Book review of The White Mosque by Sofia Samatar

The Mennonite neighborhood is directly an evangelizing spiritual group and a “tribe.” As novelist Sofia Samatar (A Stranger in Olondria) explains, the tribe consists of the white descendants of its Swiss, German and Dutch founders, however the faith is rising quickest in Africa. Samatar embodies that duality: Her white American mom met her Black Somali father on a church mission. They raised their household within the United States, the place Samatar went to Mennonite faculties.

So how does Samatar make sense of her identification? To reply this query, she got down to discover how Mennonites have interacted with different cultures and selected an excessive instance: The 1880–84 trek of a small, sturdy group of “Volga” German Mennonites led by minister Claas Epp Jr. Inspired partially by an 18th-century German novel, he thought Jesus would return to Central Asia in 1889. The trekkers landed in what’s now Uzbekistan, and whereas the world didn’t finish the best way Epp anticipated it to, the Soviets did ultimately drive his neighborhood out of the nation.

The White Mosque is Samatar’s considerate, gorgeously written account of a tour she took retracing the trekkers’ difficult path to their new settlement, the place they lived for some 50 years. But her pleasantly digressive e book encompasses rather more: Central Asian tradition, the memoirs of teen trekkers, Mennonite martyrs, doomsday beliefs, her father’s disillusionment, her personal looking adolescence at a Mennonite boarding faculty. She even features a lovely reverie on how the settlers will need to have felt on the day that Jesus didn’t return. (Epp simply stored shifting the date till he suffered a psychological collapse.) 

Samatar’s journey culminates in what stays of “White Mosque” village, the place present Muslim residents have established a museum commemorating their odd however fondly remembered former neighbors. Back in 1935 when the Soviets rounded up the Mennonites for exile, their distraught native staff wept.

Understandably, when Samatar launched into her pilgrimage, she was in search of a sort of self-understanding as a brown lady in a Germanic custom. Instead, she realized to like the trekkers’ “wrongness.” After all, fragmentation could make a beautiful mosaic.