In his book titled IN THE BEGINNING, Chaim Potok said, “All beginnings are hard…. Especially a beginning that you make by yourself.” Potok famously wrote of fictional boys who pushed against the confines of a Jewish Hasidic community.

In GROWING UP AMISH, Ira Wagler goes the memoir route, relating key episodes on his journey away from the Old Amish community. From the vantage point of middle age, he tells his own restless story of fear, longing and hope. The hope involved ambivalence. Sometimes he hoped that he’d learn to fit in with and contentedly remain within the provincial community defined by his family, his people --- even if they lived hundreds of miles from his home settlement. Alternately he hoped he’d be able and content to “make it” in the outside world.

His large family --- Ira was the ninth of 10 children --- lived in Aylmer, Ontario. His father was the foremost spokesman for the Amish and some Mennonite communities worldwide, being the editor of their flagship Family Life magazine. As is often the case, the “family expert” sired children whom he didn’t really get to know and whom he could not successfully control. A daughter and a son left the Old Amish community long before Ira walked out, in the middle of the night, when he was 17 --- for the first, though not the last, time. It took nearly a decade of serial flights and returns --- to Aylmer and later to more liberal communities in the States --- before he left the Amish for good and then with a spiritual peace/assurance that God’s grace was sufficient for his salvation even when living outside the Amish fold.

Wagler doesn’t romanticize the Amish life. He seems honest about its harsh elements and deep depression, and yet his understated writing is at times winsome and humorous. “My father was a man of many gifts and skills,” he writes. “Farming was not one of them.”

He describes the pull of the familiar. “It was a strange thing, and I don’t quite understand it, even today, but when we were out there, living and working in normal society, thoughts of home, the good things --- the security, the family, the comforts of home --- somehow always crept in and drew us back.”

As with a good memoir --- as distinct from a biography --- Wagler here tells a story that is confined to his life and times in relation to the Amish community. What he has done since age 26 when he finally left a community in Goshen, Indiana, is summarized vaguely in two pages. The author bio says he lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. He’s a good writer who has left room for a second installment. Maybe it could be titled GROWING BEYOND THE AMISH.

This is a book for people interested in all things Amish. But I hope its audience is bigger than that market.