About those Reimers
About Those Reimers: A Memoir. Elizabeth Reimer Bartel, Rosetta Projects, 2010. 223 pages. $ 20.
About Those Reimers vividly demonstrates how much of one’s life is determined by factors outside one’s control. Elizabeth Reimer Bartel begins her memoir, not with her birth, but with the Mennonites, their movements, and a view of the city of Steinbach in the East Reserve of Manitoba, where a group of them settled in the 1870s.
It was here that she was born, in 1925, into the large, talented, and sometimes contentious H.W. Reimer clan, who happened to own a prosperous Steinbach general store. A religious identity, a unique place, the dynamics and decisions of a particular family—these are the givens within which Elizabeth’s life unfolds.
When she is six, her father leaves the H.W. Reimer family enterprise, the only one of the siblings to do so. He moves his family to Sperling, some 80 miles away. They next live in Winnipeg for some years, struggling financially while inheritance issues in the extended family remain unresolved, and then go back to Sperling. In 1939, Elizabeth returns to Steinbach to attend school, feeling “like a princess come to claim her coronet.” Her family eventually re-settles in Steinbach as well, though with an interlude in Hamilton, Ont. The memoir takes us up to Elizabeth’s marriage during World War II and the couple’s early years together.
The author provides insights into tensions in the extended Reimer family—their “continuing saga” —and glimpses too of the theological “hairsplitting” that seems to beset the Mennonites at every turn. Since she writes through the lens of her memory, however, matters concerning conflicts that left the H.W. Reimer family fortune “in tatters” remain somewhat vague, lost in what she calls “the mysteries of adulthood.” I found myself wishing for the precision that research into legal and church records might have provided.
What the author does so wonderfully in this memoir, however, both in the narrative and in interspersed poems, is evoke (with quite astonishing detail) the sounds and sights and smells of places and times, such as the “fairyland” of her grandfather’s store or the ambience of “English” Sperling. She has the gift of penetrating description, speaking, for example, of “the rude vigour” that prevailed among the Reimers, her uncle “plump as a toy bear,” and God—for the Mennonites—not soft “but hard/like a theorem in geometry.”
It is this appealing voice that turns the pages of this memoir. It reveals heritage for the mixed blessing and burden it is. It also reveals Elizabeth Reimer Bartel’s lively personality—her uniqueness as an individual within her heritage, and also apart from it.
WINNIPEG, MB—At a time in life when most people are slowing down, Elizabeth Reimer Bartel is busy promoting her second book, a memoir titled About Those Reimers.
“I have always thought that the story of my extended family was a story worth telling,” the 85-year-old says by phone from her home in Victoria, B.C. “It is really the story of an ambitious family who did very well. My grandfather became very prosperous and wealthy, and he had a large family. It was sort of the rise and fall of an empire, I call it.”
Reimer Bartel’s grandfather was H.W. Reimer, a Russian immigrant who became a wealthy merchant after starting a store in Steinbach, Manitoba in 1874. The book chronicles the family from the peak of their prosperity to the demise of their “empire” in the 1960s.
The book includes Reimer Bartel’s reflections on what it was like growing up amidst privilege that most girls of the Mennonite settlements of the early 1900s could only dream of.
“The sad thing is, I took it for granted,” says the writer, whose father John worked at H.W.’s department store before buying a car dealership in Sperling, Manitoba. “It was just the way it was. It was a very secure and idyllic childhood until I was six years old.”
The demise of the family’s empire was the result of a conflict over how H.W.’s wealth was to be divided after he and his wife died. It was to be divided among all nine of his children, but his son Henry felt that, as the eldest male child, he was entitled to all of it.
Reimer Bartel says the story includes how the family’s Mennonite church community responded to the conflict, and also recounts a significant conversion her father experienced that led to him forgiving his brother.
“I hope people take away from the book that families are terribly important, and where you come from is important,” Reimer Bartel says. “It made me realize how rich my heritage is and it taught me how to live a richer, fuller life.”
Elizabeth Reimer Bartel 