Category Archives: Generations

Deprived of Decades

17 July 2022 Ilse Munro Leave a comment

Me (front, second from left) and my friends at Latvian camp in Michigan.

I always assumed that I would live long. After all, my maternal grandmother, who survived the Russian Revolution as well as World War I, World War II, the resulting diaspora and emigration to the United States, died when she was 90. And my mother, who saw much of that herself, died when she was 91. Since life expectency has increased substantally since my grandmother’s day—she was born in 1879, when it was about 43 years for Baltic females—and was longer for females in the States than for those left in Latvia and since we arrived in the States when I was just five years old, I figured that should count for something. So, it seemed likely that the combination of good genes and good healthcare here would do me well.

I also assumed that most people—my mother and grandmother included—underestimated the toll that being a displaced person nearly from birth had taken on me and the other Latvian girls that I knew growing up in Grand Rapids. By all appearances, my cohort and I were remarkably healthy. But I felt that I was—and suspected that they might be, as well—damaged in ways not apparent to those who did not care to see. Of course, I meant emotional or behavioral–not physical–damage, conveniently forgetting that I considered mind-body dualism something that should have died with Descartes. So I saw nothing incompatible in the two assumptions. We might have to struggle more but would still lead long, productive lives.

That lasted as long as 2012, when I learned that one of the Latvian girls (the one directly behind me in the photo) was having a double mastectomy. Although she responded well to treatment, it made me question one of my asumptions. Particularily when another girl (the one to my right) succumbed to ovarian cancer in 2016. She, like me back then, was in her early 70s and her mother had lived to be 92.

That forced me to face the fact that my nearly dying a year earlier, when I was 71, might not have been the anomaly that I made it out to be (see “Body Language”). Particularly since the extensive testing I underwent in the process revealed a range of other issues. All I needed was the sad news that yet another girl (the one on the right in the back row) had died of unknown causes after six days of hospitalization. She was also in her early 70s while her mother had died a few years before at age 93

In all cases, death or potentially deadly health conditions had occurred about two decades before they should have according to my first assumption. While I know nothing about the remaining two girls, it did make me wonder whether I would last to 2035, as I had previously expected. And whether the stress of displacement at an early age might have done more than merely make me quirky.

So I searched for corroborating data. Not surprisingly, there was little that was even remotely relevant. One longitudinal study on the forced migration of Finnish children was about all that I could find. In reviewing the existing literature, the authors cited research, particularly from the United States, that showed better health among most immigrant subgroups than native-born residents as measured by indicators such as mortality, morbidity or self-ratings.The immigrant advantage could be attributed to selective migration, meaning that migration, especially the long-distance type, is dominated by people whose health is better than that of the origin country population.This is further reinforced by some stringent host country screening processes. Whether children who move with their parents are subject to the same selection mechanisms is less clear.

Selective migration was intentionally ruled out in the study itself since all families from a specific location were forced to move. As was selective return migration, where unhealthy migrants or those who experience deteriorating health tend to return to their communities of origin. Here, none of the families could return after World War II since their land had come under the control of the Soviet Union.

No support was found for the hypothesis that the traumatic event of forced migration during childhood has long-term negative health consequences. In fact, adult child migrants had lower odds of receiving sickness benefits and the females also had lower odds of receiving disability pensions. And mortality rates were largely driven by patterns specific to eastern-born populations of Finland. The authors suggested that the absence of adverse health effects could be due to the successful integration of these child migrants into post-war Finnish society.

As a former researcher, I knew that this study was hardly definitive. It is widely accepted that negative results are easier to obtain than positive ones since there are so many confounding variables. I also knew that the five or so years of displacement in foreign nations as well as the eventual insertion of young Latvian children into an unwelcoming American culture was, at best, only loosely comparable to the Finnish experience. Still, I took it as a sign that I–unlike others in my cohort–was not doomed to an early death.

That worked reasonably well until this past June, when I was diagnosed with Stage 3 triple-negative invasive breast cancer. I could not understand how on Earth this had happened. No one in my family had ever developed cancer of any sort apart from my aunt in London, who was a dentist and attributed her melanoma to the careless way X-rays were initially used in her profession.

All I could come up with was that my deterioration was but one manifestation of the general breakdown we had all experienced over the past few years. Where things dating back as far as my grandmother’s day–pandemics, far-right extremism , Russian invasions and the subjugation of women–that I thought had been relegated to the trash heap of history had re-emerged. That all the progress we had seen in our lifetimes had eroded and done damage to me just as it had when I was a one-month-old war refugee.

Generations, Migration, Nationalism

Welcome to America

24 June 2018 Ilse Munro 7 Comments

Five-year-old me photographed for emigration to the United States.

As indignities go, it ranked relatively low. After all, I had been subjected to senseless fumigation. An insult to any girl whose grandmother has taught her to wash her hands after everything and to always carry a clean handkerchief. But, somehow, making me look like a monkey in my first official photograph crossed the line. Some self-important functionary had said that my ears, which stuck out, had to be clearly visible or I would not be allowed to emigrate to the United States. So my mother braided my hair and attached it to the top of my head, and I let everyone know exactly how I felt about that. Or so I was told, at least. I have no actual memory of anything from my first five years, when I was a little displaced person from war-torn Latvia.

Similarly, I have no memory of the turbulent transatlantic crossing in a converted troop carrier, the General S. D. Sturgis, in the middle of a mid-October hurricane, where almost everyone but my father and a cook was too seasick to eat. Or of refusing to be labeled like luggage at Ellis Island, where I not only tore off my tag and drew a picture of a girl on the back but also snatched those identifying other refugee kids. Or of the 730-mile train ride to Michigan. Or of my mother bursting into tears once she disembarked in the Lowell station and saw the bleak surroundings. Or of the meager meal of canned tomato soup and Saltine crackers that our sponsors, a Lutheran minister and his wife, served us before putting my mother to work. Meaning that she was to hand-wash the dirty laundry accumulated since their washing machine had broken down, except that my mother—a clever lady shaking from exhaustion—diagnosed the problem as a short and fixed it with wire strippers and electrical tape and then only had to repeatedly load and unload the machine and carry everything out to the yard to dry. Or of the cramped, unheated space above the garage that they deemed suitable quarters for four people, including an old woman and a small child, during a chilly fall and the following freezing winter. Or of my urbane father being tasked to single-handedly turn their fallow fields into a functioning horse farm. Or of him walking 26 miles in deep snow to Grand Rapids, the closest large town, to secure a factory job. Or of us moving to a nice flat on Ethel Street.

The first thing that I do remember is staring at a large Coca-Cola clock on the cloakroom wall at Sigsbee Elementary School, where I sat for what seemed like an eternity, terrified that no one would come to take me home from kindergarten. Before you conclude that this was the same sort of separation anxiety seen in American kids starting school, let me remind you that Europe had been decimated by World War II and dealing with the devastating aftermath. As a result, my father and mother and maternal grandmother had been the only source of stability that I had ever known. The thought that I had been left to fend for myself was unbearable. Which is why I am appalled when Americans refer to the “zero-tolerance” policy of separating children from parents who cross the Mexican border to seek asylum—their right under both US and international law—as sending them to “essentially summer camps” or “basically boarding schools.”

As you might expect from the way that my family and I were welcomed to the United States, I was not nearly as shocked as many of my progressive American friends were by the way that a recently empowered segment of our society views foreigners who have been forced to flee their native land. That was always there, if not always so openly expressed. But back then, at least, no one kept me from my family. Despite my worst fears, someone eventually took me back to Ethel Street. Still, the memory of sitting alone in that cloakroom with that ticking clock stays with me to this day. I wonder what traumatic memories and subconscious changes will stay with the 2500 some kids recently separated and sent to shelters in at least 16 states. Some are only a few months old. Hundreds have been apart from their parents for several weeks. And there is no good system for reuniting them, so who knows how many will ever see Mom or Dad.

A border patrol agent takes a youngster into custody in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where at least three facilities are holding “tender age” migrants. (Photo: John Moore / Getty Images)

Children are held in a US Customs and Border Protection detention facility at Rio Grande Valley Centralized Processing Center in Texas. (Source: US Customs and Border Protection/Reuters)

Emotions, Generations, Identity, The Arts

A Book About Sentient Beings, Great and Small

11 April 2018 Ilse Munro 6 Comments

Front and back covers of the English-language version of a Latvian book.

Sometimes I wonder how I manage to have any friends at all. Take what I did to the talented Rīga illustrator Rūta Briede shortly after I was introduced to her by someone I knew from my childhood. Rūta had sent me the drafts of three books merely to give me some idea of the current state of children’s literature in Latvia; I responded by sending her three single-spaced pages of comments on one of them, addressing everything from color scheme to parallel construction to atmospheric science. I did say in the accompanying message, “Please understand that they are just initial reactions and that I, like many Latvians that I know here, state my opinions far more forcibly than I should, or even than I intend.” But that didn’t stop me from having the same sick feeling after hitting “Send” that I had as a child after I couldn’t keep from doing something that I knew full well was wrong.

Remarkably, Rūta could read between the lines. She understood that I would never have bothered doing any of that had The Dog Who Found Sorrow not meant so much to me. You see, it was one of those rare books that took children’s feelings seriously, and I was one of myriad others who grew up wondering why their experiences during war and displacement and other dreadful events were routinely trivialized by similarly distraught adults. It bothered me so much that when, late in life, I wrote my first story,“Making Soup,” I gave voice to a one-month-old infant and made her position clear from the start:

A woman on a bicycle stopped to tickle my stomach. It was bad enough she did that without my leave, but then she turned to my mother and said, “Thank God she is too young to understand.” Perhaps I was too young to play the piano or read Proust, but I was not too young to understand what went on around me. I understood before I came into the world, when my mother carried me inside of her. She gasped, and I had no air to breathe.

Rūta grants this sort of awareness to all sentient beings, both great and small. She uses a grown dog as her first-person narrator, and this dog demands that he be taken as seriously as my verbal infant. As depicted through evocative grayscale illustrations provided by Elīna Brasliņa, Rūta’s former student, his ears are erect, not floppy, indicating that he has not become domesticated and does not want to be seen as either an able assistant or a pampered pet. Similarly, his nose is long and pointy, not short and round. And being a thoroughly modern urban male, he not only walks upright and wears a coat but also grows pink roses, which he sometimes soothes with his harmonica. Accordingly, Rūta calls him “suns”—not the endearing “sunītis“—in Latvian, a language seemingly dominated by such diminutives.

Thus, Rūta and I were, more or less, on the same page. Then I had to tease her about the book’s themes and endanger our rapport. If only I had limited myself to exclaiming, “How Latvian!” This, after all, was the first reaction that I received from poet and publisher Clarinda Harriss after I asked her to look at the book. Clarinda, you see, had learned enough about my native land to know that this was so. Even enough that she had incorporated me into her story “The Vinegar Drinker” and made my character provide the protagonist with a recipe for galerts, an elegant aspic made mainly of pigs feet. But I had to take it further, much like a child has to test the limits. Referring to the sorrow that permeates the book, I sent Rūta a video clip from the Onion News Network featuring Latvian American actress Laila Robins demanding that her subordinate give her a hit or she would make him her news director in Latvia. “You know what the Number 1 hobby in Latvia is?” When he indicates that he does not, she unsmilingly says, “Sadness.” Fortunately, Rūta said she found it to be funny.

But sadness was so painstakingly detailed in the book that I came to believe it was meant to be something more than a national tendency. This particular sadness started out as mysterious black smoke that poured out of “everything that was lonely and abandoned,” causing residents to cough and destroying both the color and scent of roses, only to form a large cloud “as dark and hard as a cast-iron pan,” impenetrable to raindrops, which turned out to be tears. In contrast to the modern dog and other up-to-date denizens of what could easily be Rīga, this sadness had an old-fashioned feel, reminiscent of the soot that once coated cities during the Industrial Revolution. Doing some digging, I learned that Latvia is still dealing with the legacy of ecological damage brought about by the poorly planned industrialization that occurred after it was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. And that, despite the impressive economic gains and the cultural rebirth that followed the restoration of independence in 1991, Latvia is losing population at an alarming rate and even the vibrant city of Rīga, sadly, is now called “The Capital of Empty Spaces.”

Undaunted by the impossibility of his undertaking and the obscurity of my references, the dog, armed only with a ladder and a curtain rod, pokes a hole in the cloud. Once inside, he is surrounded by sorrows, at least one of whom is female. I see them as the mothers, sisters and wives of men such as my uncle who were first conscripted into the German Army against their will, then punished by the Soviets, who deported them to remote regions such as Kazakhstan and imprisoned them in slave-labor camps, but I have such an overactive imagination. Not knowing what to do, the dog—”How Latvian!”—resorts to music, which results in dancing, which breaks apart the cloud and releases the tears, which wash away the soot. That isn’t as unlikely as it seems. Between 1987 and 1991, Latvians participated in an Estonian initiative, The Singing Revolution. It culminated in a human chain spanning the three Baltic nations that could have hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. Less known but maybe more important is the role of the Environmental Protection Club, which resisted the industrialization, in constituting the core of The Latvian National Independence Movement. Success in blocking the building of a hydroelectric dam emboldened many other opposition groups.

“Hey, that’s too heavy a load to place on such a slender volume,” you—or even Rūta, who is currently participating in the London Book Fair and conveniently unavailable for comment—could say. But remember that once a book is released, it belongs to the reader. And I have decided that I have rights that extend beyond those of a regular reader. Rūta was kind enough to acknowledge me in the back matter, which, in my mind, makes me the dear dog’s agnostic godmother. Which requires that I look after his future. And it is a future that already includes East Asian nations such as Korea, Taiwan and China, where politician oppression and industrial pollution are realities that seep into the consciousness of the largest and smallest beings. And it is a future that could well include temporary settlements around the world that house young and old victims of the worst refugee crisis since the one that I experienced. As well as great American cities such as Detroit and Baltimore from which affluent families flee and leave behind much that is “lonely and abandoned.”

But before I press “Publish” and, yet again, cringe at the thought of what I have unleashed, allow me slip in one more layer of meaning. Although Rūta and Elīna might disagree, I cannot help seeing the dog that they brought into being as their alter ego. Or even a second self representing contemporary Latvian illustrators as a whole. One reason—other than the sheer impressiveness of their body of work—that I am so taken by them is that, unlike many others, they have managed, without denying its existence, to put Latvia’s troubled past behind them and briskly move forward. And it turns out that I am not the only one to feel that way. Rosie Goldsmith, an award-winning British journalist specializing in the arts, has observed that while contemporary Latvian writers seem to be burdened by the past, illustrators, in contrast, appear to be liberated. One could say that it is almost as though some well-drawn dog has ripped apart a dark, oppressive cloud and let color and scent return to the roses.

Note: Rūta Briede is a graphic designer, a lecturer at the Art Academy of Latvia and an art editor at Liels un Mazs (Great and Small), a Latvian children’s book publisher. The Dog Who Found Sorrow is Briede’s first but not only collaboration with Elīna Brasliņa, an accomplished artist in her own right who translated Briede’s The Queen of Seagulls, which received an International Baltic Sea Region Jānis Baltvilks Prize in 2017. For more on my dealings with dogs, read my essay “Me, As Mammal.”

The dog, who played the harmonica for a rosebush, plays for the sorrows.

Some “lonely and abandoned” buildings in Rīga being revived bit by bit.

Some well-deserved recognition for Latvia’s new “liberated” illustrators.

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Two illustrators at the 2018 London Book Fair, which features Latvia.

Gender, Generations, Leadership, Politics

No Big Deal

9 February 2016 Ilse Munro 5 Comments

President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga hosts a summit in Rīga. (Source: NATO)

Little Latvia has something to teach the great United States of America about presidential politics. Namely, that electing a woman as president is no big deal. It was not back in 1999, when Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga became the first female president, and it was not in 2014, when Laimdota Straujuma became the first female prime minister. (Latvia has a parliamentary system, so there is a head of state and a head of government.) Though born in Latvia, I had lived decades in the States by the time both of these events occurred. But I knew enough about both countries to be able to spot two reasons why this might be so: (1) the gender gap was not quite as large in Latvia and (2) the prevailing attitude among Latvians the world over was that women could do whatever men did. And could succeed—or fail—to the same degree.

The gender gap can be measured objectively. The Global Gender Gap Report, for instance, is based on data collected from 130 countries, or over 93 percent of the world’s population, in four broad areas: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment and health and survival. With no country obtaining anywhere near the combined score needed to indicate complete women’s equality (1.0), the most recent findings (2014) show that Iceland comes the closest (0.8594). And that Latvia (0.7691) fares a bit better than the States (0.7463). Curious to see what that says about political outcomes, I linked the scores to a list of women world leaders. Apart from President Borjana Krišto of Bosnia Herzegovina and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, for whom data were not available, all the women came from nations scoring above 0.6:

0.8594 Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, Iceland
0.8453 Prime Minister Mari Johanna Kiviniemi, Finland
0.8453 President Tarja Halonen, Finland
0.7850 President Mary McAleese, Ireland
0.7798 President Doris Leuthard, Switzerland
0.7780 Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany
0.7409 Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Australia
0.7208 President Dalia Grybauskaitė, Lithuania
0.7165 President Laura Chinchilla, Costa Rica
0.7154 Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Trinidad Tobago
0.7075 Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor, Croatia
0.6974 President Roza Otunbayeva, Kyrgyzstan
0.6973 Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh
0.6806 Prime Minister Iveta Radičová, Slovakia
0.6455 President Pratibha Patil, India

Attitudes are harder to quantify. But I am fairly certain that I was not unique among Latvians everywhere in feeling empowered as a female from my very first days. This empowerment came from my maternal grandmother, who was responsible for my day-to-day care. Born in 1879, she was able to figure out how to support her remaining family after her husband was executed by Russian revolutionaries and she had to return to Rīga, pregnant with her second child, accompanied by my mother, who was only a toddler, and bags of worthless rubles: she set up her own sausage stand and, later, turned a seaside resort into a resounding success. It come from my mother, who worked outside the home all her adult life. Born in the 1915, she managed to land a good job after we fled to Austria to escape the invading Red Army and then assumed the role of sole breadwinner when my father, after falling the equivalent of several stories at the hydroelectric plant where he had found work, decided that it might be best to study law in Innsbruck instead. And it came from my father, as well. He grew up with two accomplished sisters on a farm Cēsis and was equally proud of the one who became a farmer’s wife and the one who became a dentist. The latter, similar to what my mother did in Austria, became the primary provider not long after she and her husband fled to England. While she was able to establish her own practice in London, her husband, who had served as a judge in Latvia, could only find factory work. Which was not only unsuitable but also became a tax liability. So he quit to manage her practice. And both were fine with that.

I am constantly amazed by how many native-born American women my own age do not feel similarly empowered by their predecessors. However, I am truly heartened by what I hear from those born several decades later. For whatever reason, they have managed to instill the No-Big-Deal attitude in this electoral cycle. While most want to see a female president soon, they are also unwilling to say that it has to occur this particular year and be this particular front-runner. Even—or perhaps particularly—many feminists. So, according to a New York Times piece, some 87 percent of likely primary voters aged 18 to 29 say that they would vote for Bernie Sanders compared with only 13 percent for Hillary Clinton. As a woman quoted in an LA Times piece says, “Feminists choosing her just because she is a woman is the opposite of what feminism means. A ‘person’ should be elected by their records, not their gender.” So, there seems to be substantial progress.

It is important for the electorate to reach the point where gender no longer takes center stage. Not only so that more women are willing to run for office, confident that they had a fighting chance, but also that this could elevate the level of political discourse. As John Cassidy wrote in a piece in The New Yorker, “One of Hillary Clinton’s problems is that her campaign is largely about her. Sanders, on the other hand, seeks to inspire people with an uplifting theme.” And Clinton has claimed that this is so because she is a woman. If we were at the point where it was not always about gender, Clinton might show us what a remarkable leader she could be. On the other hand, very few have matched the “uplifting theme” marking President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. And racial inequality in the States is clearly greater than gender inequality. And many of the world leaders listed above had to contend with greater gender inequality than either Latvians or Americans endured. So maybe the best that Clinton can do is to make the presidential bid about herself. But then, at least, we would know.