I am thankful for…more Batum Story excitement!

This evening, as I started my five-day Thanksgiving weekend and was waiting for my simple pre-feast supper to bake (off-topic: after trying various sweet potato recipes, I still think the most wonderful way to prepare these humble tubers is to bake them like a baked potato, and enjoy with butter, salt, and pepper), I got a phone call. Now, I still live in the dark ages as far as having a land line with no caller ID, so I assumed when a voice was asking whether I was Mary Janzen, it was yet another appeal for end of year charitable giving like I got from the local public TV station or my grad school alma mater this week. Fortunately, I answered and did not hang up, for it was a descendant of the author of one of the sections in The Batum Story named Agnes and her husband, who live in an undisclosed location in Pennsylvania (reference a previous post for my vagueness).

They had just been about to make photocopies of my grandmother Mary’s first edition of the book from 1974 as holiday gifts for their children when they attended a historical talk and bumped into one of the persons I named in the foreword of the second edition for helping me. They got to talking and found out about my second edition. They even got a brief glimpse of a copy I’d sent to a historical library.

When I created said second edition, I was hoping to obtain comments and/or photos from each of the families represented in each of the sections of the book. This family was the most elusive for me, so I never obtained what I wished for. Now with this call I learn they are not only extremely interested in the history, but they want to send me a photo of Agnes’s forebears taken while the immigrant group was still in Turkey, before arriving in America! They’d like me to insert it to make a kind of edition 2-1/2.

Now, my only conundrum is kind of a good one, I guess, but already nagging at me. All other copies I made I gave out gratis. In a few cases of late requests I hadn’t planned myself, I did ask that instead of paying me for the copying and mailing costs, the recipient would donate the equivalent to the charitable organization that first sent food aid to the immigrant group and kept my grandparents and others on the journey alive. However, this family who just called me might want me to make something like 25 copies. They want to pay me for the expenses. It is true that I would be unable to afford making that many copies at this juncture, just having charged an expensive veterinary bill on my credit card, with contemplating a Christmas trip to see my family besides.

I told them I would make their copies, and I gladly will. I just wish I didn’t feel like being paid for it will be violating the spirit of my having begun the project in the first place, which was a labor of love to honor my buddy, Mary Janzen Sr. and keep her memory alive within her descendants. WWMSD? (What would Mary Senior do?)

Batum Story story

Earlier this month, I was at a very low point, learning by a communication from someone who’d supplied information for my 2009 reedit of the Batum Story book compiled by and partially written by my grandmother Mary Dirks Janzen in 1974 that by posting the person’s full name in a blog post here (in a list of people I was expressing gratitude toward) that I’d violated that person’s privacy. As soon as I received the message, of course, I deleted any reference to the person. I have no excuse for posting someone’s full name (other than mine) here who is still living–I guess the giddyness of so many awesome people popping out of the woodwork to help me just overcame my sense of appropriateness. I am still berating myself terribly.

So, it is with a sense of trepidation that I want to thank one more person in regard to the book, a person whose first name begins with “C” who I met on my recent travels in a chance meeting while lunching at an event at my college alma mater. Thirty-six years ago, she was interested enough in my grandmother’s story that she took on the task of typing out the first edition on a typewriter, a task I took on myself more recently on a computer.

Earlier this week, I sent off a copy of my second edition to her (gratis, as were all copies distributed). I hope she will accept it in a good spirit. If she’d not taken on the task of the first edition, I’d not know the rich history of the hard times my grandparents had in coming to the U.S. as refugees from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Thank you, “C.”

I am beside myself

For the last couple months, I’ve been spending a great deal of time (OK, I’ve been completely obsessed) retyping, re-editing, and researching Oma’s book The Batum Story. Because our department at work engages in a lot of discussion of copyrighted vs. free content (we’re hosting a big symposium March 29 that centers on that topic), yesterday I posted to our internal staff blog asking advice on whether I could claim to copyright the new edition, even though I’m not the author. I said I wanted a statement to the effect that anyone could copy it unmodified for nonprofit purposes, but just wanted to make sure no one defamed or misrepresented our clan.

Well, don’t even mind that! It pales in comparison to a discovery I made this evening that gave me an awful feeling in my stomach and completely took the wind out of my sails. I did a Google search for “Batum warehouse 88.” As as result, I found that a Canadian woman named Irmgard Epp included all the text from The Batum Story in her published and copyrighted! 2006 book Constantinoplers: Escape from
Bolshevism without making any effort to contact our family or obtain permission. I just sent off an e-mail to the publisher basically asking what the hay.

I mean, does that imply if I share my new edition, I’ll violate the copyright of this person who stole Oma’s book? Mostly, I feel our family has been violated.

Update 3-12: The Batum Story is in the Bethel College Mennonite Library and Archives collection, and Oma is listed as the publisher. Trafford Publishing of Victoria, B.C. has passed on my request to correspond with this woman. Our department’s director wrote: “Copyright is inherent. In other words, with or without an explicit
copyright statement your grandmother owns the text. This other woman is
in violation of copyright law. I think ;-)”