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