The Russlander
Katherine (Katya) Vogt is now an old woman living in Winnipeg, but the story of how she and her family came to Canada begins in Russia in 1910, on a wealthy Mennonite estate. Here they lived in a world bounded by the prosperity of their landlords and by the poverty and disgruntlement of the Russian workers who toil on the estate. But in the wake of the First World War, the tensions engulfing the country begin to intrude on the community, leading to an unspeakable act of violence. In the aftermath of that violence, and in the difficult years that follow, Katya tries to come to terms with the terrible events that befell her and her family. In lucid, spellbinding…
$23.00
August 20, 2002
Sandra Birdsell was born in 1942 in Winnipeg, the fifth of eleven children, to a Dutch-Mennonite mother and a French-speaking Métis father – but that’s where the similarities to the Vandal family end, she insists. Children of the Day was inspired by the childhood memory of a census taker who came to the door and reduced her family’s rich and varied heritage to a simple fill-in-the-blank “French.” Her father would later assure the young Bartlette children that they were in fact “true Canadians”–a little bit of this and little bit of that.
Birdsell began writing when she was a girl, but it wasn’t until after she had three children (and a variety of jobs, including seamstress, cocktail waitress and Avon…