“My Babylon, My Jerusalem”: The Dialectic of Home and Exile in Julia Kasdorf’s Poetry
The daughter of parents who left Amish and Mennonite communities behind, Julia Kasdorf writes poems that celebrate and mourn both her lost home and her new one—leaving her perpetually in the liminal space between.
By Michial Farmer
In the opening essay to her collection The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, Julia Kasdorf describes the terrain of her parents’ native central Pennsylvania, which she visited on road trips in her childhood, years before she became the major American poet of the Mennonite and ex-Mennonite experience. Her parents had been raised in the country, in strict Mennonite and Amish communities, but they had chosen to leave those communities, raising their children in the suburbs of Pittsburgh instead, albeit with an active faith and a deep connection to their religious history. As their car ran over the narrow, nauseous hills of Route 655, Kasdorf would sit in the back seat in anticipation. She loved the Kishacoquillas Valley in a way that her parents, who grew up there, never could, and in the first paragraph she calls it her personal Garden of Eden—in a real sense, her spiritual home, even if she never actually lived there. Crossing the Appalachians became a religious ritual, a trial on the road home.
“I learned to associate mountains,” Kasdorf writes, “with meanings that reach beyond timber and rock to the boundaries of human community. I learned to connect a certain queasiness with limits, and to love and resist them as my parents did” (“Mountains and Valleys”). This simultaneous love for and resistance of limits is an important theme in Kasdorf’s poetry—perhaps the dominant theme of her early work, although she has never entirely abandoned it. Like her parents, she would eventually move away from the religious community in which she was raised, though in her case she moved to New York City and converted to the Episcopal Church. And yet, like her parents—perhaps like all of us—her religious and cultural upbringing stayed with her. To read Kasdorf’s poetry is, on some level, to come to terms with her complicated attitude toward home, her feeling that home is both a place of belonging and a place of boundaries that must be transgressed if one is to be a whole person. Thus she speaks of the Mennonite communities of Indiana and Pennsylvania with both warmth and violence. She belongs to them by birthright and perhaps by temperament, but her vocation separates her from them, even if no separation is ever simply a separation. The dialectic, for Kasdorf, is never resolved: Pennsylvania—like her other home, Brooklyn—will always be both home and exile.
The very act of writing creates the dialectic for Kasdorf, as perhaps for few other writers. The Mennonite tradition in which she was raised, she explains in “Bringing Home the Work,” does not hold a particularly elevated place for literary writing; instead, it operates “from a Platonic perspective, as transmitted through Western Christianity, measuring texts against a set hierarchy.” The Bible is revered, as are official Mennonite texts like the Martyrs Mirror, an enormous seventeenth-century record of Anabaptist martyrdoms. But Mennonites treat these texts as direct spiritual advice, and more oblique creative writing can only, by some lights, “amuse—or even corrupt” and thus “should be avoided by serious people altogether.” This attitude understandably puts Mennonite artists and authors in a very precarious position. Silence, for them, means security, but it means a betrayal of their own deepest needs. Kasdorf explains that “As plain dress, a strange dialect, and the geographical separation of valleys or remote prairie villages have delineated safety zones for vulnerable Mennonite bodies in times past, so the absence of literary activity has hidden Mennonite hearts and minds from the curious gaze of others” (“Writing Like a Mennonite”). Kasdorf’s appreciation for writing comes out of the Mennonite tradition but does not remain within it, exactly; over time, she explains, “I’ve struggled to rely less and less on given meanings, and instead, to construct individual ones from my own experience: to make art. Tension, for both writers and readers, arises when the individual meanings collide with the received meanings endorsed by the community.” The Mennonite artist is thus apt to feel spiritually homeless, belonging in some sense to the community in which she was raised but also cast out of it by the values that she has, in the eyes of its more conservative members, warped beyond recognition. Kasdorf’s relationship to her great-grandmother is a good example. This woman, whom Kasdorf never met, burns all her photos to save her whole family from hell. But her descendants are thereby cut off from her:
She did not think of us,
only to save us, leaving nothing
for us to touch or see
except this stubborn will to believe.
(“Sleeping Preacher” 19-23)
The poem Kasdorf writes is in certain sense a betrayal of this woman—or at least a betrayal of her faith-driven repudiation of the physical world.
I belong to my home the way my soul belongs to my body: I do not choose it; it is given to me as a gift or a curse.
The question of home is ultimately a question of belonging. Frost’s dual definitions in “The Death of the Hired Man” shed some light: The wife says that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in” (122-123). The husband seems to disagree: “I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve” (124-125). But these conceptions of home are complementary rather than contradictory, and they are united by the notion of belonging. If you must take me in when I must go to you, it must be because, in some unchosen sense, we belong to each other. Likewise, if I don’t have to earn my place at home, it is because I already belong there—it belongs to me, and I belong to it. As Gabriel Marcel sees it, the home, along with the related concept of the family, is a mystery as deep as the relationship between body and soul. In his essay “The Mystery of the Family,” he says, “In both cases we are in the presence of the same fact, or rather of something which is far more than a fact since it is the very condition of all facts whatever they may be: I mean incarnation.” I belong to my home the way my soul belongs to my body: I do not choose it; it is given to me as a gift or a curse.
Thus, Kasdorf and her narrators frequently feel ambivalent toward their homes and toward the communities to which they belong. Just as all of us sometimes experience our bodies as constricting our souls, so community is always somewhat constricting. An old Mennonite metaphor suggests that the Church is wine and thus requires each individual “grape” to be crushed. Kasdorf remembers this image “as a reminder of the cost of belonging to the Body of Christ” (“Bodies and Boundaries”). Individuality is threatened here, but it is also made possible, just as, in Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy, the existence of the body gives sensory functions to the soul. Kasdorf, for example, remembers her grief at the excommunication of an historic Mennonite congregation. She was teaching at Messiah College at the time, and a colleague tried to comfort her by telling her that she was an Episcopalian now (and thus ostensibly freed from having to worry about the Mennonite church she’d converted away from). But things are not that simple: “the ache I felt that day and afterward, as if part of my own self had been torn off, suggested that my body would always be Mennonite, and that what had happened to that congregation had also happened to me.” We are who we are because of the societies and communities in which we find ourselves. In fact, following Mikhail Bakhtin, Kasdorf says that we need other people if we are to have an identity at all: “From inside our own bodies and inside the limits of our existence, we experience only a vague unknowing; we can only imagine possibilities for ourselves. Through loving relationships, however, others provide us with information. And as we come to accumulate many images of who we are, we continually construct and revise a sense of self.” She echoes this idea in her most famous poem, “Mennonites,” in which she traces a history and orthopraxis of her community. “This is why,” she says, “we cannot leave the beliefs / or what else would we be?” (33-34). Our identities belong to the group we find ourselves in, but even then, they may be lost, as “our voices lift with such force / that we lift, as chaff lifts toward God” (37-38). The two ends of the dichotomy, then, are forever changing, both in themselves and in relationship to each other: My identity is forever changing as it receives new input from the people to whom I belong; my relationship with those people changes as I become different sorts of people; and the degree to which I depend on other people changes, too.
Kasdorf demonstrates the difficulties of identity and belonging when she retells the story of Rudy Wiebe, a Canadian Mennonite, whose bildungsroman Peace Shall Destroy Many got him in trouble with his own religious community:
Rudy had shown that a writer of imaginative literature… could also articulate Mennonite identity. And this articulation—a fictitious version of what is, rather than a factual version of what should be—was so threatening that he got punished. I think I understood that his punishment became proof of the truth of his writing, for the Mennonite imagination almost always makes a hero of a fugitive-martyr. (“Marilyn”)
It is thus one of the paradoxes of belonging that Wiebe’s being shunned by his community made him belong more staunchly to that community, even as he was cut off from it. Home, then, while it has physical dimensions, is never merely geographical. In a certain sense, Wiebe always belonged to the community that shunned him, just as Kasdorf felt she belonged to the Mennonites even after she’d formally joined the Episcopal Church.
Her difficult relationship with family tradition is further complicated by the fact that that family tradition is itself ambivalent.
We see this same tension in “Green Market, New York,” the first poem in Kasdorf’s first collection, Sleeping Preacher. Its narrator encounters an Amish woman at a farmer’s market. When the woman learns that the narrator is from central Pennsylvania, “she grins like she sees the whole farm / on my face” (16-17)—as if the narrator carries the place just under her skin. But their connection ends shortly thereafter: “And then we can’t think what to say, / that Valley so far from the traffic on Broadway” (20-21). If, on the one hand, the farm is inextricably a part of her, it is also true that she is no longer connected enough to the place to really belong with the Amish woman. On top of this, Pennsylvania is on some level inconceivable and unutterable from this new place. The narrator doesn’t “like New York” (27), and yet she finds that “sometimes these streets / hold me as hard as we’re held by rich earth” (27-28). New York City is, after all, a place, too, even if it’s also a trap, and it rescues her from Pennsylvania even as it exiles her. “Whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back,” she quotes, “is not fit for the Kingdom of God” (30-31). On the one hand, she leaves Pennsylvania behind; on the other, the quotation itself is a return, an excerpt from a genre of writing acceptable to the Mennonites, recontextualized in a genre that is not.
We see similar themes in Kasdorf’s poems about her relative Bertha Spicher. Bertha’s relation to Kasdorf is complex, to say the least. As Kasdorf explains in “Tracking the Mullein,” Bertha “married my Amish grandfather. In addition to becoming my father’s step-mother, Bertha was my mother’s aunt, and as a young woman she had worked on my grandparents’ farm when my mother was born” (12). Bertha was thus simultaneously Kasdorf’s step-grandmother on one side and great-aunt on the other—bound to her by numerous genetic and communal strands. In “Where We Are,” Bertha tells her in a letter that “we must thank God / you will not stay in that city forever” (24-25). In fact, Kasdorf does not leave New York (at least not at the time of the poem’s composition and publication), and she does not really accept Pennsylvania as her home—but she does find herself glad that Bertha is still there:
Instead, I thank God I can still find her
poking her pots of African violets or bent
over the counter, crimping the crust on a pie.
She’s still there in that silence. (26-29)
The two of them make, in their way, the compass in Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”:
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun. (33-36)
Kasdorf is able to leave Pennsylvania only because someone remains there. This is her liminality, and unsurprisingly, she is drawn to liminal members of her own family—like Bertha, who once quilted on a plane flying Kasdorf’s grandfather’s body to be buried. Bertha wants Kasdorf to remember him when she sees the quilt: “Yet it’s her I see, hunched in the soft spot / of airplane light, embroidering above him, alive” (38-39). Thus she disappoints Bertha even as she praises her.
Kasdorf has ambivalent relationships with many of her family members, both immediate and extended. “I Carry Dead Vesta,” after a brief description of Kasdorf’s grandmother’s death and her mother’s pregnancy, opens with an expression of natal belonging: “To this house I was born” (5). But this belonging is always ambiguous: “I have only her [her grandmother, Vesta’s] hair, which, this short / must look like it’s up in a bun” (13-14). Many Amish women do not cut their hair; instead, they tie their hair into plaits, which they pin up in buns secured by hairnets. Kasdorf has adopted this hairstyle in a manner of speaking—but instead of appearing to have short hair, she actually has it. Here, too, we see that she has recontextualized a Mennonite tradition, simultaneously belonging to the community and moving beyond it. And when she says that she has “carried [Vesta] out of that Valley” (21-22), she could be describing an abduction or a rescue operation.
Her difficult relationship with family tradition is further complicated by the fact that that family tradition is itself ambivalent. She belongs, it seems, to an ancestral line of not quite belonging. “Vesta’s Father” talks about her great-grandfather, who was reprimanded for drinking and wearing a baseball cap before being buried in a Lutheran cemetery. Kasdorf fails to see the problem:
I am not weeping like his wife or daughters.
The sins of the fathers won’t be visited
on my generation. I say there is no shame
in lying among Lutherans. (21-24)
Doing so may be preferable, in fact, because the Lutheran cemetery is “in plain view / of those mountains that rise dark and silent / as old Mennonites standing in pews” (26-28). Like Rudy Wiebe, and to a lesser degree like Kasdorf herself, the land itself draws Vesta’s father back to the community that exiled him.
There is, ultimately, no way to escape from a family like this one.
Kasdorf’s own parents saw their heritage as something to be escaped as much as celebrated; as she points out, “Having shed the distinctive clothing and language of their past, my parents instilled in my brothers and me an ideology of cultural and religious difference that was invisible but keen” (“Tracking”). She has inherited, however, both the sense of difference and the desire to belong. In escaping, Kasdorf is burrowing further into her family tradition; to escape is to model her escape on her parents’ past actions. Her father, who grew up in an Amish community, decides to leave home in “The Only Photograph of My Father as a Boy.” The camera steals his soul, or at least the part of his soul that belongs to the Amish; at the flash, Kasdorf says, “something flew out of him… / And something flew in” (7, 9). The next photograph was taken a decade or so later, and in it, “he’s grinning / on the rim of the world, / as confident as science in 1951” (10-12), standing on the cusp of his flight. Unsurprisingly, when he returns from college in “Song of Enough,” he finds that he has evolved past the place to which he once belonged. He has returned for his mother’s funeral, and his pain at having fled from his home goes hand in hand with his grief at his mother’s death. And yet his Amishness surely remained on some level if he could feel its loss so profoundly, and if there were enough of it for Kasdorf to turn it into poetry.
There is, ultimately, no way to escape from a family like this one. In “Freindschaft,” she worries that her identity is set in stone by her family history: “What can I do to change my fate / but take a strange lover and cleave / to my work?” (54-56). But even this escape can only ever be partial, because the Mennonites also cleave to their work: “The only defense against their worst fears / is work and hope, arbeite and hoffe” (59-60). The fears have changed (Kasdorf fears that she is her lineage, whereas her ancestors feared the fires of hell), as has the type of work (Kasdorf works with her mind, whereas her ancestors worked with their bodies)—but the solution remains largely the same, and she cannot fully escape her family traditions. Even if she could, she would not want to, as “First Gestures” perhaps demonstrates. The poem’s central point is that growth is a form of loss. The first gesture we learn, after all, “is good-bye” (1), and to learn it we must first understand that we are briefly losing the parent to whom we wave. Kasdorf talks about a girl who has just lost her virginity and is weeping:
She’s too young to see that as we gather
losses, we may also grow in love;
as in passion, the body shudders
and clutches what it must release. (35-38)
We must let go of home, then, if we are to grow, but we never wholly abandon it. Instead, it grows in our memory: “Think how a particular ridge of hills / from a summer of your childhood grows / in significance” (25-27). To belong only in one’s memory is nevertheless to belong, and the Garden of Eden from which we cast ourselves remains a Garden of Eden. In “Eve’s Curse,” Kasdorf acknowledges this tension and wishes to warn one of her students about it. Writing poetry, she wants to say, “will make / you strange in the end” (4-5)—strange, perhaps, in the French sense of étrange: strange, foreign, estranged, outside of the society in which she stands.
Kasdorf’s solution to all the ambivalence she feels is to limn and to praise both sides of her identity, to admit that she is both Pennsylvania and New York, both Mennonite and Episcopalian. In “Along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn,” she extends the same praise to others in similar position, comparing three Hasidic Jews to Amish men: “I bless the one who leaves in anger or hurt, / bless the memory of his first cheeseburger” (17-18). This blessing recognizes the ambivalence he is sure to feel, “the mind that returns for the rest of his life / to this corner, to the Hebrew storefronts / where old men drink dark tea in tumblers” (19-21). But here too she is inclusive: “I praise equally the ones who stay” (22). Members of ethnic and religious minority groups living in mainstream society are going to experience their personal identities as torn or as bricolage; the only solution is to hold onto both sides at once. Thus, in “Before Dawn in October,” Kasdorf finds her home in her marriage and in the unnamed town—not New York City—in which she lives. The futon on which she and her husband are lying “is a raft,” and on it they can explore their universe: “The moon / and tiny star we call sun are the parents / who at last approve of us” (8-10). The universal macrocosm in place, the microcosm falls in line:
As long as we walk
down our street in sun that ignites
red leaves on the maple, we will see
faces on the subway and know we may take
our places among them. (20-24)
These final lines’ blend of natural and urban imagery suggest a blended identity for their speaker—both city and country. They also suggest that leaving New York did not solve her problems with determining or creating her idea; it is another home that sustains her even as it threatens to subsume her. “On Leaving Brooklyn,” likewise, plays with Psalm 137—the prototypical song of exile—to demonstrate the degree to which the categories of home and exile become confounded. She sings to Babylon, not Jerusalem, and she does so not to curse its infants but to bless it for “the secrets / only a stranger can learn” (4-5). By the end, no easy distinctions between home and exile can be made, and she asks to be punished “if I do not always consider thee / my Babylon, my Jerusalem” (16-17). The comma in the middle of the final line is ambiguous: Is it a parataxis or an appositive? If it is the former, Brooklyn has an equal claim at being Babylon and Jerusalem, exile and home; but if it is the latter, Brooklyn is essentially her Jerusalem, even if she compels herself to see it as her Babylon. This ambivalence about ambivalence itself is, it should be clear by now, typical of Kasdorf’s writing on this subject.
The dialectic between home and exile is the great subject of Kasdorf’s poetry, and we should be suspicious if she too readily accepts any one narrative that would explain it.
Many of the major themes of Kasdorf’s work are laid out in semi-allegorical form in the early poem “That Story,” which reconfigures the Judeo-Christian fall of humanity as a personal history. Her parents’ original sin was leaving the Amish community, and, like original sin in Christian theology, it is handed down to her as a spiritual heritage. Her father tends a garden, which he experiences as thankless labor, but for Kasdorf it is a Garden of Eden. She is Cain, “a woman / who slays with words” (13-14), and she casts herself into the Land of Nod, where “Her garden is only as wide / as a sidewalk” (16-17). Like elsewhere, Kasdorf is anxious about telling communal secrets and being permanently cast out of the community, and yet she feels she must tell those secrets. Her parents’ flight—and her own—is both a felix culpa and the end of ultimate happiness. And yet, while she acknowledges the myth, she refuses to live by it. If her life in New York is really an exile, it is one that she chooses again every day, suggesting that she does not really trust her longing for Pennsylvania and the Mennonite community. The dialectic between home and exile is the great subject of Kasdorf’s poetry, and we should be suspicious if she too readily accepts any one narrative that would explain it. Perhaps her philosophy of home can best be summed up by the final lines of the final poem in her most recent collection, 2011’s Poetry in America. Speaking of her daughter, she says, “Under a roof with someone who loves you // is your home, I try to tell her, though / you will always long for what’s not there” (“Hens” 18-20). For Kasdorf, to be in exile is to long for home—but to be at home is to long for exile.
Michial Farmer is the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017) and the translator of Gabriel Marcel’s Thirst (Cluny, forthcoming). His essays have appeared in America Magazine, Front Porch Republic, and Fortnightly Review, among other places. He lives in Atlanta.