To Antoine

In this timely work of historical fiction by E. J. Wiens, the narrator, Peter Enns, a retired teacher in Manitoba, faces judgement as a war criminal. He relives his childhood and youth during the Stalinist terrors and escape following the Nazi occupation of his Mennonite village in Ukraine, then a refugee in Germany, an interlude in Paraguay, and finally three troubled decades as a father and teacher in Canada. While he awaits his fate he struggles with his judgement upon himself, haunted by memories of looming figures from his Mennonite past, and above all by the shrouded presence of Antoine, his mentor and idol during his youth and early manhood.

EXCERPT

An old man taking inventory of accumulated griefs and failings, fanning smouldering memories, picking among the ashes for scraps of vindication, something to settle the heave in the pit of my stomach. I come here in all weather, oblivious to the chill in the air as the months slip by toward winter. September, November, December, those embers of the dying year. ...

I am like a ghost among them, but my presence does not haunt them. I am just some sordid business from the past for the proper authorities to deal with. I scorn their judgment, but unless I be judged I am nothing. So I take pen and paper and turn to you, Antoine.

It’s a magnificent book … a kind of micro history or case study, because its treatment of memory (right up to the crushing final line), of impossible moral choices, of survival and compromise and betrayal, transcends the particulars of the narrative and speaks to the human condition at a time of crisis and horror… It’s an important book, and wonderfully crafted.

Gordon Campbell, FBA, Leicester

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We are what we remember. This overwhelming story asks: does Peter Enns dare to remember what he has done and not done, what was done to him by those he loved, or hated; including Antoine, his brother, mentor … his idol.  Good reader, dare to follow Peter as he unflinchingly remembers himself. And you will discover the beauty, the guilt, the goodness, the horror of being a human being in the (as he calls it) “demented” 20thcentury.

- Rudy Wiebe