Marta’s Promise - Dennis, Jeanne, and Sheila Seifert. Kregel, 2006. 319p. $13.99, paperback. ISBN-10: 0-8254-2489-5. ISBN-13: 978-0-8254-2489-2. kregel.gospelcom.net Fiction Germans—Soviet Union—Fiction. Russia—History—Catherine II, 1762-1796—Fiction. Germany—Emigration and immigration—Fiction.

For readers who are not students of history, the brief historical summary prefacing Marta’s Promise aids in understanding the complexities of the era in which the action of the novel occurs. The German state was in political and religious upheaval during the mid-1700s. Czarina Catherine, a German, decreed that Germanic people could come to Russia to settle the vast area along the Volga River and promised them free land, homes, and travel. But the German emperor needed soldiers so desperately that he made it a crime for men to emigrate.

Even before young Marta Ebel, a single Christian woman, reaches the border of her homeland on her long journey toward a better life, she encounters danger. She takes as her traveling companions a young man, Carl Mueller, and a five-year-old boy. Carl avoids talking about his past, and some of his behavior on the trip raises suspicion.

In Russia the immigrants discover that the rosy future promised does not await them. Marta learns that in order to receive land, she must have a husband.

Love, hope, faith in God, and forgiveness ebb and flow throughout the novel and provide a satisfying ending, although the reader knows that the characters do not face an easy future. Marta’s Promise is informative and thought provoking.

Beverly M. Bixler
First Presbyterian Church
Ashland, Ohio