Bij uitgeverij Koppernik verscheen onlangs de eerste Letse roman die in het Nederlands is vertaald. Donau-hoofdredacteur Frank Elbers bespreekt Moedermelk, een bewonderenswaardig en aangrijpend portret van drie generaties vrouwen in Letland tijdens de Sovjetbezetting.
Lees verder bij Donau.
Nora Ikstena, a prose writer and essayist, is one of the most influential and widely translated writers in Latvia. After obtaining a degree in philology from the University of Latvia, she studied English literature at Columbia University in New York. Her first work of fiction, a collection of short stories under the title Nieki un izpriecas (Trifles and Joys), appeared in 1995. Ikstena has published a novel almost every year since. In her prose, which is marked by an elaborate style and detailed approach to language, she often reflects on life, death, love, and faith. Her latest novel, Soviet Milk (Mātes piens), has now been published in English.
Soviet Milk depicts a troubled mother-daughter relationship set in Soviet-ruled Latvia between 1944 and 1989, the mother’s life span and also the beginning and ending of the Soviet period. It is also the story of three generations of women – each trying to cope with the Soviet regime in their own way.
Soviet Milk is narrated in alternating sections by the mother and her daughter, both of whom are unnamed. The mother is born in 1944, towards the end of World War II, and shortly before occupied Latvia is liberated from the Nazis. On the eve of Christmas that year, Soviet soldiers, the new occupying force, plunder her parents’ yard, ransack the house, and take the father away. In response, the newborn is quickly whisked away to Riga, Latvia’s capital, in a suitcase.
The daughter, born in 1969, the same year as the author, grows up in Riga, where her grandmother and stepfather have an apartment. With her mother – her father is not in the picture – focused on her medical career, the daughter is mostly left to herself and grows up cared for and supported by her loving grandmother and stepfather. “Throughout my childhood the smell of medicine and disinfectant replaced the fragrances of mother’s milk. These chemicals would hang like a cloud around my mother: there when she returned from exhausting night duty at the maternity hospital; still there when, after long hours of wakefulness, she caught up on sleep at home,” the daughter recalls.
The mother is clearly damaged psychologically by the political repression under Soviet rule. As the title suggests, milk emerges as an underpinning theme. “My milk was bitter: the milk of incomprehension, of extinction. I protected my child from it,” the mother says. This rejection of one of the few commodities that is widely available, and impulse to self-harm, is a symptom of the internalization of political oppression.
While her daughter is in secondary school, the mother, a gynaecologist and fertility specialist, is awarded a prestigious research fellowship in Leningrad. Already known for her critical attitude towards the Soviet rulers, her medical career is destroyed after she molests the abusive husband of one of her patients who has sought her help to get pregnant. She is banned from doing research by the Soviet authorities and returns to Latvia where she is forced to work in a clinic in the country side. There she becomes more and more reclusive, and occasionally suicidal, not being able to copy with life in a totalitarian state – leaving her teenage daughter ever more in the care of her mother and stepfather in the capital Riga, who tell her stories about what life was like in Latvia before the Soviet occupation. The grandmother gives her granddaughter the love that her daughter is unable to provide. The mother subsequently flees in drugs and reading Moby Dick and samizdat literature. The daughter tries to take care of her mother and has a zest for life her mother lacks. She graduates high school and goes on to study medicine. As a student she actively engages in political organizing against the Soviet authorities, which eventually leads to Soviet troops withdrawing in 1990.
Soviet Milk is a beautifully written but also disturbing novel. It reminds us of the tragic reality of life under totalitarian rule and how hard it is to survive in such circumstances for uncompromising souls like the mother in this story. A century has passed since Latvia became an independent nation in 1918. For half of that time it was part of the Soviet Union. In Ikstena’s novel, the longing for freedom finally prevails, as it did in Latvia, which celebrated its centenary and liberation from Soviet occupation last month.
Nora Ikstena. Soviet Milk. London: Peirene Press, 2018. Translated by Margita Gailitis.
Dana Reizniece-Ozola is Latvia’s Minister of Finance. Before assuming this post, she served as the minister for economic affairs from November 2014-February 2016. She was a representative in the Saeima, Latvia’s parliament, for the Union of Greens and Farmers (ZZS) from 2010-2015. While in the Saeima, Reizniece-Ozola was chairperson of the Commission on Education, Culture and Science, member of the Legal Affairs Commission, and member of the European Affairs Commission. Ms. Reizniece-Ozola is an accomplished chess player and has held the title of Woman Grandmaster since 2001. In this interview, she talks about the glass ceiling and gender equality in Latvia.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
At the beginning of the twentieth century an artistic rebellion swept through Europe. Artists, architects, and graphic designers attempted to liberate the visual arts from the rigid constrains of the past and developed Art Nouveau, a new style inspired by the natural world. Art Nouveau left its mark on cities in Europe and North America like Barcelona, Brussels, Prague, Vienna and New York. No other city is, however, defined as much by the ornamental style as Riga, the capital of Latvia and largest city in the Baltic: almost one third of the buildings in the city’s center are in the Art Nouveau style.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
One of the most ambitious building experiments in history is nearing its end in many former Soviet states. Faced with severe housing shortages in the 1950s due to rapid population growth and urbanization, Soviet planners rolled out their first pre-fabricated, concrete panelled apartment buildings. By industrializing the building process, instead of using time-intensive masonry, housing stock throughout the Soviet block was rapidly expanded in the 1960s with these so-called Krushchyovkas, named after Soviet leader (1953-1964) Nikita Khrushchev.
Read further in Muftah Magazine.
Women run Latvia. The Baltic country with 2 million inhabitants is the only EU member state where women occupy the majority of management posts in different enterprises, according to data from Eurostat. Of the 54,540 Latvians classified as managers, 28,778 are women. The fact that women are chief executives, managing directors, sales and marketing managers is not new. Back in 2006, almost 43% of managers in Latvia were female, the highest proportion in the EU.
Read further in WUNRN, Women’s UN Report Network.
There is a new spectre haunting Eastern Europe. It is called the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence. From Riga to Sofia, resistance against this so-called Istanbul Convention has been mounting in the past few months.
Read full blog at Muftah.
RIGA / TARTU — Under the EU relocation scheme Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have now accepted 455 asylum-seekers from Greece and Italy since the beginning of last year. Although France (2,702), the Netherlands (1,216) and Germany (1,099) have received the most asylum-seekers to date under the program, by accepting the 455 — mostly Syrian — asylum-seekers the three Baltic states have actually carried a greater burden given their size (only France accepted more as a percentage of its population).
The EU relocation scheme is supposed to relocate asylum-seekers from Greece and Italy to other EU countries. It just hit the 10,000 mark last week, with 150,000 more to go by 27 September 2017. If successful, and that is still a very big if, the EU program would relief the 60,000-odd refugees that are currently stuck in Greece and suffering under terrible winter conditions, as well as another 70,000 from Italy. But implementation is slow and there is a lot resistance from governments and voters, aside from logistical challenges.
That the Baltics are now leading the way in the EU relocation program is quite astonishing, to say the least. Resistance to the arrival of refugees from Syria has been strong and the Baltic governments only reluctantly agreed — unlike other post-communist states like Hungary, Poland and Slovakia — to be part of the relocation mechanism. And as recent as last August the European Commission was critical of the strict admission requirements that the Baltic governments set for war refugees from Syria and Iraq seeking relocation.
RIGA — Laimīgu Jauno gadu! I’ll be spending January in Latvia and Lithuania where I will be reporting several stories on emigration and the refugee crisis. I will also be preparing for courses I teach this spring in the Gender and Development in Humanitarian Assistance program at Lebanese American University in Beirut.
2017 will be a critical year for the European Union’s relocation scheme, which aims to relocate 160,000 asylum seekers that are stuck in camps and reception centres in Greece and Italy to other EU member states. You may remember that enthusiasm in the EU for this quota mechanism has been lukewarm at best — with Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the United Kingdom not participating in the program. And the numbers show it: on 19 December only 9,356 out of the 160,000 asylum seekers from Syrian, Eritrea, Iraq had found refuge in the EU. Although Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are only expected to have accepted 1,481 asylum seekers by the end of 2017, out of the 160,000 for the whole EU, progress towards this goal in the Baltic states in the first months of 2017 may be indicative for the success of the EU relocation scheme as a whole. I’ll be speaking with policy makers, Baltic residents, and with refugees who were accepted last year and who are trying to integrate in their new adopted homes.
While 2017 may well be a crucial year for tackling the European refugee crisis, Latvia and Lithuania are continuing to face an emigration crisis. Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, young and highly skilled professionals have been leaving the newly independent Baltic states in large numbers. (Estonia is the exception; since 2015 immigration exceeds emigration, which provoked a response from 39,399 Estonian citizens.) Although emigration has been slowing in recent years, researchers have found that since the 2008 financial crisis more women aged 40-65 — some of them grandmothers — are moving abroad in order to salvage their economic well-being and support their multi-generation families. This is a trend also seen in other post-communist countries like Romania and Ukraine. In the next few weeks I’ll be interviewing both migration researchers and women who have left Latvia and Romania for Guernsey, Germany, Ireland, United Kingdom, Italy and Spain to seek better lives.
RIGA – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have drawn the ire of the European Commission over their reluctance to host refugees under the EU relocation programme, the LNT commercial TV channel reported Friday.
“There are only two criteria based on which someone can be refused asylum or relocation within Europe,” Kristīne Liepiņa, spokesperson for the European Commission Delegation in Latvia, told LNT. “One reason is that this person poses a threat to other people’s security, namely, to local society. And another reason, of course, is if this person poses a threat to international security.”
Yet to date Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have only accepted refugee families with children and educated refugees with foreign language skills and work experience.
The Baltic states between them are expected to accept 1,481 asylum seekers by the end of 2017 as part of the EU’s relocation scheme. All EU member states together agreed to take 160,000 refugees that are stranded in Greece and Italy by that date.
In its fifth report on the progress of the EU relocation and resettlement programme, the Commission wrote last month: “During the reporting period, a number of Member States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) have rejected relocation requests without providing substantiated reasons or on grounds other than those specified in the Council Decisions on relocation.” The previous, fourth report (June) also singled out the Baltic countries, among others, for “[…] lack of motivation of rejections of relocation requests [which] goes against the letter of the Council Decisions on relocation and the spirit of loyal cooperation.”
This is the first time, however, that a representative of the European Commission openly criticises the Baltic governments. So far the EU Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, Dimitris Avramopoulos, has only encouraged member states to do more. During the presentation of the last progress report he spoke of a “positive trend, but more efforts are needed.”
Latvia’s governing Unity party believes that the EU report is a testament to the fact that Latvia takes the application verification process very serious. “Our system of domestic affairs staff are doing their job well. […] The criteria should not be changed,” Lolita Čigāne (Unity), member of the Saeima and chairperson of the European Affairs Committee, told LNT in response to the criticism.
Ironically, the criticism comes at a time when all three Baltic countries have started accepting substantially more refugees. On Friday, Lithuania welcomed 11 Syrian refugees from Greece under the EU deal, bringing the total to 73 so far. Earlier last week, a court in Latvia granted five Iraqis refugee status and 12 asylum seekers from Eritrea and Syria subsidiary (temporary) protection. And two Syrian refugee families arrived in Estonia from Greece at the end of July.
The next progress report of the European Commission is expected in September.
