Katya

Canadian author Birdsell (The Chrome Suite, 1995, etc.) chronicles the effects of the 1917 Revolution on a family of German Mennonites in Russia.

Living in Canada, where she emigrated in the 1920s, the aging Katya recalls her early life for a historian. Her story highlights an unfamiliar chapter in Russian history: Mennonites who fled persecution in Germany in the late 18th century and established colonies on the Russian steppes. They thrived there, as did the wealthy Sudermann here. Even Katya's father, who was Sudermann's estate overseer, aspired to be a landowner. Katya recalls in lavish detail that long-ago life—the countryside, Christmas at the Sudermann manor, harvesting the crops—as she describes her own large family, living near the big manor house, and playing with the Sudermann children. But the Sudermanns kept their distance when the Vogts came too close, hurriedly marrying off son Dietrich, who had fallen in love with Katya's older and favorite sister, Greta, to someone more suitable. Such class distinctions quickly became meaningless as WWI began. The Mennonites were pacifists and would not fight for the tsar, but they did serve, like Katya's father, in the medical corps. As the war went badly, unrest grew in the Russian countryside, and then, as the revolution broke out, bands of anarchists, Bolsheviks, and peasants, who had long envied the Mennonites' prosperity, pillaged and plundered their properties. Katya and her two younger sisters miraculously escaped, though not before witnessing the brutal massacre, in 1917, of most of the Sudermann and Vogt families. Katya, then in her teens, was traumatized by the events, but she survived to make a life for herself, though one always haunted by the past.

Finely wrought, but leached of passion or dramatic tension.