Raspberrying
- Publisher
- Black Moss Press
- Initial publish date
- Jun 1991
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780887532221
- Publish Date
- Jun 1991
- List Price
- $10.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
About the author
Fifty kilometres west of Hope is Yarrow, a once thriving Mennonite community established in 1928 when eighty-six settlers arrived from Europe, including the parents of Leonard N. Neufeldt. "Rootless lives may be as endemic to the Canadian and American West as root-bound ones," he laments, "but in a world of change, there is little defence for either condition." Edited by Neufeldt, Before We Were the Land's and Village of Unsettled Yearnings, recall Yarrow's origins. Born and raised in Yarrow, Neufeldt became a professor of American Studies at Purdue in 1978. His poetic recreation of life in Yarrow, Raspberrying, has recalled how refugees from the Soviet Union came to the Fraser Valley to grow fruit and serve God. Yarrow was soon unable to offer most of its young people career opportunities. "The 1950s witnessed a modest but gradual decline in the Mennonite population, the 1960s a precipitous one," he concludes.