In the early 1930s, young Mennonite women—mostly adolescents—began to arrive in Vancouver, seeking work as domestic servants. Most had recently come to Canada as refugees from Russia, having escaped the terror of Stalin’s regime. Their desperate families owed a substantial debt to the Canadian Pacific Railway for their journey.
Continue 
Enter your name and email address.
Read the first section of Daughters in the City.
Ruth Derksen Siemens is a first-generation Canadian of Russian Mennonite descent who was born in Vancouver and also lived in a traditional Mennonite community in the Fraser Valley. A scholar with a particular interest in historical documents and their socio-linguistic implications, she is an instructor of writing and rhetoric at the University of British Columbia. Her PhD in the philosophy of language (University of Sheffield) investigates a corpus of 463 letters written from the former Soviet Union by Russian Mennonites. Some of these letters appear in her edited work Remember Us: Letters from Stalin's Gulag (1930–37), published by Pandora Press.
Along with producer-director Moyra Rodger, Ruth is the co–executive producer of a documentary, Through the Red Gate, which traces the journey of the letters from Russia to an attic in Carlyle, Saskatchewan. The website www.gulagletters.ca presents images of the original letters, their translations, photos of the Russian Mennonite writers, artists’ exhibits and the one-hour documentary.
Contact the author at: info@daughtersinthecity.com
