Mennonite Literature as Ethnic Lit

Today we had our first discussion in Mennonite Lit -- about Nathan Englander's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," which first appeared in The New Yorker in December 2011, and which was later published in 2012 as the title story of a collection.  Englander's story portrays and encounter between two couples that represent the liberal and conservative extremes of the group. Brought together by the wives' school-girl friendship, the husbands struggle to connect. Eased by liquor, and then some pot discovered in a teenaged son's clothes hamper, the couples began to peel back the layers of decorum, revealing their assumptions about space, place, occupation, family, the holocaust, marriage, intermarriage, Jewish identity, trust, intimacy, finally testing out the latter three items by playing the Anne Frank game in a well-stocked pantry, challenging each other to discern whether or not they would save each other--given another holocaust, and one of them being non-Jewish.

What makes an ethnic group and how is it reflected in literature?  Ingredients include a shared history, shared religious beliefs or specific cultural practices, a language, and a resistance to, or anxiety about, assimilation into the mainstream culture. All of these elements are also present in Mennonite literature. There's even a version of a joke in Englander's story that I first heard in reference to Mennonites: "Why don't Mennonites have sex standing up? Because it could lead to dancing."

Englander's story is a take-off on a famous story by Raymond Carver, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." Carver's story also involves two couples getting soused, but it is not an ethnic story, unless we count rather well-off white alcoholics as an ethnic group. In 2007, The New Yorker published a version of Carver's story to show how the original was heavily edited by Gordon Lish.