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Works by Esther Royer Ayers (Writer)Email:
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March 19, 2005
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A Heritage That Money Can't Buy: My Growing Up Years as
an Old Order Mennonite (1997) with Sarah
Blosser Oberlin
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Flights of the Herons (2001)
When Frank, a lonely widower, takes up genealogy,
he discovers how ancestors fled oppression in Europe and ultimately
reached the United States. Then, in a turn of fate, he meets Katie, a
victim of modern oppression who shares his ancestral heritage.
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Rolling Down Black Stockings: A Passage Out Of The Old Order Mennonite
Religion (2005)
Rolling Down Black Stockings is a personal recollection of Esther Royer
Ayers’s youth spent in a highly restrictive and confined religious community.
Her story is as much a search for identity and a longing for a mother’s love
as it is a tale about a totalitarian culture that led to her departure from
the Old Order Mennonite religion.
This poignant story is told in three books:
book 1 describes her youth in a farm community on the outskirts of Columbiana,
Ohio; book 2 follows the struggles of as she tries to fit in with another
culture after leaving the church when her family moves to Akron, Ohio; and
book 3 discusses the history and cultural dynamics of the religion.
Ayers
recounts how the Old Order Mennonite Church came into existence. Her personal
account begins when she was eight years old, watching as her mother took care
of her father. With intelligence and insight, Ayers describes how her family
coped with the burden of not having enough income, which meant that the
children were expected to work instead of getting an education. When secular
educational leaders closed the one-room schoolhouses that served her Mennonite
community Ayers relates her difficulties trying to fit in at the public school
and how she and her siblings were required to fail classes so that they would
be expelled. It concludes with reflections on what all this meant to her.
A
rare and moving memoir, Rolling Down Black Stockings is also a valuable piece
of social history that will appeal to historians as well as those interested
in separatist communities and women’s studies.
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