Faspa as Worship: A Living Etymology

It all began with pluma mos. My recipe card detailed a sweet cold soup made with prunes, raisins, and spices.

​I’ve eaten it many times over the years when I was with extended family for Christmas, but this year I asked my father, “What is the word mos? What language is it? Russian or German?”

He replied it was spelled the same way on his recipe card. He had copied it from his mother who had copied it from hers. “It’s Plattdeutsch, Low German,” the language he grew up with, commonly known as Plautdietsch.

The internet was little help at first. I reached out to a cousin. Her recipe showed the same spelling as well. Like me, we had eaten mos for years but had never learned a definition for the word itself.

In the 1870s, my mother and my father’s families immigrated from Holland to the Black Sea region of Russia. Through her colonizing agents, Catherine the Great had promised religious freedom, freedom in trade, and 170 acres of land to each family. But Russia also needed soldiers, and when change came, these families moved to Nebraska, settling as farmers and building God-fearing communities in the Mennonite tradition. (I was able to borrow a 1975 centennial edition of the account and records from the Henderson Centennial Committee edited by Stanley E. Voth). Heisers, Rempels, Bergens, Hiebners, Epps, and Friesens. Their farm town of Henderson, Nebraska, was the careful planning of an expedition of men from the Alexanderwohl Mennonite colony in the summer of 1874. The group of twelve toured available land from southern Canada to the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas.

When the twelve returned to Russia, General Todtleben, a representative from the Czar, spoke in their group meeting and urged the Mennonites not to leave, promising to remove the military service requirement. Todtleben did his best and spoke about all that the people had built and how they should stay. But it did not work. The people voted unanimously to go.
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When I was young, my family drove long hours from Mississippi to visit grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in the summer and at Christmas. It seemed as if everyone I met was a cousin of a cousin. My most distinct memories in Henderson center around family farms and irrigation ditches. I can hear the low voice of my father’s father chatting with me and my sister as he looked along the corn rows and let us play. Black earth, cold well water, and catching frogs in the heat of the summer sun. We climbed trees, played in the hayloft, chased the barn cats, cuddled their kittens, and investigated the still-working outhouse. . . .

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