Born Hutterite: stories by Samuel Hofer

Acts of Concealment, the proceedings of a conference on Mennonite writing held a t the University of Waterloo in May 1990, brings together ten critical essays, an intr oduction and a transcription of the closing panel's remarks, poetry by Sarah Klassen, David Wal ter - Toews, Di Brandt, and Patrick Friesen, and prose fiction by David Walter - Toews and Sa ra Stambaugh. The combination of critical and "creative" writing in one volume reflects the pr ogram of the conference and follows the pattern of Harvest: Anthology of Mennonite Writing in Canada (1974), Mennonite Images (1980), and Visions and Reality (1985). Read within the context of those other works on Mennonite writing, the poetry and prose fiction in Acts of Concealment mark a change in the writing anthologized: with the exception of Sarah Klassen's poems and David Walter - Toews "Fear of Landing," the subject matter is not readily identi fiable as Mennonite. That is not to say that an "insider" could not read the Mennonite mat ter into these writers' works, but whether the writers simultaneously conceal and reveal their Mennonite identity or whether they have done with what Rudy Wiebe calls "navel - gazing" a nd are getting on with being writers remains debatable, as the critical essays in the collectio n show. The first three papers, Al Reimer's on Arnold Dyck, Victor G. Goerksen's on the father image in Mennonite poetry, and Harry Loewen's on Gerhard Loewen, might be read as desc ribing the contributions of a Mennonite "canon's" forefathers. Reimer identifies Dyck's two main contributions to Mennonite writing as: 1) depicting "Mennonite experience from a fully integrated ethno - secular perspective rather than from a church - oriented dida ctic perspective"(33); and 2) exploiting "the rhetoric of Low German plain style and the levels of irony it offers"(34). Doerksen sees "continuity reflected in the image of the fa ther in Mennonite poetry"(39), primarily in the "traditional metaphysical father image"(45) of God /father. Harry Loewen situates Gerhard Loewen's poetry in the context of Mennonite writers who began publishing in Russia in the late nineteenth century and continued in Canada afte r the Russian revolution, but notes Loewen's difference in being "among the first Mennonites t o break with the purely devotional - religious verse - making and to turn instead to German c lassical and romantic models"(58). Essays by Magdalene Redekop, Andrew Stubbs, and Wayne Tefs focus on cultural con cern