Heritage

UPDATE: February 15 is the new target date for the book to be available on Amazon. It is actually almost ready to be put online, but the person who is doing the technical work needs to set my book aside for a while in order to meet other, long-standing commitments.

Helena and Jacob Willems with children and their spouses. My mother, Agnes, stands behind Grandpa, my dad to her left.

The Gift of Laughter is a family history memoir, the story of my father’s family. My dad was the fifth of the fifteen children born to Jacob C. and Helena Zimmerman Willems. In 1919, the family moved from a Mennonite community in Saskatchewan, Canada to the raisin country southeast of Fresno in California’s great Central Valley. This rich farmland around the small towns of Reedley and Dinuba was a magnet for Mennonites who farmed the North American prairie. The land, captured by the artist Paul Buxman* in the scene at the top of the page, is as much a part of this memoir as the stories of the people growing up on it.

Preliminary drafts of chapters from the first half of the book can be read by clicking on the desired title in the Memoir Chapters list in the sidebar.

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*”Drying the Raisins, 1990” used with Paul Buxman’s permission.