Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2024
Cover design Louisa Maggio
Cover photograph Refugees from Poland heading for Berlin 1945, Fred Ramage/Alamy
It’s one thing to collect stories from strangers, but quite another to gather them from a beloved grandmother. Andra Putnis has succeeded in venturing where angels might fear to tread.
She has patiently over time listened and questioned her Nanna Aline and also recalled tales from her life as a young person when Grandma Milda lived with her family. To this she has added the results of conversations with other family members and her own research.
What she delivers us in the end is a carefully and thoughtfully curated story of family, of dislocation and migration, but also a view of the history of Latvia, and Europe as a whole, in the twentieth century. This is a story of repeated occupations, as it is for many countries in that region, with successive invasions and occupations by the Russians and Germans.
This is a painful history for most Latvians and big questions of how to cope with an occupying force and still survive inevitably arise. However, in the intimate recollections of the personal lives of Andra’s grandmothers, we feel the intimate emotional impacts of these big political and military events. The methodology of the author is almost as fascinating as the tales she tells.
Students of modern European history will be interested in the experiences Nanna Aline had as a teenager in a German work camp. The social mores of the time are starkly displayed with the story of her unwed pregnancy and subsequent marriage to a priest.
These were stories long held and the sense of shame is palpable. The telling has provided a type of expiation and brought the wider family together in ways that could never have been imagined at the time.
Equally, the plight of Grandma Milda, pregnant and fleeing invasion, leaving behind a formerly comfortable life with her handsome husband Rudis, sheds light on the attitudes and lifestyle of some Latvian community members now resident in Australia. The things we value and the things we must leave behind are so often the same.
The parlous state of Latvia in the second half of the 20th century (post World War 11 and its geo-political changes) meant that returning was always problematic.
First there was the issue of safety and then of shattered memories. To some extent it is the story of all migrants, the longing for what was and can no longer be, the loss of belonging – anywhere, really.
In the end this is a story of strength and resilience. It is not entirely a story of the women of this family but is largely so. Indeed, the very need Andra felt to unearth secrets and stories, and then to construct this written history is indicative of the pull of family, the essential human need to know who we are and where we come from, and to honour it.
This book is an act of love – for family, for Latvian culture, heritage and history and for all displaced peoples. And it is a way for old hurts to begin to heal. It’s a beautiful reading experience, created by an author not only in command of her subject and the craft of writing but possessed of the long and gentle patience needed to be with people who need to speak of grief and loss.
The reader is the grateful beneficiary of Andra’s compassionate and meticulous chronicling.
Thank you to Allen & Unwin for my review copy and to Andra for speaking with me about family, history, Latvian culture and the process of gathering stories.