Simple Refugee Wedding: My grandparents (1931)

My father was born less than a year after these 1931 wedding photos.

Jacob Fast and Helen Janzen had been in Paraguay less than 8 months—see the MCC telegram—and tragedy had already struck both refugees families. Jacob’s first wife and a daughter became victims of the epidemic that ravaged the new colony of Fernheim in those first months. He was now a widower at age 39—with an infant and other children without a mother.

Helene was single and 29 years old. Her mother too had died from the same epidemic; her father was partially crippled. They had come from southern Ukrainian community of Spat, Crimea; Fast was from Ural Mountains area in Russia where South Russian Mennonites had created a “daughter colony” a generation earlier.

Each had siblings who fled to Moscow in 1929 with them and who were accepted by Canada in 1930. My grandparents however were rejected—she was a single woman with frail parents; he was a man with an ill child.

Perhaps in contexts like these the falling-in-love part would have to happen sometime after the wedding. Marriage has multiple purposes in conditions of extreme poverty and need.

By all accounts it was a good marriage, but my Helene died too early—after pioneering yet another colony in east Paraguay (Friesland), when her eldest was just 14 years old.

I try to imagine the atmosphere of a wedding under those conditions. I never met these grandparents, and I feel as if there was much sadness that marked the start of their married life. Maybe not.

The photo suggests that the watermelon and pampas grass, rightly displayed, could bring joy. That they had. And community—and now each other.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

See previous posts, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2022/09/eradicating-communist-spirit-in-young.html, (more coming soon).

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