A Time to Replant, A Time to Rebuild
Despite his childhood uprooting by the Nazis, Robert Treuer chose to spend his life rebuilding and replanting a new future for his family.
Review by Tessa Carman
We moderns are homeless. Whether through war, genocide, economic upheaval, natural disaster, or societal neglect, much of our spiritual and cultural inheritance has been lost. Simone Weil warned that it is “a sacrilege to destroy” what she calls the metaxu, “those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.” The tragedy of our inheritance from the twentieth century has been what Paul Kingsnorth calls “the Great Unsettling”: we no longer have a coherent metaxu. And it is far easier to hoard whatever pieces of power or pleasure we can find than to do the hard work of rebuilding and replanting what we’ve lost.
Robert Treuer’s memoir The Tree Farm: Replanting a Life (first published in 1977) tells the story of how he re-settled his family in the Minnesota northwoods after being uprooted—physically, culturally, and spiritually. As author and conservationist Paul Gruchow has said, this is “the book Thoreau might have written had he gone to Walden pond [sic] with a wife and children.” It’s also the story of a father’s long, dedicated effort to pass on a rooted inheritance, a full metaxu, to his sons.
Treuer was born in 1926 to a respected Jewish family in Vienna, but his childhood was upended at age eight when the Nazis gained political power in Austria. His father became a hunted man, but Treuer and his mother managed to escape to a London refugee camp. The family reunited and relocated to Ohio in 1939, just before the start of the Second World War. Treuer married at age nineteen and became an activist, driven by a deep hunger to make things right. Eventually, wife and sons in tow, he found himself leading a union strike in northern Minnesota. It was a good gig: he could fulfill his vocation of fighting oppressors, and he could hike, canoe, and explore the Northwoods.
When the strike ended, Treuer was directed to uproot his family again in order to lead the next strike in another state. This time, he didn’t want to leave. He was forced to reexamine his life, and to ask how much “was really given to being constructive in my work, my beliefs, and my personal relations—and how much was a knee-jerk reaction.” He decided it was time to replant: to live closer to the land he loved, to be a better husband and father, and to show his sons what a constructive life could look like.
This desire to build and to give undergirded the project of the tree farm. The family bought a deserted farm—buildings disintegrating from abuse and neglect, yard full of trash—north of Bemidji, near the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Over the long summer days, the family labored from dawn to dusk to make the farmhouse livable before winter. At the time Treuer’s oldest boys—Smith, Paul, and Derek—were fourteen, thirteen, and eleven, and they worked alongside their father. The first trees were planted in 1958 (a year before my own dad was born), and so began the work of “replanting a life.”
Treuer’s tale is not a sentimental one, but it’s bracing in its realness: it’s a rooted work that shows one way, at least, to build a constructive life. Throughout The Tree Farm, through everyday work on the land and life on the farm with family and neighbors, we see a living tapestry of people, land, and community working together, one that parallels the stories my dad tells of his own growing-up years. Around the same time that Treuer found his 200 acres of mistreated land north of Bemidji, another transplant began farming in northern Minnesota. In October 1954, my grandparents moved from southern Michigan to northern Minnesota to start a new life as rural missionaries. Two years later, Grandpa Russell bought a farm on 140 acres and started growing tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables, eventually selling them from a red wagon stand. His seven kids (my dad right in the middle) grew up planting cucumbers, hoeing strawberries, milking cows, cutting firewood, baling hay, and working alongside their neighbors. Similarly, Treuer’s book describes the work of planting trees, helping out a widowed neighbor bring in the harvest through a neighborhood work bee, taking care of sheep, harvesting wild rice, and swimming with the neighbors: it forms a pattern to life, knits each part into a whole.
We cannot take part in the disintegration of communities, persons, and places and expect our neighbors to thrive.
One winter’s night, Treuer recounts, he chased off a pack of dogs from their barn. He was too late; their two lambs were dead, and the blue-ribbon ewe his son Smith had raised from infancy lay moaning, too injured to save. Later, around the dinner table, Treuer tried to help the boys, especially the grief-stricken Smith, understand how tame dogs could become vicious and kill just for bloodlust. He reflected, “I’ve been hunted by a pack. And I’ve been part of a pack.” He told his sons of running away from the Nazis as a child in Austria “because I was a Jew,” and also about his time leading the union strike. During one demonstration, he writes, “a small group of ten or fifteen out of that crowd of several thousand went berserk.” Though Treuer did not take part in the riot, he felt responsible nonetheless, and the episode moved him to rethink his life and to desire “a more wholesome way of living, something farther removed in character and kind from destructiveness and conflict.” He told his boys that, in the face of both injustice and tragedy, you must so “shape your life and your conduct as to be constructive. A builder, a planter, a lover of life.”
After his first marriage failed, Treuer met and married Margaret “Peggy” Seelye, a member of the White Earth Ojibwe Nation, who eventually became a tribal judge and the first female Native American attorney in Minnesota. Treuer writes of being enfolded in Peggy’s family and their traditions, including their open-door policy: “one of the pleasures of having family around,” Treuer writes, is that they can stop by anytime: “They drop in, we drop in.” His description of family life could fit that of my extended family, even now. I can go to northern Minnesota and show up at an aunt and uncle’s door unannounced and expect to join in a flower-picking outing, pitch in to sort tomatoes or shuck sweet corn, go to the barn to see the new calf, or simply sit and talk with my grandma. And I know I’ll be asked to stay for dinner.
It is easier to destroy than to make, especially things one has had no practice building. Though his family’s life was forcibly uprooted, and their metaxu fragmented, Robert Treuer had the courage to rebuild. And just as my grandpa learned to farm from his dad, Treuer’s father bequeathed him a love of growing things, and also myriad skills without which the farm would have been scarcely more than a dream. Treuer and his wife both were then able to pass on a rich inheritance to their own children, some of whom (Anton and David Treuer) today continue that work through preserving the Ojibwe language and culture.
Both Treuer and my grandfather understood that, in order to give their children a rooted life in their family, the community of creation, and the sacred, they must root themselves first. In a shattered world in desperate need of healing, Treuer’s book shows how the gifts of the metaxu are like water, food, and shelter to the human soul. As Christians who wish to take part in the work of healing, we must tend to the basic needs of the soul just as we must tend to the needs of the body, and we must recognize how both are interconnected. We cannot take part in the disintegration of communities, persons, and places and expect our neighbors to thrive. But just as many years must pass before a tree farm is ready for harvesting, so too the work of growing can be long and arduous. Yet it is also joyful work—and in it we discover beauties and blessings that can be found in no other way. When trees, communities, places, and persons are torn up, there is always the choice to replant, and to rebuild.
Tessa Carman writes from Mount Rainier, Maryland.
The Tree Farm: Replanting a Life was first published on May 1, 1977 by Little Brown and Company. It is currently out of print, but you can buy a used copy here or at your local bookstore.
