From the Archives #21: Rowan Farm by Margot Benary-Isbert

Rowan Farm is the sequel to The Ark, which was reviewed here in May, and continues the story of the Lechow family, Pomeranian refugees who have had to resettle in the Hesse area in Germany after the war.  It begins precisely where The Ark left off, in January 1948.  The war has been over for almost three years, but the effects are still being felt everywhere.   Most things continue to be rationed, everyone is still hungry and cold all the time and much of the country still bears the scars of wartime destruction "Ruins rose into the clear winter air like broken teeth...To the left was the cemetery, torn up by bombs; to the right the ruins..." (pg 9)

All the Lechows from the first novel are still around in this second work: Dr. and Mrs. Lechow, Matthias, 17, Andrea, 13, Joey and adopted Ull, both 7, but the story is still centered mainly on Margret, 15.  Margret still loves working as a kennel/stable maid for Mrs. Almut, who also breeds champion Great Danes as well as running a small farm with her son Bernd, who had returned from a prisoner of war camp the previous summer.

The story begins with two important events: first is the arrival of the new school teacher, Christoph Hühnerbein, a 20 year old war veteran with a disabled leg and an amputated arm; and second, Margret's rescue of a badly abused Shetland pony from the slaughterhouse and her nursing it from near death to heath.

Both of them are perfect metaphors for Germany at the end of the war and its endeavors to rebuild itself  after the horror of its Nazi past.

Despite his disability, the new teacher soon has his students well in hand.   When he hears about the Wetz Farm, which had taken a direct hit from a bomb during the war that killed the family and destroyed the house and everything near it,  Hühnerbein comes up with the idea of cleaning it up to see what is reusable, and build what is called "rammed earth housing"with it for returning homeless veterans, most of whom had been in Russian prisoner of war camps.  And much of the work is done with the aid of Margret's little Shetland pony, named Mignon, "after the poor, unhappy little gypsy child in [Goethe's] Wilhelm Meister." (pg 30) The project of supported by everyone except the mayor, who plans to put a stop to it.

Meanwhile, Margret also meets an American Quaker, Mrs. Coleman, who is in Germany to help out with the refugee problem and who has a farm with her husband in Pennsylvania.  Now that the war is over, she and her husband want to start breeding Great Danes again, so she has a genuine interest in the dogs being bred at Rowan Farm.  Naturally, she and Margret hit is off and she offers Margret a position in America.

Life is further complicated when a beautiful young woman from Frankfurt comes to visit her relatives, and both Matthias and Bernd loose their hearts to her, even though it was clear that Bernd had always been attracted to Margret, but too shy to do anything about it.  Margret is hurt by Bernd's behavior and decides to wash her hand of him and men in general.  But will that resolve really last or will it simply give her the push she needs to go to America with Mrs. Coleman?

Once again, Benary-Isbert has taken difficult topics and presented them in the gentlest manner in a story that is told so well geared for her young readers but without being overly graphic.  Unlike in The Ark, she does talk more about the Nazi past, especially with regard to the 15 and 16 year olds who were drafted into the German army towards the end of the war and then found themselves homeless and unable to adjust to life again.  Besides Bernd Almut, Benary-Isbert includes the story of two boys, Karl and Alfred.  These two boys ran away from east Germany, whose Russians occupiers are sending former teen soldiers to work and mostly likely die in Uranian mines.  They are hired at Rowan Farm and become the first two veterans to live in the rammed housing at Wetz Farm, but when they hear the mayor is going to report them to the Russians, they run away.  Alfred gets caught stealing and Karl is found dead by suicide.  Their stories are very compelling and point to a postwar problem not usually addressed in YA literature.

So again, as in The Ark, Benary-Isbert has given the reader the bad and the good together, to remind them that this is life and, like the continuous birth of new animals on the farm, life goes on.  I wrote about The Ark that it is almost an overly sentimental story, yet people are surprised by how much they like it when they are finished.  The same can be said of Rowan Farm.

This book is recommended for readers age 12+
This book was borrowed from a friend.

This is book 11 of my Historical Fiction Challenge hosted by Historical Tapestry.

*From the Archives used to be called That's the Way it Was Wednesday.