Written From the Heart

Love of Letters

Part I

A few years back, in the cleaning out of possessions a.k.a. downsizing, I discovered I had kept every letter anyone had ever written to me...every single one... Since my letter writing career started in middle school, there were a LOT of letters, the bulk of them from my high school and college years, diminishing in number in the years after. I decided to be relatively ruthless in my getting rid of most of them, but not without reading them first. My history-minded son was appalled: “Mom, this is primary source historical material from the 60s and 70s!” With his words ringing in my ears, I did my reading cautiously, erring on the side of keeping more than I originally intended.

There were letters from high school friends away at other colleges, some describing the spiritual climate of their campuses. It was at the height of the Jesus Movement, and strangely, some of these letters read like Paul's epistles or the book of Acts, telling of the amazing things God was doing in their groups at school. These letters were keepers. There was post-high school gossip from back home and the sweetly awkward letters from guys who were “just friends” who were navigating relational dramas and college adjustments. These letters were read and tossed. Actually, most letters contained relational drama, girls away at school struggling with being separated from high school boyfriends in distant colleges. There was a large collection of letters from two high school friends, one telling of the history of the friend's relationship with the guy she would eventually marry and is still with fifty years later. The other collection told a similar story, but since I had lost touch with this friend several years after college, I had no idea how the story ended. I tracked both friends down, got their addresses and sent them each a large envelope full of the “primary source” documents of their early love. I hope they enjoyed reading those letters as much as I did. And, of course, I kept every letter written to me by my now husband back when we were dating long distance during his early years in graduate school.

My downsizing letter adventure, though a lot of work, was, for the most part fun, a blast from the past. It did, however, make me a little sad to think the texting/email generation is not likely to ever experience that same adventure, both the overwhelming trauma of wading through a massive stash of old letters and the “primary source” joy of finding both delightful and painful memories from their distant past. But maybe there is hope. I have a son who owns a manual typewriter and writes letters to friends which he snail mails.

In an earlier post*, I talked about the main existing primary source of Haban/Hutterite history, the combined volumes of the The Great and “Small” Chronicles of the Hutterian Brethren, a series of journals detailing the life of the Hutterites from 1517 through the 1800s. In many ways, these read like letters to the Hutterite people themselves, a communal history, the narrative peppered with personal plural pronouns and adjectives - “we”, “our”, “us”. The Chronicles may have all the trappings of history books, but at the heart of these writings is a letter-like familiarity toward all those Hutterites that were yet to be born. Those to come would want to know what God was doing among those who came before them, what relational dramas played out, even what community gossip there might have been...not unlike the kinds of writing I found in my long-kept stash of letters.

During my downsizing adventure I found a stack of letters that hadn't even been written to me, but to my mother, letters I somehow inherited. My mother, who was fluent in Slovak, corresponded with several cousins in Slovakia until her death. Most she had only met once during a trip to Czechoslovakia in 1938, but she knew them for years through their letters. For about a twelve year period in the early 1990s through 2002, my mom thought it a good idea to take every letter she received from those relatives in Slovakia and translate them into English and pass copies on to whoever might like to read them. A second rereading of this collection of letters revealed lots of what I can only call “Habanisms”, phrases and sentiments common to those with Haban background and totally missing from contemporary letter writing in this country. They'll be the subject of my next post.

In the pre-texting, pre-emailing and pre-affordable phone culture letter writing is what people did to keep connected. While this letter writing was common for the time, I wonder how much of the Hutterite/Haban chronicling gene has come down the family line. Has it shown up in the family letter writing? In addition to my mother's ongoing correspondence with cousins, Grandma also wrote her brother and cousins in Sobotiste. Grandpa wrote his sisters in Svaty Jan. According to my mother's memoir of Grandma and Grandpa, Grandpa had a particularly frequent correspondence with his sister Anna, called Nanina. She wrote long newsy letters, would sometimes write about her dreams and would send pieces of poetry to Grandpa. So much writing. Has the chronicling gene been behind my mom's memoir of Grandma and Grandpa, my cousins' documentation of their own father's life and military career? Is it why my son writes letters on his typewriter? Is it responsible for me embarking on this open-ended chronicle-like writing project blog because, well, Haban R us?

*https://habanrus.blogspot.com/2018/07/imnot-making-this-stuff-up-ihave-love.html

 

Written on the Heart

Love of Lettering

Amid my large collection of art paraphernalia, I find I have a disproportionate amount of calligraphy materials – books, print outs of fonts, nibs and pens, ancient Speedball textbooks. I've always been interested in lettering, so some of these materials are mine, acquired for various printing projects. The majority of materials, however, I inherited from my mother who enthusiastically pursued calligraphy in her retirement years. Mom always had an artistic bent and briefly attended Cooper Union as an art major back in day when Greenwich Village in New York City was the cool place to be an art major. She eventually decided that the art school was a bit too cool for her and her style of art and left to pursue a career as a secretary. When she retired in her 60s, she immediately started taking art classes. There were oil and acrylic painting classes as well as watercolor, but her most repeated classes were always calligraphy. Birthday cards to me and my kids were masterpieces of simple painting and ornate hand lettering. She did a few commissioned pieces for friends and her church, but mainly she lettered because she loved it. And she was good at it.

I always assumed I inherited my artistic abilities from my mom, including my interest in calligraphy, but never thought to look further back than Mom for this seemingly hereditary interest. In researching our Haban roots, I came across an article* about Hutterites and calligraphy. I already knew about their long association with painted pottery, but was surprised to find that they had a long history as calligraphers. This history starts before the Haban, even before the Hutterites themselves, and goes back to the early Anabaptists at the time of the Protestant Reformation.** Initially, the Anabaptists made use of the Fraktur script, a medieval German lettering that was made on geometric principals using a ruler and a compass, then “fractured” (broken up) into the letter design. It is somewhat similar in appearance to what is called Old English lettering, most often associated with Christmas cards and carol titles. This Fraktur lettering survived well past the Middle Ages as it became the go to lettering of the printing press in the early Gutenberg days. The literate Anabaptists jumped at the chance to print their books and Bibles, but when persecution caught up with them, as it always did, they were banned from using the printing press and resorted to hand copying their texts. The ornate Fraktur lettering was initially used, but as divisions occurred among the Anabaptists and they were chased all over Europe, they ended up in different places and were exposed to different lettering. Mennonites went west, taking Fraktur with them. The Hutterites went east with their Fraktur lettering, but now were exposed to the classical Roman lettering know as Antiqua. This became their new go-to lettering for copying Latin texts, keeping the old Fraktur lettering for the “barbaric” languages. The Hutterites were also exposed to Turkish and Arabic calligraphy in the then Turkish-occupied Hungary. The Hutterites may have adopted some of the stylings of the Arabic calligraphy, but more significantly they copied the reverence and perfection with which the Turks copied the Qu'ran. The Hutterites applied this reverence to the copying of the Bible, and both boys and girls were taught to read and copy the Bible carefully by hand in the Hutterite schools. As a result, Hutterites were often respected in the illiterate rural communities they had settled into, protected and employed by the upper class because of their literacy and precise calligraphic skills.

Fraktur

Antiqua

The Hutterites who fled Grandma and Grandpa's towns, choosing not to stay and become Haban, took their love of lettering with them. Hutterite girls in the Dakotas and Canada incorporated the Fraktur and Antiqua lettering into their hand embroidered samplers. But examples of lettering still exist in Haban towns as well. The picture of the book below, found on the facebook page Habánsky dom o.z. Moravský Svätý Ján, is a good representation of the Fraktur lettering, the book possibly a copy of one of the Hutterite chronicles. From the neatness of the lettering I suspect that the book was printed on a press and not hand-lettered. (I have no idea what is written on the open pages, though the side bar of the facebook page, written in Slovak, contains the names Cederle, Tschetter, Pullman, Wirth, Baumgartner, Muller and Kleinedler, all Haban names related to Grandma and Grandpa in some way.)

Mom's love of lettering may have been more caught than taught, though I don't think she had any inkling of the Haban heredity that might have influenced her foundness for fonts. As for me, my choice of lettering when I do letter is less Fraktur and Antiqua and more Drops of Jupiter and Skinny Caps. Still, after finding this lettering connection to the Haban and Hutterite writing, I find myself wanting the precision and reverence of my ancestors to come through in my calligraphy. A perfect and holy Harlott font, perhaps?***

*Maria H. Krisztinkovich, Historical Hungary as Background for Hutterite Needlework in Canada, Hungarian Studies Review, Vol. VIII, No. 1 (Spring 1981) (Don't ask. I run across some of my information in the most serendipitious ways...)

**Check out https://habanrus.blogspot.com/2018/07/thecurse-of-martin-luther-churchhistory.html and https://habanrus.blogspot.com/2018/07/tobaptize-or-not-to-baptize-or-when-to.html if you need a review of Anabaptist/Hutterite/Haban history.

***Yes, this is a popular lettering style.

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. - Jeremian 31:33

 

A Few Tattered Shreds, Redux

Back in the early days of this blog I wrote that I had read somewhere memoirs are about what we remember and not necessarily about what actually happened...and I could not accurately remember who said that. I also wrote about one of my favorite writers, John Gierach, and his amusingly believable essay on remembering. 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 certainly proved true in both Grandma and Grandpa's baptism stories. Grandma always celebrated her birthday on December 29, but her official birthdate, according to the baptismal records was December 28. What was the actual day of her birth? Who knows? Was she born at midnight? Maybe. Overall, this one day discrepancy is probably not a big deal in a culture where name days – the feast day of the saint one was named after - were more likely to be celebrated than birthdays. The bigger deviation from remembered facts, however, is more significant in the names, numbers and birthdates of Grandpa's sisters.

In my mother's memoir of Grandma and Grandpa, Remembering Mama and Papa, she writes of Grandpa's sisters:

Papa was brought up with five sisters. Two other sisters died at birth...Papa had one sister who was younger than him, Katerina...

Mom had written this memoir a number of years after Grandpa had died, so she was writing from memory of Grandpa's memory of his family. He was 92 when he died, and, granted, he was a sharp 92, but his memory was probably less than perfect in remembering the exact ages and order of the sisters that surrounded him growing up, most of whom he had not seen in close to 70 years. In the interest of accurate family history, I will use the baptismal records and Mom's memoir of Grandpa to attempt to make sense of the house full of girls Grandpa grew up with. (Remember, names and spellings are pretty arbitrary in the historical records and family usage.)

Julianna and Maria, twins, were the oldest. Maria died at or soon after birth. Julianna, referred to as Julia, lived into her 80s or 90s.

Theresia was next. According to the memoir, she died of pneumonia or diphtheria as a young married woman leaving behind a despondent husband who killed himself. Their young son was raised by his father's relatives in Vienna.

Then comes Maria, known as Mary. She is the second Maria, and unlike her earlier namesake, she lives to a ripe old age. In her later years she lives in the family home in the Haban section of Moravsky Svaty Jan. She is best know in this blog as the sister whose picture makes it into the book, Hutterite Society.**

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

Rosalia dies at birth. This is one of the two infants that is not mentioned in the memoir, and I never heard Grandpa speak of her, though she would have died almost four years before Grandpa was born.

Catharina is referred to in the memoir as the one sister younger than Grandpa. She is, in fact, two years older than he. She was know as Tecinka Katina and was godmother to my mother and two of her sisters. She lost a husband in World War I, remarried, then moved to Sobotiste, the town Grandma grew up in, where she and her new husband ran a grocery store. She died suddenly in her 50s.

Grandpa – Andreas/Andrew – is the seventh child and only boy.

Amalia/Amelia lives for only a month after her birth. She is the other infant that is never mentioned. Grandpa was only two when she died, so would not remember her. Interestingly, my daughter named her second child Amelia, not knowing that it was a family name.

The youngest is Anna, nicknamed Nanina. According to the memoir, Grandpa was closest to her of all his sisters. They wrote each other long letters frequently over the years. She, too, was in her 90s when she died, eight months before Grandpa died. He had outlived all his sisters.

So, that's the updated story of Grandpa and his sisters. It was kind of fun going through what passed for a data base in the late 1800s, searching for those few tattered shreds of what actually happened and finding the names and dates for all those siblings. It was also encouraging to see the historical shreds were slightly more than a few and probably less tattered than they initially appeared.

Julia, Anna and Maria, rocking the best of Haban women's fashions

*See post from June 8, 2018, A Few Tattered Shreds...

**See post from June 22, 2018, Mary, Mary Quite...Haban

In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer. ― Adam Sisman

 

Baptism – Adults only, please...or not

Back at the very beginning of my Haban discoveries, the historical item that first caught my attention was the journal entry regarding infant baptism.* Up until this point in Hutterite life, babies were not baptized. They may have been blessed or dedicated or committed to God's purposes, but babies were not baptized in the Catholic way of assuring their eternal salvation. Baptism, as such, was a decision for adults who fully understood they were acknowledging they had a new life in Christ. Infants and children, until they reached an age where they, too, could understand this acknowledgment of a new spiritual life, were not to be baptized. In Grandma's town of Sobotiste, this issue between Hutterite belief and Catholic doctrine came to a head in the mid 1700s:

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.**

By the time Grandma and Grandpa were born, the Haban attitude toward infant baptism had radically changed in both Sobotiste and Grandpa's town of Svaty Jan. Instead of the insistence that baptism be reserved for those mature enough to make an acknowledgment of faith in Christ, newborns were quickly – very quickly – baptized. In a time of high infant mortality, the Habans had taken on the very Catholic practice of baptizing a baby as soon as possible just in case the worst happened, which it often did. In a later blog post I will go into a thorough historical study of all that happened in Grandma and Grandpa's towns regarding this conflict and subsequent division between Hutterite and Catholic beliefs regarding baptism. For now, I will look at what infant baptism looked like in Grandma and especially Grandpa's family at the time they were born.

According to the story told to her as a child, Grandma was born on December 29^th on a cold and snowy day. She was promptly baptized in the Haban Catholic chapel two days later during a blizzard even though her mother was not yet recovered from her birth to attend the baptism herself. The actual baptismal records back this up...sort of. According to the records, Grandma was born on December 28^th, not the 29^th and baptized on December 31^th. Grandma always celebrated her birthday on the 29^th and it's possible the church records, more interested in recording the baptismal date, got the birth date wrong in this case. Maybe without Grandma's mother present to set things straight, Grandma's father may have given the wrong birth date. Either way, Grandma was baptized quickly.

Grandpa was one of nine children and the only boy.*** Three of his sisters died in infancy, five survived to adulthood. According to the baptismal records, Grandpa and all of his sisters were baptized within one to two days of birth. The first of Grandpa's siblings, twins, were baptized the same day they were born. One of the twins didn't survive. Grandpa himself was born on April 17^th and was baptized on the 18^th.

Below, I've included snips of the actual entries from the baptismal records of Grandma and Grandpa and his sisters. The information given is as follows: First column is what number the child was that year in that church/town. Grandpa (Andreas) was child number 39. Second column is the day of birth, third column the day of baptism. Fourth column is first name of child. Fifth and sixth column is male or female, seventh and eighth column is legitimate or illegitimate birth. The ninth column in the father and mother's names and religion. The tenth column is a mystery – perhaps the name of the priest officiating the baptism? The eleventh column is the names and religion of the godparents. The twelfth column is the baptismal name of the infant, though in most of the cases it does not differ from the given name. There seems to be a note in the second entry for Maria, perhaps because she was the second Maria baptized in the family, the first Maria being the twin that had died. The last column, “observationes”, seems to be a place for comments, though it is mostly used to note if a child survived infancy or not. A small black cross was an indication that the child did not.

(A click on the snips should open them in a larger screen that is easily readable.)

So, the Haban, by the time Grandma and Grandpa were born, had come quite far from their Anabaptist/Hutterite belief of adult baptism only, and now fully embraced the Catholic practice of infant baptism. This departure from the tenet of faith that gave the Anabaptists their very name does seem to be a drastic turn around. After all, these people were persecuted and chased all over Europe for refusing to baptize their infants. The events that led up to this 180 reversal were not pretty. But that's a story for a future blog post...

*That story can be found in the post from June 1, 2018,  Stumbling into the Past, Part 2

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

***Fun fact: Grandpa, Andrew Cederle, was the only boy with eight sisters. His son, also Andrew Cederle, was the only boy with four sisters as was his son, another Andrew Cederle, again, the only boy with four sisters. There were at least two more Andrew Cederle's before Grandpa, his father and grandfather, but I have no information regarding their siblings.

The snips of the baptismal records are from the Family Search website, a great collection of old records. (Family Search.org Records Slovakia Church and Synagogue Books, 1592-1935 Roman Catholic (Rímsko-katolícká cirkev) Senica Moravský Svätý Ján Baptisms (Krsty) 1877-189... (Inv. č. 1477 (pokrač.) They can be challenging to decipher since they are all handwritten and vary in quality. Thankfully, whoever was doing the entering of data in the baptismal records of Grandpa's hometown had a relatively clear, neat handwriting. Not so in Grandma's hometown.