Perilous Journey: The Mennonite Brethren in Russia 1860-1910, John B. Toews, 1988

at another time and in another place. Voth left his native Brandenburg around 1 820 to teach school in Ohrloff, a Molotschna village some one hundred 13 miles southeast of Chortitza. Epp knew of the school, but not of its first teacher. Several years before leaving for Russia, Tobias and his wife, influenced by the writings of the pietist Jung-Stilling, underwent a new life experience. He subsequently strove for a piety which in his own words was preoccupied with "the state of the heart and what man may have in Jesus as Savior." 8 Most of his contemporaries were apparently content with less. Voth's tenure at the Ohrloff school, which was to infuse Christian ideals into the Mennonite community, ended in 1829. His auto- biography reflects a lonely man, disillusioned by the people he came to serve. Contemplative and inward-looking, he seemed irrelevant in a Mennonite world concerned with frontier survival. Neither his reading society (Leseverein) nor his prayer meetings for missions endured for long. 9 David Epp also makes no reference to the recently deceased missions promoter and small group fellowship advocate, elder Franz Goerz of Rudnerweide. Occasional visits to the Molotschna apparently did not bring Epp into contact with British and Foreign Bible Society supporters like elder Peter Wedel of Alexanderwohl and Bernhard Fast of Ohrloff. He also does not speak of the refreshing piety of the Prussian migrants who settled in Gnadenfeld in 1835. There is another sense of isolation. The diary contains only two references to books. Epp mentions the arrival of 900 hymnals from Prussia and notes his relationship with the British Bible Society representative John Melville. 10 Thanks to Melville's influence David became the Chortitza Bible distributor for the Society. 11 Epp's diary probably leaves the reader with a distorted sense of the loneliness of the Russian steppe. It was, to be sure, still a new frontier in which the struggle for survival was a high priority. Yet, almost imperceptibly, the Mennonite world was changing. The Quakers, William Allen and Stephen Grellet, visited the colonies some two decades before John Melville. Other visitors to Chortitza included the emigrants from Prussia whose ongoing presence brought news of a steadily changing Mennonite world to the west. And what of the impact of pietistic and other religious literature also coming from the west and its dis- semination via the lively familial, ministerial and economic contacts between the two colonies? In the end this material and the spirituality it promoted proved irrepressible. There were other changes. While in the Molotschna colony during 1838, David Epp visited the school in Ohrloff taught by Heinrich Heese, as well as a newly built school in Steinbach 14 directed by Friedrich Lange. 12 He was so impressed that he resolved to send his son to Steinbach the following year. 13 Not long after, Epp was astounde