POTSDAM -- SUNY Potsdam Associate Professor Dr. M.J. Heisey has co-authored a book, "Relief Work as Pilgrimage: 'Mademoiselle Miss Elsie' in Southern France, 1945-1948," which was recently published by Lexington Books. She wrote the volume with her sister, Nancy R. Heisey, who is a professor at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va.

The book documents the travels of Elsie C. Bechtel, who left her Ohio home in 1945 for the tiny French commune of Lavercantière, where for nearly three years, she cared for children displaced by the ravages of World War II. Bechtel's diary, photographs and letters home to her family provide the central texts for this study.

As a volunteer with the Mennonite Central Committee, Bechtel was part of the war relief efforts of pacifist Quakers and Anabaptists. Between 1939 and 1948, the committee's programs in France distributed clothing, shared food, and sheltered refugee children. The work began in the far southwest, but by the time Bechtel completed her service in 1948, had moved to the Alsace region, where French Mennonites clustered.

Bechtel's writings emerged from a religious context that included much travel, but little reflection on the significance of that travel. Yet, religiously motivated travel -- an old tradition in southwest France -- shaped Bechtel's life. The authors consider her experiences in terms of religious pilgrimage and reflect on their own pilgrimage to Lavercantière in 2006 for a reunion with some of the people marked by the broader effort that Bechtel joined.

To understand Bechtel's experiences and prose, the authors examined archival sources on MCC's work in France, gathered oral and written narratives of participants, and researched other war relief efforts in Spain and France in the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on these various contexts, the authors established the complexity -- but also the significance -- of pilgrimage and humanitarian service as intercultural exchanges.

Dr. M.J. Heisey completed her bachelor's degree in history at Messiah College, before going on to earn a Master of Arts degree and a Ph.D. in history at Syracuse University, where she also completed a Certificate of Advanced Study in women's studies. Heisey has been a member of the faculty at SUNY Potsdam since 1997, and is an associate professor in the Department of History.

"Relief Work as Pilgrimage: 'Mademoiselle Miss Elsie' in Southern France, 1945-1958" by M.J. Heisey and Nancy Heisey is available via Lexington Books, at www.rowman.com/Lexington.