoslovakia, later the Czech Republic). Because of the Bavarian/Tyrolian roots of the Hutterites, German was their language, and remained their language. The North American Hutterites today still speak German and many of their writings are still in German. By the middle of the 1700s, most of the Hutterites lived within the boundaries of what was now the Habsburg Empire, eventually to become Austria-Hungary, a large area that included what we know today as Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, some random bits of the Balkans and snippets of Italy and Poland as well. It was during this time that Maria Theresa, empress of these lands, decided that the Hutterites really needed to convert to Catholicism...or else.

This mish-mash of people groups and languages makes for a variety of spellings and pronunciations for the names and places I encountered in my readings. Here is a cheat sheet to help us all going forward:

- Grandma's hometown, one of the longest and most stable Haban villages, is Sobotište, a Slovak spelling, but in most Hutterite writings it is spelled Sabatisch.

- Grandpa's hometown name gets complicated. At the time of his birth, his village would be called St. John in English, St. Johann in Hutterite writings and Svätý Ján in Slovak. When the communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, in keeping with their policy to wipe out all religious references, they renamed the small town near Moravia Moravský Ján. After the fall of the Soviet bloc in 1991, Grandpa's village was renamed again, now Moravský Svätý Ján.

- Grandma's maiden name was Pullman, a name found frequently in Hutterite writings. Because of subtle differences in pronunciation Pullman, Pollman, Bollman and Wollman, with variations of a single l and a double n, were all names for the same family.

- Grandpa's name was Cederle, a somewhat Americanized Slovakian spelling. On his diploma from trade school in Vienna, Grandpa's name is spelled Csederle. This is also the spelling that is found in baptismal records for Grandpa and his sisters. Older variations of spelling within the same family group included Zeterle and Czeterle. Say each one of these names aloud, as spelled, and they sound almost identical. (No wonder Grandpa was frustrated by English's insistence on one correct spelling.) The Hutterite spelling of Grandpa's family name, however, is the most unusual – Tschetter. Pronounced somewhat like the cheese, I thought it was an odd variation, until a childhood memory reminded me I had heard the word – well, at least of variation of it – before. Americans that we were, we pronounced Grandma and Grandpa's last name with an s-sound, like setter-lee. But when our grandparents were visited by friends from Czechoslovakia, they would always pronounce their name to sound more like chetter-lair and even chetter. When two of Grandpa's friends came to visit when I was a little child, I wondered why they had referred to my Grandpa as Andrew Cheddar

Mary, Mary Quite...Haban

The difference between my family's remembered stories of the Habans' past and the factual accounts I was finding in my reading and research made me wonder just how connected my family actually was to possible Hutterite roots. My mother's memoir of her mother and father talked about their ancestors being relocated from Hanover, Germany, to the Slovak towns of Svätý Ján and Sobotište by Empress Maria Theresa, then ruler of what would become Austria-Hungary. Perhaps Grandma and Grandpa's parents and grandparents were newcomers to their hometowns, missing out on the 18^th century Jesuit push to make the Hutterites Catholic. But if so, why did their descendants identify as Haban, dress in the 20^th century much as the Haban had done in the 18^th and 19^th centuries? Why was the Slovak language they spoke filled with German words? And why was the Catholicism they professed and practiced made them appear as more than just “good Catholics”?

I started reading about Hutterites in any books I could find in the local libraries. Much of the historical Hutterite writings is, of course, written by Hutterites and Hutterite scholars who view Hutterite history, specifically the Haban part of it, from a faithful Hutterite point of view. According to them, the “true believers” are now living out God's calling in North and South Dakota, Montana, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. But the North American Hutterites did not completely forget their reprobate ancestors who had caved in to the demands of the Jesuits back in the old country in the 1700s. Several times in the 20^th Century, North American Hutterites visited the towns in Slovakia where Haban descendants still lived, curious to know what the descendants of those Hutterites who stayed behind in the 1700s had become. (More about those visits in a later post.) One book I was reading, John Hostetler's Hutterite Society, contained a photo of an old woman, according to the caption, a Hutterite descendant from the Slovak town of St. Johann taken during a 1970 visit. Something about the woman's face looked familiar, reminding me of my grandfather. St. Johann, the Germanic version of the Slovak Svätý Ján, was the town where Grandpa grew up. Maybe the woman in the photo was a relative, a cousin perhaps? I photocopied the picture and sent it to my mother. Mom spoke and wrote Slovak fluently and corresponded with several cousins living in Slovakia. She sent the picture to her cousin Marka who still lived in Svätý Ján, asking her if she recognized the woman in the picture. Her cousin wrote back (and this is the exact, translated quote): “You truly don't know who it is? Well, I'll tell you. It's my mother and your aunt...” The old woman in the photo was Grandpa's older sister Mary. My great aunt Mary's traditional Hutterite dress and head covering, her last name in the picture – Tschetter – the Hutterite spelling of the family name Cederle, her town of St. Johann and the recognition of her as a Hutterite descendant in the photo caption left no doubt – Grandpa's family, at least, was truly Haban.

Photo of Grandpa's sister, Mary, taken from the book Hutterite Society by John Hostetler, (1997)

Haban, Habani, Habaner...

A computer search of the word Haban sometimes has Google wondering if perhaps you were really looking for a hot chili pepper and were too lazy to spell out habanero. Haban, in its Hutterite/Slovakian context is not in common usage. The most frequent Hutterite-related listings for the word are associated with Haban pottery, a floral decorated ware that the Hutterites were known for in Slovakia and that the converted-to-Catholicism Haban continued to produce long after the rest of the Hutterites had left for points east (and then west). Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to take some time to delve a little deeper into the meaning of the word that appears in the title of this blog...

The word Haban is somewhat shrouded in mystery. The truth is that no one really knows specifically what the word means, Haban having multiple meanings and connotations. In her memoir of Grandma and Grandpa, my mom says “Habani” and “Habans”, equivalent forms of the word, mean - “God's true children” - coming from the Hebrew “Habanim”. (The actual English translation of the Hebrew word “Habanim” is closer to “adoption”.) Anabaptist historical writers often add “Habaner” as an equivalent to “Haban” and “Habani”, saying the Haban part is a shortened form of "Haushaben", another name for the Bruderhof, the communal houses the Hutterites lived in.

“Haban” was first used by the peasants of Slovakia as a derogatory nickname for the Hutterites that had settled in their towns. The Hutterites were different from the people whom they settled among, different in dress, lifestyle and religion. The Hutterites were generally seen as strange intruders to the life of the town, and even as they came to be begrudgingly appreciated and tolerated for their expert craftsmanship and nursing skills, they were held at arms length by the local peasants. “Haban” became the label they were known by, perhaps sarcastically intoned with something like “Yeah, they think they are God's true children...” After the 1780s, after the Jesuit-forced conversion of some Hutterites to Catholicism, “Haban” became the name for those former Hutterites who remained in the towns in Slovakia and went through the motions of being Catholic. The remaining Hutterites left Slovakia and went to Wallachia, a section of Romania, then Russia and finally to the United States where they settled through the Great Plains and up into Canada where there are approximately 45,000 Hutterites living today. But the former Hutterites that remained in Slovakia, that group of German-Slovak-Hutterite-Catholic hybrids, were still set apart from their village neighbors by dress and lifestyle though, no longer, at least on a superficial level, by religion. The name that they were called and eventually came to call themselves would continue to be “Haban”...

Mama and Papa were not just ordinary Slovaks, but were better known as Habani – from Remembering Mama and Papa, a memoir by Lillian Cederle Zima

A Few Tattered Shreds...

I remembered reading a great definition of a memoir a few years back. I thought it was a good quote, something to remember when writing about a history interlaced with family memories. However, when I went to verify and attribute the definition to its correct source, I couldn't locate it. I googled every possible variation of the definition I could think of but nothing popped up that was even close. I did locate where I had read it, however. Ironically, it was in an essay about remembering by fly fishing writer John Gierach. In this kind and insightful piece about how people in general, and fisherman specifically, don't always remember the same things about an event, he credits the author John Irving as having said “a memoir is what the author remembers, not necessarily what happened”. I went back to google with “John Irving” and “memoir” in tow...and still no quote, no accreditation. Did Gierach make it up? Did he remember incorrectly in this essay on remembering, where he says our recollections are influenced and made up of many variables – mood, surroundings, other people, various levels of self-perception - “and a few tattered shreds of what actually happened...”? This tension between what one remembers and what actually happened came up frequently as I researched my Haban roots.

In my mother's retirement years, she wrote a book, a memoir of her mother and father (Grandma and Grandpa to us). Her sources of information were what she herself remembered of her childhood and the stories she was told by her parents about what they remembered of their childhood as well as the stories their own parents told them. The first page of her book is as follows (verbatim):

Mama and Papa were not just ordinary Slovaks, but were better known as Habani (or Habans) (from the Hebrew “Habanim” meaning God's true children). They often talked about how their ancestors came to Czechoslovakia way back in the latter part of the 1700s when that country was Austria-Hungary. It did not become Czechoslovakia until after World War I.

Maria Theresa ruled the Hapsburg Dominion after the death of her father in 1740. Slovakia was under her rule and that country was inhabited mostly by peasants who were farmers. Maria Theresa decided to bring trades people into four separate towns in Slovakia. One of the towns was Sobotiste (Mama's hometown). Another town was Moravsky Svaty Jan (where Papa lived) After World War II, the Russians changed the name from Moravsky Svaty Jan to Moravsky Jan.

Maria Theresa uprooted many trades people and their families from the town of Hanover, Germany, with the stipulation that they had to convert to the Catholic faith, so that there would be no religious conflict with the people living in Slovakia. Because of this religious change, these new settlers were referred to as Ana Baptists (meaning a new baptized). They were given land and their own churches and continue to pray in German. When we went to Slovakia in 1921 (approximately 150 years after they had settled there), the people (including me), were still saying their prayer in German. Even the Slovak language that Mama and Papa spoke was interspersed with German words, as I found out when I took a course in Slovak at Julia Richmond High School.

Papa's people were carpenters and Mama's were shoemakers and all these people had very German sounding names, like Schultz, Muller, Baumgartner, Wirth, Wolf, Pullman (Mama's maiden name) and Cederle. Although the peasants dressed in very colorful and decorative costumes, the Habani wore very plain, dark clothes, almost like the Amish people. The two groups did not mix and the Habani considered it below them to marry the peasants. Even the art and ceramics of the Habani had a very Pennsylvania-Dutch look.

My mother's version of the Haban transition from Hutterite to Catholic seems mild and benevolent. The word Hutterite does not even appear in the collective memory of her family recollections. This is in sharp contrast to the persecution-laced accounts I had read in the excerpts from the Book of Chronicles. These accounts were decidedly more brutal. The Jesuits removed unbaptized children from their families and burned books not deemed Catholic. They arrested Hutterite leaders, some bearing the names of my ancestors. And, yet, there seemed to be no mention of this painful time in what my mother and her parents and their siblings remembered of their own parents' stories. Like that dubiously credited definition of a memoir, was the collective family record what was remembered and not necessarily what happened? At this early point in my historical research, I only had a few facts about the 18^th century towns my grandparents were eventually born into. The “few tattered shreds of what actually happened” to make the Haban who they were to become came down to this: Hutterites had settled in towns in what will be Slovakia. Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary attempted to keep the valuable asset of these skilled Hutterite craftsmen and people of upstanding character in these towns without compromising her strong Catholic beliefs. Jesuits (an order of Catholic priests) are employed to turn Hutterites into Catholics. Hutterites push back. Jesuits push back harder. Some Hutterites, tired of pushing back, leave all behind for Transylvania, then to Russia, finally to the United States and Canada. Some Hutterites, tired of pushing back, give up, stay in their homes, their towns, give in to Jesuit demands and become “Catholic”. They baptize their children, send their children to Jesuit schools, but retain much of their Hutterite ways, still speaking German, still wearing the Hutterite clothing, furtively reading their Hutterite books, even having their own “Catholic” church services. They do not mingle with the other townspeople. They maintain their own insular identity. Because they choose to be set apart, not unlike their recent Hutterite forebears, they are identified by a name that distinguishes them from their neighbors. They are known as Haban...

“A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.”

― James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History

Stumbling into the Past

Part 2

Pullman and Cederle in Print

Much later that night, after the kids were in bed, I sat down to resume my reading of the Hutterite chapter in The Story of the Mennonites. Despite, or perhaps because of, the Hutterites' history of constant persecution and relocating, they keep a meticulous journal of their doings for almost 300 years. This Book of Chronicles tells all, from gruesome persecutions to fires, floods and droughts, deaths of church leaders, changes in rules and regulations that governed their religious practices, even details of church quarrels. This chapter on the Hutterites contained excerpts from the Chronicle, listed chronologically by year. As I read on, the name of Grandma's hometown in Slovakia, Sobotište, began to appear in the entries as a town with a thriving Hutterite settlement. Neat, I thought. Now the history is getting personal...

Sobotiste, painted by a relative of Grandma, 1938

*1663: On the third day of September, the Turks and Tators arrived at Dechtiz a short time before dinner They took captive thirty-five souls, and two of the brethren were cut down and murdered. The buildings were burned down, and all the crops in the fields destroyed. The next day the community at Sobotiste was destroyed.

Ouch, I thought. Further entries, however, imply the rebuilding of the Sobotište community, so all appears to be well again. Other sample Chronicle entries go on to report the return of a kidnapped Hutterite woman, a heat wave, an epidemic, and a famine. When I came to an entry for the year 1733, I started getting the chills:

1733: In this year came the terrifying mandate that we should not baptize our newborn babes, but that we must take them to the priests for baptism or suffer a heavy penalty. The elders and the superintendent together with the brethren met at Sobotiste to consult regarding this unheard of order, and decided not without many tears and twangs of conscience, to obey this order, since there was no other way out of this tyranny. This decision caused a great deal of dissatisfaction in the church, and resulted in a division.

Grandma's hometown, a town where its Hutterite community had experienced a relative degree of peace and stability, was about to be turned upside down with a new form of persecution.

1761: On March 21, Jesuit missionaries, accompanied by four guards, appeared at Sobotiste, arrested three of the leaders, Walter, Pulmon, and Cseterle, and took them away. The meeting house was closed, the key turned over to the Jesuit representative, and the brethren were warned that they must attend his preaching and send their children to his catechetical class. They were ordered to give up all their books, to dismiss their teachers, and send their children to the Catholic schools. The Habener were forbidden to carry on their services. Many of the brethren vigorously protested against these measures and cried out that they would rather lay their necks on the block and lose their lives than obey the Catholic priest and send their children to his school.

There it was – Haban(er). My heart skipped a beat, not so much because I saw the word “Haban” in print, but because of the two names in the beginning of the 1761 entry, the last names of the leaders – Pulmon (Pullman), Grandma's maiden name, and Cseterle (Cederle), Grandpa's name.** (I later read the journal entry to my mother who recognized the third name, Walter, as a family still living in Sobotište when she visited the area in 1938.)

A Pullman and a Cederle that weren't Catholic...people with our family names in direct opposition to church authorities. It would take some time, good Catholic girl that I was, to wrap my head around what I had just read. The thought I had leaving the library earlier that day, the one that turned me around and compelled me to check out the book was right – there was so much more I needed to read...

* Journal entries found in The Story of the Mennonites by C. Henry Smith

**Though Grandpa's family was not from Sobotište, he had a good friend with that name from the town, and Grandma had Cederle cousins in her hometown.

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies. - Shirley Abbott