Ernest Braun, a local Mennonite Historian and close friend of Jack Thiessen, shared his thoughts and the legacy that was this larger-than-life man from Grunthal, and attempts to answer the question, "Who was Jack Thiessen?"
Jack Thiessen was a Mennonite farm boy.
“Born in Gnadenfeld, near Grunthal Manitoba, Jack spent his childhood years growing up on the family farm. Champion 4H’er and hard worker, he attended high school at MCI in Gretna and graduated from the University of Manitoba and received his PhD at the University of Marburg, Germany.”
“It was after attending United College that he discovered a great need for English teachers in Germany. So, he applied for that and got accepted and ended up teaching English as a second language to high school students in Germany in the mid 1950’s. During the summers in Europe, when he wasn’t teaching, he was employed by Aristotle Onassis to be the program director on his transatlantic ships where Thiessen made about 40 crossings. In the process, he met every conceivable celebrity on the planet and was invited to the wedding of Prince Rainier III of Monaco and Grace Kelly. He attended the wedding and while he was there met Prince Phillip, the husband of the young, Queen Elizabeth.”
Braun says, Jack Thiessen was a globe trotter and cosmopolitan. “He was comfortable in almost any setting you name it, academic, social, judicial, agricultural, and political, but in his heart, he was a farm boy. He was Grunthal’s most famous resident, but he would never draw attention to it. He would always include everybody. I mean, just the fact that he and I were friends, I mean, what does that tell you? Everyone would feel comfortable with him.”
WHO WAS JACK THIESSEN?
Jack’s accomplishments are monumental.
“He was a Russian Mennonite teacher, translator, and writer. He was an important contributor to the development of Mennonite Low German literature as well as one of the language’s most prominent lexicographers (a person who compiles dictionaries).
“So, who was Jack? Well, for one thing, he was larger than life. He was knowledgeable beyond the ordinary in just about every sphere of life. Widely travelled, internationally recognized as an authority on Mennonite Low German culture. To this end, he treasured his many friends around the world and never forgot anyone. Although his work on preserving low German served as a drop back of that backdrop, his ability as a storyteller, and that's what he also was, that's what made him unforgettable. Even on casual acquaintance, it seemed that he knew everybody, and everybody knew him. He had read everything and with his prodigious memory, he could remember it all too. He was also capable of a very incisive wit. He was always a force to be reckoned with. When you add all that together with an academic career on two different continents, a huge list of publications and you know, a public presence in community service as president of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra for many years. Yes, this is a man to be reckoned with. And it would be very difficult and probably unfair to him, to try to summarize who he is in a short paragraph like that.”
Jack Thiessen was also known to many as a storyteller.
Now, whether or not, all of his tales were true, only Jack will know for certain. However, Braun says, “what he was able to do, was to be able to translate his own experiences, elaborate upon them, and give them more universal significance. I've read most of his short stories, as I edited some of them. And yes, there was a germ of real life in many, many of them. I would suggest that most of the stories have their roots in the experiences that he lived through, but he had this gift too.”
Jack Thiessen was fluent in three languages and was from time to time known to move seamlessly from Low German to English to High German while telling his stories and hardly without a breath.
Braun says that he believes that the reason Thiessen was determined to share his stories in Low German is because he was intent on maintaining the heritage. “He was intent on preserving the language by writing in low German, by creating the dictionary, by translating, as you know he translated you know ‘Alice in Wonderland’ for example, into German and he translated the ‘Little Prince’ from French into Low German and many other books.
Jack wrote the first Low German dictionary, by himself.
Thiessen published his dictionary in 1977, followed by a second edition in 2003. Braun says, “There are very, very few dictionaries that are made by a single individual. Doing this was so overreaching and ambitious. Jack was intent on including every solitary Low-German word and expression that existed.”
As to which dialect, Thiessen chose the East Preserve, the Molotschna version, which was the dialect he spoke at home. “The language that Jack spoke was actually not old colony, like the way it is in the West Reserve. He chose to do the dictionary in the East Reserve Low German.”
Braun says by now there are five editions of his dictionary, but that only two of them are in print.
WHO WAS JACK THIESSEN?
Jack loved doing what it took to preserve the Low German language.
Even if it meant, translating children’s classics ‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘The Little Prince’ and others. Thiessen also collaborated with other Low German authors as well as writing a handful of short stories.
“So, yeah, you start adding them all up I'm sure it's more than a dozen publications. And then, of course, innumerable articles and lectures and presentations, you know, like in his day, of course, there were no blogs, right? But if you were to put everything that he did on blogs, you know, you could go for many, many years on a daily basis.”
"And he was just as, as you know, pithy and incisive and witty and as he always was right up to the end of April at this last year."
Braun notes it’s been overwhelming at times to think that he had the opportunity to work with Jack Thiessen on his Low German dictionaries. “I mean, who am I? A little Grunthal boy is going to be fiddling with Jack's masterpiece and fiddle I did.”
WHO WAS JACK THIESSEN?
Jack is a legacy.
But how did he get there? Braun makes his best guess. “How does a particular man go about making five dictionaries, how does that happen?”
“And there's a couple of things that come to mind. One is that when he was working in the bush camps in the late 1940s, and early 1950s., he was sort of taken under my Uncle Peter's wing. My Uncle Peter was also one-of-a-kind, and my Uncle Peter was absolutely one of the most creative Low German speakers that I know of, and he and Jack hit it off. Uncle Peter became a bit of a mentor to him.”
“Or perhaps it was in 1973, ten years after Jack got his PhD in Canadian Mennonite Low German. He was commissioned to do a study of Yiddish in Canada, and he published a book on Yiddish in Canada and he entitled it, “The death of a language”. It may have been there that he realized from that study that Yiddish was a language that was dying and perhaps something connected with him as he compared it to Low German because within five years he had published a preliminary dictionary of Low German, which he wrote himself. Then within 12 years, he began publishing works on Mennonite Low German language and culture and by 1999 he had published a comprehensive Low German dictionary but he didn't stop there. He wrote another one in 2003 and the final one in 2019.”
“But it seems to me this may well have been triggered way back then by this spectre of the disappearance of his favourite language, the way Yiddish was disappearing so would Low German.”
WHO WAS JACK THIESSEN?
One would say that Jack will most be remembered for his passion for Low German.
Jack Thiessen was born on April 14, 1931 and passed away on October 9, 2022. Funeral arrangements have been made by Crossings Funeral, Steinbach.
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Conrad Stoesz, Archivist at Mennonite Heritage in Winnipeg says of Jack Thiessen. “To understand a community, you need to understand its language. Jack Thiessen helped us understand ourselves with his work on the Low German language.”
Ernest Braun, from the Mennonite Historical Society, says that Jack’s passing is a significant loss to not only the family but also the entire community
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Ernest Braun has been a personal friend of Jack Thiessen for the past 20 years. Braun got to know Thiessen when Braun did some editing work for Thiessen, in fact, Braun helped Thiessen with both editions of the Low German Dictionary.
The photo of Jack taken at 'Oma’s' in St Pierre was taken a few months ago, when three historians met for lunch. *Dr. Mark Louden, Ernest Braun and Jack Thiessen.
*Dr. Mark Louden is North America’s foremost Germanic dialect specialist at Univ of Wisconsin, an ordained Amish minister, and spokesperson for the Amish in any court proceedings. He is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror and does not have a drop of Amish blood in him.