photo: Stanisław Ciok Flipping through a recent issue of the Polish news magazine ‘Polityka’, I had a chance to read an article about the Roma people, perhaps better known Stateside by the more colloquial ‘Gypsies’. Entitled ‘Romofobia’, the piece describes the challenging situation of the 8 million-strong Roma minority living within Europe. Poland, where I live for a good chunk of the year, has a…
They live about as far back in as you can get, two miles down a mud road, deep in the heart of a serene pine-and-birch forest. The neighbors are mostly friendly, and Jacob has worked out a deal with one of them – a big-city transplant and a bit ‘unhandy’ when it comes to farming – to manage and use a cow and some of…
It looks like Anita and Jakub, the ‘Amish in Poland’, are back in the news again. The Pennsylvania/Indiana-transplant couple, who settled in a village not far from Warsaw 14 years ago, appeared on the national talk show ‘Rozmowy w Toku’ (roughly, ‘Conversations in Progress’) tonight. Kind of an odd place to find an Amish family, but again, we’re not sure exactly what their particular brand…
This one goes back a couple years, but really surprised me when i first found it. An English-language Polish weekly, the Warsaw Voice, reported back in 2000 that a few families, apparently of an Amish or Mennonite persuasion, had settled in a village not far from the capital. The arrival of the families apparently caused quite a stir: one villager ‘ran from house to house…
A small, accidental settlement of Amish apparently once existed in New Orleans. David Luthy explains that in the 1800s, many migrant Amish came to America from Europe by way of the Mississippi River port. Sometimes it happened that an Amish family lacked the funds to continue upstream and onward to established settlements, often in Illinois. Previous to 1850, stranded families formed a small and short-lived…
When selling books in Amish communities, I’m often asked if I carry the Martyrs Mirror. This book is very popular in Amish homes today. It is an account of the numerous Anabaptists, spiritual predecessors of the Amish, who perished on account of their faith. It is also a hefty tome–at over 1100 pages there are more than a handful of accounts in here. One of…