Ingrid Rimland
| Ingrid Rimland | |
|---|---|
| Born |
May 22, 1936 Molotschna, Ukraine |
| Occupation | Author and child psychologist |
| Nationality | Soviet Union, Paraguay, United States |
| Ethnicity | Black Sea German |
| Notable works | The Wanderers |
| Website | |
|
www | |
Ingrid Rimland (born May 22, 1936 in Halbstadt (Molotschna) in Ukraine) is a Ukrainian-born American author, child psychologist, activist, and former social worker. She has written several novels loosely based upon her own experiences from growing up in a Mennonite community in Ukraine and as a refugee child during World War II. Her novel The Wanderers (1977), which won her the California Literature Medal Award for best fiction, tells the story of the plight of Mennonite women caught in the social upheavals of revolution and war.[1]
Biography
Born into a Russian-German Mennonite community in Ukraine[2] she grew up trilingual (German, Russian and Ukrainian) in the then-Soviet Union. Her family had been wealthy prior to the Russian revolution, but the community faced persecution under the communist regime due to their pacifist beliefs and heritage. In 1941, when she was five years old, her father was deported to a Siberian concentration camp by the Soviets and she never saw him again. Most of her family was exterminated by the Soviets. Fleeing the Red Army, she ended up in Germany with her mother in 1945. After several years as a refugee, they emigrated to an isolated Mennonite community in the rainforests of Paraguay in 1948, with the help of Dutch and American Mennonites.
In Paraguay, Rimland married and had children. She moved to Canada in 1960 and to the United States in 1967, becoming a US citizen. In the US, she gained a doctorate in education in 1979 and worked as an educational psychologist in California public schools, specializing in special education and migrant education for children, and simultaneously running a private practice in child psychology.
Literary work
Most of her literary work is autobiographical to various extent. Her 1977 novel The Wanderers traces the decimation of a pacifist people during the Russian Revolution, anarchy, famine, the Stalinist purges, escape from Ukraine, and eventual resettlement in the rain forests of Paraguay. Her 1984 book The Furies and the Flame is her autobiography as an immigrant and deals with her struggle to raise her handicapped child. Her trilogy Lebensraum (literally, "life-space"), published after her political conversion to fascism, received less favorable reviews.
Political activism
In her third, and least known, book, Demon Doctor, Rimland tells of her quest to find Josef Mengele in the 1980s with the help of Simon Wiesenthal.
In the 1990s, Rimland met and befriended German-Canadian Ernst Zündel, who later became her second husband. She became involved in right-wing causes, acting as the ostensible manager of Zündel's controversial website.[3]
References
- ↑ Wilfred Martens, Book review: The Wanderers, Direction, 1979
- ↑ Klassen, Abraham and Cornelius Krahn. (1956). Halbstadt (Molotschna Mennonite settlement, Zaporizhia Oblast, Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved 15 February 2011.]
- ↑ James C. Juhnke, Ingrid Rimland, the Mennonites, and the Demon Doctor, Mennonite Life, vol. 60 no. 1, 2005
External links
|