Growing up Amish, as I saw it, was a powerful, dangerous book, the keen words of a talented and bitter man. He was just one of a string of other sons, sons whom the father mentioned only in passing.) (Ira shows up in his father’s book, of course, but I didn’t really notice. The writer, Ira, was the son of the venerable David Wagler, and he inherited his father’s talent. Somewhere along the way, that included a book called, simply enough, Growing up Amish. Through the next years I gulped up every book and article I could find about the Old Orders, both Amish and Mennonite, driven to understand my heritage and find my place in it. (Interestingly, this was the same year that David’s son Ira published a book that took the Amish-related-book world by storm). I left home in 2011, bound for nursing school, and still a devout Old Order Mennonite. As a youngster, I read and reread this book, trying to understand the simple faith and deep pain of this Amish patriarch as he walked through a son’s near fatal and crippling accident, and the aftermath. Through Deep Waters is a simple hardback book, no longer in print. My parents approved of this, in part because I always did better with learning good behavior from books than from parental scoldings. Family Life and Young Companion, especially. I grew up steeped in the writings of the elder Wagler, David. And because I do, here is a book review, which is something I rarely do. Eventually, though, I grew to respect him.
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