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