A program at Kauffman Museum will look at an unusual example of “Mennonite fiction.”
Bradley Schmidt, a Kansas native now living and working in Leipzig, Germany, will talk about the process of translating Elina Penner’s novel Nachtbeeren/Nightberries into English in a Sunday-Afternoon-at-the-Museum program Aug. 16 at 3 p.m. in the museum auditorium.
The program is free and open to the public.
Penner published Nachtbeeren, her debut novel, with the Berlin publisher Aufbau Verlag in 2022. The book eventually went to CMU Press at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, which released the English translation, Nightberries, earlier this summer.
Like Penner, the protagonist of Nightberries, Nelli Neufeld, was born in Russia in the late 1980s and fled with her Mennonite family to Germany at age 4.
Nelli becomes pregnant at 20, marries the father of her child, and seems to be doing well in a traditional marriage. Yet over the course of two key days in 2020, mysteries about Nelli – and about what has become of her husband – surface that even Nelli herself may not be able to solve.
Both Nelli and Penner are members of “the 1.5 generation” of children brought to Germany (or any second culture) by their parents, who find they identify with neither their country of residence nor the country of their birth, and seem always to be struggling to belong in their current context.
Nelli (and Penner) are also part of a Plautdietsch-speaking culture, a subset of the 2.5 million mostly ethnically German people who immigrated from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Penner’s original text presented unique aspects to its translator in its use of Plautdietsch (Low German) and occasional Russian terms and phrases, which he will describe in the Aug. 16 program.
Schmidt was raised in a Mennonite family in Goessel and graduated from Bethel College. He is currently an educator and translator living in Leipzig.
Penner is a successful essayist and blogger living with her family in East Westphalia, Germany. Her book Migrantenmutti (Migrant Mother), a collection of her nonfiction pieces, was published in 2023 and her second novel, Die Unbußfertigen (The Unrepentant), in 2025.
For more information on Kauffman Museum’s exhibitions and public programs, visit www.kauffmanmuseum.org or the museum’s Facebook page, or contact the museum at kauffman@bethelks.edu or 316-283-1612.
Regular Kauffman Museum hours are Tues.-Fri. 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 1:30-4:30 p.m., closed Mondays and major holidays. Admission is $5 for adults, $3 for children ages 6-16, and free to Kauffman Museum members and children under 6. The new special exhibit, “Piece / Work: The Art of Mary Lou Goertzen,” opens Aug. 30.
