Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia

Violetta Kelertas, University of Illinois, Chicago
"An illuminating contribution, bringing the experiences, memories and psychological aftermath of survivors of Soviet occupation to the world's awareness. Skultans' book demonstrates that oral history alone cannot capture the horror of a life but a sensitive anthropologist's array of tools can flesh it out.... makes the interdependence between social upheaval and mental illness explicit and yields broader applicationsnfor the analysis to victims of war trauma in general."


Book Description
Vieda Skultans left Latvia as a refugee at the age of six months. In 1990, she returned for the first time. This remarkable book is both a personal account of a homecoming and an anthropology of a people trying to come to terms with its past and to face an uncertain future. Based on more than 100 interviews carried out in the wake of Latvian independence, it gives voice to the stories that could not be told under Soviet rule--stories of dispossession and exile and of ambiguous returns. At the same time it unpicks the process of memory itself, showing how personal memory is shaped by the traditional narratives of national history and culture.


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