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Summary
Summary
"It's long been assumed of the region where my grandmother was born...that at some point each year the dead will come home," Inara Verzemnieks writes in this exquisite story of war, exile, and reconnection. Her grandmother's stories recalled one true home: the family farm left behind in Latvia, where, during WWII, her grandmother Livija and her grandmother's sister, Ausma, were separated. They would not see each other again for more than 50 years. Raised by her grandparents in Washington State, Inara grew up among expatriates, scattering smuggled Latvian sand over the coffins of the dead, singing folk songs about a land she had never visited.
When Inara discovers the scarf Livija wore when she left home, in a box of her grandmother's belongings, this tangible remnant of the past points the way back to the remote village where her family broke apart. There it is said the suspend their exile once a year for a pilgrimage through forests and fields to the homes they left behind. Coming to know Ausma and the trauma of her exile to Siberia under Stalin, Inara pieces together Livija's survival through years as a refugee. Weaving these two parts of the family story together in spellbinding, lyrical prose, she gives us a profound and cathartic account of loss, survival, resilience, and love.
Author Notes
Inara Verzemnieks teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Upon a visit to her ancestral Latvia, Verzemnieks, who teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa, vividly imagines the dramatic youth of her grandmother Livija, a farm girl. Verzemnieks follows the desperate flight of Livija and her two small children to a refugee camp in 1944, with her husband at war on the Russian front. Upon settling later into the Latvian community of Tacoma, Wash., Verzemnieks's grandparents reunite, have children and grandchildren, and raise the author following her parents' divorce; their presence alone helps keep their memories of their beloved homeland alive for the curious girl. "Words can become as real as anything we see with our eyes or feel with these hands," Verzemnieks writes. She describes how refugees ousted from their lands form the collective bond of community in their adopted countries. By combining the memories of Livija and her sister, Ausma, with her own powerful impressions of Latvia, Verzemnieks has created a stirring family saga of exiles rich with compassion, loss, perseverance, myth, superstition, and courage. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The dead return to visit the living, according to Latvian folklore. But in this elegiac book, it is author Verzemnieks who returns to the land her grandmother fled during WWII to explore the lives that were torn apart during those years. After the death of her grandmother, who raised her from a young age, Verzemnieks journeys back to Latvia, visiting with her grandmother's sister. The sisters' paths diverged when they were young and the war came to their village, her grandmother eventually making her way to the U.S. while her sister was exiled to Siberia. Slowly, Verzemnieks uncovers their stories, discovering the meaning behind the silence. Her grandmother's agonizing years waiting in a camp, while the U.S. debated whether to accept refugees, strike an especially resonant chord. Beyond the story of her own family, Verzemnieks offers a moving history of the Latvian people, oppressed for centuries, and their disappearing way of life. Spellbinding and poetic, this is a moving tribute to the enduring promise of home.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FOREST DARK, by Nicole Krauss. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Tracing the lives of two Americans in Israel, one a celebrated novelist and the other a successful older lawyer, this restless novel explores the mysteries of disconnection and the divided self, of feeling oneself in two places at once. UNBELIEVABLE: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History, by Katy Tur. (Dey St./William Morrow, $26.99.) Tur's breezy journalist's memoir is really a story of one woman's endurance. Donald Trump singled her out for particularly harsh insults at his political rallies, but she soldiered on, sometimes through dangerous situations. THE CRISIS OF MULTICULTURALISM IN EUROPE: A History, by Rita Chin. (Princeton, $35.) An associate professor of history at the University of Michigan analyzes the current debates in Europe over immigration and Western values to create a vivid picture of a continent consumed by social tensions. THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, by Brendan Mathews. (Little, Brown, $28.) Mathews's admirably fearless debut novel, about Irish brothers on the run in 1930s New York, is long and full of digression, which is no knock; for what is a good novel - or a good life - but a long series of digressions? A RIFT IN THE EARTH: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial, by James Reston Jr. (Arcade, $24.99.) The arguments over the construction of a Vietnam memorial were angrier even than current disputes over Confederate monuments, and Reston's narrative is insightful and unexpectedly affecting. AMONG THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: A Tale of Exile and Homecoming on the War Roads of Europe, by Inara Verzemnieks. (Norton, $26.95.) Verzemnieks's family history interleaves stories of the grandparents who left Latvia and raised her in Tacoma, Wash., and of her great-aunt who stayed behind. She also confronts Latvians' fraught participation in World War II. DINNER AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH, by Nathan Englander. (Knopf, $26.95.) In a novel that gleefully blends thriller elements with sociohistorical considerations, a disgraced Israeli agent offers tragicomic reflections on the broken promises of the Promised Land. ONE DAY WE'LL ALL BE DEAD AND NONE OF THIS WILL MATTER, by Scaachi Koul. (Picador, paper, $16.) Koul's irreverent and funny essays explore the binds of being the child of immigrants, shuttling between Canada and India, between love and resentment. THE GOLDEN HOUSE, by Salman Rushdie. (Random House, $28.99.) The Obama years form the backdrop of this novel about a billionaire and his enigmatic family after they arrive in New York. Avoiding spoilers is tricky, but suffice it to say the body count is high. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Guardian Review
An American writer uncovers the remarkable story of her Latvian grandparents, as their homeland is conquered by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union The map of Europe was shaped in the 20th century by complicity and disappearance. Mass murders. Expulsions. Colonisation. Countries vanished; whole peoples exterminated and displaced. For Europeans, this is the story of our continent, although rarely the version of the story we choose to say out loud. For Inara Verzemnieks, as the granddaughter of Latvian refugees who settled in the US, its the story of her family. Among the Living and the Dead is her effort to recover that family history splintered as it is by war, migration, shame and loss and put the unspeakable into words. It is, like all attempted redemptions, both partial and painful. Renowned for her journalism in the Oregonian newspaper, she begins as any reporter should: by going to the scene, in this case the family farm in Latvia. Here, the door to the little house opens, and I see my grandmother. Of course, by this time, my grandmother, the woman who raised me, has been dead for almost five years. The occupant of the farm is in fact Ausma, sister of Verzemniekss grandmother Livija, and its an early lesson that will be repeated again and again. Time telescopes, and memory seduces; but whatever youre trying to get back to is always already gone. Thats a particularly poignant truth for the Latvian diaspora or anyone whose origins lie in what Timothy Snyder has called the bloodlands, those states in eastern Europe that were barely established before suffering conquest and reconquest by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Verzemniekss grandparents were nostalgic for Latvia, and like many children of émigrés, she attended special summer camps where she learned the language, dances and stories of the old country. But the culture they were preserving belonged to a nation that no longer existed: Latvia had been absorbed into the USSR and erased from the map. They lived like fish trapped beneath the ice of the river in winter, suspended in this new half-life, caught between. And if they had been able to go back, what ghosts might have risen from that landscape of black earth hastily tamped down over moss? Verzemniekss grandfather will say that he fought in the second world war as a conscript in the Latvian Legion. What he wont say is that this means he fought for Germany, in one of the areas where the Holocaust was most comprehensively prosecuted. By the end of 1941, almost every single one of Latvias 70,000 Jews had been murdered, mostly shot and buried in that black earth. Even if her grandfather wasnt a direct participant in the pogroms, Verzemnieks knows he wore the uniform. He must have seen his neighbours vanish, and not resisted. By writing about national identity and asylum Verzemnieks's book addresses our most urgent political questions In her memoir In the Darkroom, Susan Faludi tells the story of her Hungarian-Jewish father, a hero who turned out to be a kind of monster. He pulled off a breathtaking rescue by imitating a Nazi, then later resettled in the US where he perpetrated grim paternal violence against his family. Verzemniekss grandfather is the other side of that complexity: the ordinary man who turns out to have gone along with extraordinary evil. It is the more salutary tale in some ways, because almost nobody in the bloodlands did resist collaboration. Antisemitism flowed easily. When the Soviets occupied Latvia, Livija decided that, as the wife of a now-enemy soldier, she had to leave with her children if they were to survive. Verzemniekss account of her grandmothers journey to the US is as tense as it is gruelling, Livijas survival driven by determination but decided by chance. Meanwhile, her sister Ausma chose to stay, willingly bonding herself to her mother and brother when the family was exiled to Siberia they were deemed to be kulaks and their farm appropriated by the state. Its almost unbearable to read about the deprivation they suffered; the endurance of both sisters is almost miraculous. But the cost of that endurance is an unrecoverable breach as they live in different continents Ausma under communism and Livija in middle-class America. They write each other letters telling stories not about what really happened, but designed to help you guess what really happened when what really happened was impossible to say. Verzemniekss account is personal, but by writing about national identity and asylum her book addresses our most urgent political questions. It insists with quiet elegance that, though the past eludes us, we cannot elude our past. Europe is haunted still by violence and culpability. As resurgent nationalism and antisemitism across the continent show, the unspeakable can rapidly become the normal. - Sarah Ditum.
Kirkus Review
The Latvian world of her grandmother draws the writer, an American, back to the old country to re-create a vanished life between farm and war.In her striking debut memoir, Verzemnieks (Creative Nonfiction/Univ. of Iowa), winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, refashions the early life of her deceased grandmother Livija, who was born and raised on a farm in Gulbene, in eastern Latvia. She left her hometown to work in Riga as a bookkeeper and was subsequently caught up in the Soviet invasion and takeover of her country in World War II. Livija then left her homeland and came to the United States, where she was reunited with her soldier husband, who had been demobilized from the Latvian Legion, which was actually fighting for Nazi Germany against Russia. Livija and her family settled into the Latvian community of the former mill town of Tacoma, Washington. There, they raised their granddaughter, the author, after her parents got divorced and underwent mysterious crises, leaving the child in their care. The author became keenly aware of all aspects of the life Livija left behind, so much so that years later, when she actually visited her grandmother's homestead and grew friendly with her great-aunt, she was able to re-create in great detail this vanished life. Verzemnieks beautifully evokes the sympathy between Livija and her young granddaughter and the subsequent acquaintance between the author, now grown and married herself, and her great-aunt, who reluctantly revealed painful episodes of her past, such as the day the Russians arrived at the end of the war, ransacked the farmhouse, and deported her sister to a labor camp in Siberia. With fluidity and nuance, the author smoothly incorporates Latvian history into her narrative as well as the quietly buried sins of the past, such as the Latvian men's forced conscription to fight on the German side. A highly polished memoir of enormous heart. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Verzemnieks's impressive work examines the refugee history of her grandmother's family with sensitivity and compassion. During World War II, her grandmother Livija is married, her husband fighting as a Latvian conscript, with one young daughter and a son born just days before violence consumes the capital city of Riga. Livija flees with both children and becomes one of the many war refugees seeking safety in the European countryside. Ultimately reunited with her husband, Livija and their now three children spend years in a refugee camp before finally receiving sponsorship in Tacoma and emigrating to the United States. Through her visits to Latvia, the author develops and strengthens bonds with an extended family she clearly relishes. The trips don't erase the suffering and anguish of the past, but they do offer hope of reconciliation and forgiveness. VERDICT For readers looking for parallels between historic and current events. Though Syria isn't mentioned, this book could have been written about what's happening today, rather than more than 70 years ago. (Memoir, 4/11/17; ow.ly/liks30c0Myo)-Rachael Dreyer, Eberly Family Special Collections Lib., Pennsylvania State Univ. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.