Just finished this incredible book.
As most of you know, in the past year I have been on a quest for information regarding my Latvian heritage. (And may I add; much thanks to many of you for the educational lessons!)
    I highly suggest Insula, for those like myself, who have questions of the past.
The personal stories gave me a true history lesson no other book could. Though a bit hard to read with tears in my eyes!

It is amazing what we can learn about our past from a novel.  I also just finished reading “Billes Trilogija”
and could identify with her when she was a small child.  Vizma Belsevica, from what I understand, wrote of her own life’s experiences.  The visits to her aunt and uncle’s farm brought back so many memories of my own. It was almost like re-living my early childhood. It also gave me a glimpse of what life was like for the Latvians who stayed.
For me it was a slow read because it was in Latvian, but I enjoyed every page so much and took my time that by the time I finished, I felt my Latvian vocabulary had actually improved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizma_Belševica

Works

Vizma Belševica published her first poems in 1947; her first book of poetry appeared in 1955. Her most notable poetry collections are Jūra deg (The Sea is Burning, 1966), Gadu gredzeni (Annual Rings, 1969), Madarās (In My Lady’s Bedstraw, 1976), Kamola tinēja (The Clew Winder, 1981), Dzeltu laiks (Autumn Time, 1987). Her short stories’ collections are Ķikuraga stāsti (Stories from Kikurags, 1965), Nelaime mājās (Misfortune at Home, 1979), Lauztā sirds uz goda dēļa (Broken Heart on the Board of Honour, 1997). During the post-Soviet period, Belševica wrote three semi-autobiographical books - stories about the girl Bille, following her life from the late 1930s, throughout the first year of Soviet occupation of Latvia (1940-41), the Nazi occupation (1941-45), and the first post-war years under Stalin’s regime: Bille (Bille, 1992, 95), Bille un karš (initial title: Bille dzīvo tālāk) (Bille and War, 1996), Billes skaistā jaunība (The Wonderful Youth of Bille, 1999) - this trilogy has been recognized as one of the most important works of Latvian literature of all times [my bold].

Belševica’s poetry and fiction has been translated in about 40 languages. Within the Soviet Union of the 1960s-1980s, several books of her selected poetry were published in Russian, Belarusian and Armenian. From the 1980s onwards, Belševica has been regularly present on the Swedish literary scene, (translator Juris Kronbergs), books of her poetry and Bille stories have enjoyed immense critical success and wide readership there. Her Selected Poems have been published also in Norway, Denmark and Iceland. Selected Short Stories - in Russia, Georgia and Germany. The Russian translation of the Bille trilogy has been published in Riga, Latvia.

Hi ‘Meitenes’!

Glad you’re enjoying!  Arija, you with your Belsevica and Disa—could you tell us more about ‘Insula’, who the author is?

I’m currently reading Aina Zemdega’s ‘Maruta’.  It’s about the Latvian DP’s who fled to Sweden, Maruta, a young girl, being the central character.  It starts with the not unusual, but sad tale we and/or our parents are all too familiar with—the trauma of leaving almost everything one knows, cherishes, values—one’s whole life, behind.  My mother often mentions the farmers who had to leave all their livestock and recalls that when she and my father were on their way to Liepaja to board a ship to Danzig, witnessing corridors of stray animals—horses, cows, just wandering aimlessly about on the roads. she had to close her eyes/ears in order not to look, not to hear the plaintiff, bellowing sounds.  In one of the beginning scenes in the book, people are driving their horse-laden wagons into the sea to board the boats and then just letting these animals loose to go their own way to whatever fates await them.  There’s a particualrly heart-wrenching scene, when Maruta is forced to finally let her own horse go; she throws her arms around his neck for the last time as he nuzzles her affectionately, looking up at her with such knowing eyes and then calmly, resolutely heads back to the shore.  The way Zemdega describes that nightmare of a journey across the sea is so intense, vivid, my eyes were peeled to the pages, could scarcely put the book down; the imagery of all those souls in the darkness, packed solid into a motorboat for an incredible 18 hours—people literally lying on top of each other, no standing, sitting, breathing room.  Arms, limbs cramped, aching as the onslaught of waves crashed overboard, splashing mercilessly with bone-chilling sequence, regularity—and then the overwhelming onset of nausea, the heaves, with no place to go to relieve onself.  Maruta, continually thinking:  How will I possibly live through all this, how much more can I take, surely, I will die!  And yet, she endures, lives on.

After the initial drama, the book slows down somewhat, reverting to the dreary, mundane.  Maruta is a particularly sensitive girl who is in a perpetual state of displacement, depression, going from camp to camp, then one dead-end job after another, feeling not only alienated from the Swedes around her (who though kind, seem somewhat condescending) but from the other Latvians and her family as well.

I just made the grave error of looking up a review of this book before finishing (I’m in about the middle right now), where it was heralded as being one of those books which avoids the pitfalls of sinking into a kind of dangerous similarity—same story line most of us already know,have heard a kazillion times with some slight variations—and actually has some surprising twists and turns.  Too bad, that in the process, the whole story was revealed, leaving me, knowing more than I ever wanted to…

Irena

Irena,

Thanks for that terrific post.  A book like Maruta is just too painful for me to read.  It makes me angry and upset that wars still continue. 

My mother has been reviewing her never-forgotten life in Latvia, her memories are now with heightened poignancy since the recent death of her sister - in Jelgava.  My mother also speaks of her enduring nightmares, her lasting concern for all those left behind…including the orphans in the orphanages…the old people in the nursing homes…the sick or injured in the hospitals…those unable to travel.  Who brought them food and water?  Who prepared meals and provided other assistance? Who stayed behind to help?  She wonders about all the beloved and faithful animals who had to be abandoned in the haste of fleeing, with no one to care for them.  My mother was young, brave, and optimistic when she fled her home in Riga - she left her best hat hung on the coat rack.  She left her mother and father in Latgale.  She thought she would, of course, return home soon.

I’ll try to read Maruta.  It can’t be harder than hearing my mother’s story.

http://www.lituanus.org/2001/01_3_01.htm
Astrida B. Stahnke (Woman in Amber) on Vizma Belsevica
“Wherever a nation… goes forward, there… goes her poetry,” said Aspazija, the foremost Latvian poetess of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. She said it in 1902. And thus it has always been with the Latvian nation—the people. Poets and musicians, more than politicians, have set the tone—the first saying the words, the latter setting them to music. Together, they have inspired the people, gathered and led them until they have become a force. Then the politicians come in, and the struggles and fights for freedom and independence turn into revolutions and wars and, finally, the declarations of great political moment. Then, even the politicians try to speak and write in poetic terms and often disappoint and confuse the people who trust them. But in the beginning, there—in Latvian territory—has always been the WORD.

During Soviet rule, from the end of World War II until its collapse in 1990, there, among the poets, lived and wrote Vizma Belševica. She was born in 1931, started writing poems in the mid fifties, during Stalin’s rule, and continued until the ascendance of Gorbachev. In 1987, she told me that all her poems worth publishing had been published and that she had nothing more to say. Since then, however, her autobiographical trilogy Bille has been published and is a best seller, demonstrating her superb talent as prose writer. But the focus of this essay will be on Belševica the poet and her poetry. I wish to emphasize that this is a subjective essay and not a scholarly analysis. Others, notable Dr. Rolfs Ekmanis, have done that.* Her poetry has been analyzed at many literary conferences and poetry readings in Latvia and abroad. During the sixties and seventies her poems were translated into approximately forty languages of the Soviet Union, and recently into languages of the “Free World.” She has received numerous prizes and awards. She has traveled to the Scandinavian countries, Ireland, France and elsewhere, where she has been listened to and honored and where her poems have been published. For example, in 1995, at the University of Stockholm, at a literary conference, the Irish poet, essayist and translator Desmond Egan stated: “Her range is impressive… she is a poet for our time… a genius, with the intensity and piercing insight of a great artist.” To date, three volumes of poetry and the first volume of Bille, translated by Juris Kronbergs, have been published in Sweden. And the translations, into various languages, continue, assuring her a permanent place among twentieth century Eastern European writers.

I met Vizma Belševica for the first time perhaps at the highest moment in her career, in the spring of 1983, when she was honored as the poet of her people in a special poetry concert in Old Riga, in the Small Guild House. I felt as though I has stepped into a paradoxical space, where medieval, Soviet, and Latvian orders and languages fused in a strange amalgam. The hall was packed, the stained glass windows lit by the setting sun, the atmosphere quietly charged. When she came on-stage, applause roared. She was seated on a throne-like chair. Then came the actors and actresses who recited her poetry, which struck me as extraordinary, forceful, and judgmental—not only of the big and strong who oppressed the weak, but also of herself (the persona) who was afraid, a loner, different, a being in an alienating world. With each poem, it seemed, the voltage of charged undertones increased until, in the end, came the Skandenieki (a censured folksinger group) with flowers. They surrounded the “throne” and laid the flowers all around her and, standing in a circle, sang praises in abstract, indirect folk songs, rich in transferable meaning.

After the ovations ceased and the hall emptied, my host guided me forward, through several doors until we came into a crowded room. And there she was, a rather ordinary woman. She was laughing, talking, smoking, while autographing the performance program. We were introduced. I— as “from America.” We exchanged some words, and then she signed one of the programs and handed it to me. It said, “To Astrida who is very far.” Our eyes met, and somehow, in spite of the distance, I sensed that we became linked.

I was the first Western translator/writer who had faced her thus. In turn, for me, it was as though I were confronting the self that had been left locked behind the Iron Curtain, when my family escaped in October 1944 and Latvia was cut in two by the onslaught of Russian and German forces. But I said nothing. Thanking her for the autograph, my guide and I left the ancient hall. After I returned home, cautiously, starting with Madaras (literal translation: picking madder root flowers), I began translating Belševica’s poems. I sent her the translation and confessed that I did not know what madarą were. I did not remember such flowers in my meadows. She sent a picture of them with a complimentary note about the translation and a few suggestions, corrections, explanations. Yes. Of course. Then, I recalled the flowers, with tiny star blossoms, tendrils that stuck to my bare feet, and bitter roots that women dug up for home remedies and dyes. The symbolism was clear, but Belševica told me that her poems are not symbolic. No? I wondered. Then what are they? But I did not dispute. I translated more and sent them to her, and she sent them back—with comments and corrections. (Her English is excellent. She has translated a large amount of English literature into Latvian, including Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, poems of T.S. Eliot and much more.) Our collaboration continued until 1995, when a volume of her poetry, such as I had envisioned, was completed. So that is the gist of our relationship. ... [contd.]

[Stahnke cont’d from above]
...The next step is to find a publisher, thus hopefully making her works accessible to a wider international audience.

Belševica’s is a voice that needs to be heard in English, even in translation. It is a voice that opens the long-closed Soviet-occupied world, be it Latvia or any other Eastern European country that shed its shackles with such force that, it seemed, the earth trembled and the mighty fell. The poetry also reveals- inroads into the poet’s psyche as it deals with censors, family members, and pressures to conform. It is a woman’s voice beating against male-dominated hard lines; the persona tries to escape; she even wants to die, but cannot. And then the voice becomes a hushed, underground murmur until the ground breaks: until the metaphoric shoot breaks through last year’s leaves and blooms.

Also, Belševica’s poems are like hidden photographs of the country. Through the permitted nature metaphors, we see, as in black-and-white prints, the trampled fields and meadows, the polluted springs and the sea, the ploughed-up skylark’s nest, with “the children” gone. And we also see the smart crow, looking with one eye at the dawning light. We feel the strength and the beauty of endurance. We are made to face the truth; and the truth, so pure, hurts so much that we want to turn away, even as the persona often does. Still, the collective reaction of the people, quiet or loud, was outrage. Such outrage that, in time, the system was brought down, alas, also with the poet, who then “had nothing more to say.”

Now she is quiet and ill, perhaps sustained by the knowledge that once, when it really mattered to her people, she was “Vizma. Simply Vizma… the conscience of her time and her nation.” (Knuts Skujenieks in preface to her volume Ievziedu laika, Riga: Liesma, 1988.) To us, living outside our countries, she is an honest voice, a revelation of what we had escaped—what my parents, in a horse-drawn wagon, galloped away from when the bombs fell and the borders burned, placing a wall of fire between those on the outside and those on the inside.

This year, 2001, Riga is celebrating its 800th birthday. The city is spruced up. Some ancient buildings have been rebuilt and renovated. The Old Rathaus (Melngalvju nams) stands again in the old Hansa marketplace, close to the Daugava, undoubtedly more beautiful than ever. The opera house is also renovated, as is the Freedom Monument. And Riga will host many guests, the international jet set and some of us. There will be* celebrations on every corner this summer, as the linden trees bloom and the colorful crowds mill along the rivulet Ridzene, often mistaken for a canal. But this is the new Riga of the twenty-first century. Only a short time ago, Riga was gray; Riga was crumbling; Riga was left alone. Belševica mortared that postwar Riga in her poems, which I present here in my translation as a reminder, a historical footnote, a contrast to the dressed-up Riga, illuminated with fireworks like a giant birthday cake. I am also submitting selected poems that reveal the breadth of the female artist’s emotional palate in a rigid society, where sympathy with nature provides the only true escape and solace.

As I put these words and poems together, I wonder what is happening to the current Latvian poets and their poetry? Who is holding up the WORD now? Is poetry still “the guiding pillar of light,” as Aspazija put it, or is that romantic notion obsolete—like her long skirts and plumed hats? Can great poetry thrive in a struggling democracy that was wrenched free at such risks and sacrifice, for which people paid with their nerves and ideals?

Last time I was in Riga, I saw moss gathering around the statue of Rainis—the greatest of them all…

Maybe I misunderstand, but it seems that Ambersun is attributing Woman in Amber to ASTRIDA B. STAHNKE. That is incorrect. Woman in Amber was written by Agate Nesaule.

That book is a constant in our household, as it stands at the centre of my wife’s PhD work.

My apologies for not including more information of the book Insula!
      Having finished the books our dear Kristine sent me from the shelves of Saulaine, I did an Internet search of Latvian memoirs of the war to try to get understanding of what my family had faced. Sadly I did not find many. I did however come across a small review of the book, Insula, which led me on a search for the book itself. After many difficulties in finding the book, I wrote to the authors, where short correspondence led me to a wonderful friendship. 
I must as well give thanks to the author John Plume, for his assistance in trying to help me find a DP camp in See barn, Nuenbugh vorm Wald in which ITS has my family documented for a short time, although we can find no information of….....(can anyone help me find more information?)
  I believe the book has been sold out, although I would like to offer my autographed copy to Saulaine to loan out for a donations.
For more information of Insula; http://insulabook.com

Tom,
You are absolutely correct that Agate Nesaule is the author of Woman in Amber.
Here’s the correction for Astrida B. Stahnke.

http://www.lituanus.org/1988/88_2_07.htm
Astrida B. Stahnke, Aspazija: Her Life and Her Drama.

New York: University Press of America, 1984. 381 pp. $27.50 (paperback also available).

This first comprehensive book-length analysis in the English language of the life and work of Aspazija (pseud, of Elza Rozenbergą, 1865-1943) is intelligently and sensitively told. The volume also contains two verse dramas of this major Latvian writer and champion of women’s rights some ninety years ago. Author and translator Astrida Stahnke began her translating career in 1974, with the English rendition of Rainis’s play Zelta zirgs (The golden steed). She is also a published poet (in both Latvian and English) and a contributor of articles to various literary journals….

It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at either work, and I’m glad this thread is giving me an excuse to dig through my boxes of Latvian books for semi-forgotten treasures.

Amber, I am so sorry about your mother’s, your pain.  Re: the reading of ’ Maruta’, I’m still not FINISHED, but thus far, I think it far less depressing than Nesaules’ ’ A Woman in Amber’.  I realize we’re all affected by things differently but the subject matter in the latter for me (and this is in no way meant to disparage the book, criticize the author), was so dark, disturbing, it was a place where I just did not want to go or be.  Much thanks for the Belsevica—her poetry is wonderul!

Disa, now that you mention the camp, Insula, it seems to ring a bell.  Maybe you or someone else mentioned it in a prior post.  I think it was Kristine who said this before, but I really do admire your perseverance, determination and wish you the best and if I can help, please let me know.

Regards,

Irena

Thank you for your kind words Irena!
I think I did indeed inherit Latvian perseverance! (wink)

I did post regarding, See Barn, Neunburg vorm Wald, to which it was confused with Australia. No leads and my searches have come up null and void.

If I may as well, mention another book I found informative and deeply moving; Edge of Darkness by Lynne Gessner.

Disa, I am sure you are familiar with the DP Albums on line.  Berchstesgaden has 22 photos of life in Insula.

Thank you, Arija.

Still no information found of See Barn, Nuenbugh vorm Wald…..my mystery continues.

http://www.neunburgvormwald.de

Thank you for the link a.b.

Not being familiar with the German language, does the link mention former DP camps?
Possibly, did any other families take this route as well?
I’m very confused as to this link in my families flee.

              Thank you!