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Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments Abook more than five years in the making can still lay claim to a touch of research drama. The most suspenseful moment in the writing of this book happened at a Hutterite colony in Choteau, Montana, in 2009. I had traveled more than 1,500 miles to the Miller Colony to ask whether I might see copies of the unpublished letters written by four Hutterite men, all conscientious objectors who had been imprisoned at Alcatraz during World War I. The daughter and three grandchildren of one of the men, Michael Hofer, welcomed me to the colony. Sarah Kleinsasser, a granddaughter, had answered my initial telephone call to the Miller Colony. On this day she provided introductions to her mother, Mary Hofer Kleinsasser, Michael’s daughter, who was 90 at the time, and to her brothers Michael and Joseph Kleinsasser, both ministers at the Kingsbury Colony in nearby Valier. After we visited for an hour or so, talking about the Hutterite and Mennonite branches of the Christian tree and whether I was the Stoltzfus who had caused some consternation by trying to convert Hutterites to the Mennonite side (thankfully, I wasn’t), I asked about the letters. Did they have copies of Michael Hofer’s letters? Would they be willing to share them? They would be pleased to, they said. When they brought out the letters, I saw that the drama would be continued on another day. Most of the letters were written in a challenging German script, with touches of Hutterisch, a dialect distinct to the Hutterites, xvi Acknowledgments difficult to decipher even for a modern speaker of the German language. It would be weeks before two colleagues at Goshen College could provide the English translation. The waiting effort was yet another reminder that this wartime story would be told only through shared labor. The Kleinsassers, in turn, introduced me to Anna Hofer Wurtz, who lives at the Miller Colony and shared copies of letters from her grandfather David Hofer. At the New Rockport Colony in Pendroy, Katie Jacob Waldner, a granddaughter of Joseph Hofer, said that she did not have copies of letters written by her grandfather, but she agreed to contact her cousin Joe Hofer, of the Kyle Colony in Saskatchewan. During my stay at the Kyle Colony, Joe Hofer kindly shared those letters. There was still the matter of finding the linguistic key to the letter box. John D. Roth, editor of The Mennonite Quarterly Review and director of the Mennonite Historical Society at Goshen College, where he is a colleague who teaches in the history department, generously offered to transcribe and translate the Joseph and Michael Hofer letters. Gerhard J. Reimer, a professor emeritus of German at Goshen College, kindly agreed to do the same with the David Hofer letters. Joe Springer, curator of the Mennonite Historical Library, initially noted the research potential in this wartime story; Daniel Hochstetler, a Mennonite who many years ago taught Sarah Kleinsasser when he was a grade school teacher among the Hutterites, introduced me to Sarah; Leonard Gross, a Hutterite scholar from Goshen, served as a guide to history and pointed the way to Hutterites who were also keenly invested in that history. They included Tony Waldner at the Forest River Colony in Fordville, North Dakota, and Patrick Murphy, who manages the James Valley Book Centre at the James Valley Colony near Winnipeg, Manitoba. Victoria Waters and Carol Miller retrieved many a helpful source at the Mennonite Historical Library, as did Rich Preheim (who himself has written an article about the four Hutterite draftees) and Colleen McFarland at the Mennonite Church USA Archives in Goshen. Peggy Goertzen at the Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies at Tabor College, Kansas, and James Lynch from the Mennonite Library and Archives at Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, both advanced the research. Apart from handling numerous book and article requests, the Goshen [54.235.6.60] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:30 GMT) Acknowledgments xvii College Good Library staff arranged for microform reels to be delivered from several newspapers in South Dakota and from the American Civil Liberties Union. Adriane Hanson, a project archivist at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University, helped to navigate the ACLU collection. Thanks to Norman Hofer, who mailed a folder of Hutterite materials to Goshen early on, and who let his tractor idle for a day to take a visitor on a tour of several colonies in the James River Valley, including Rockport , where the...