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Quotes About Latvia

Quotes About Latvia

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“I wanted - and still want - to tell my mothers story. She fled Stalins army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11.”
— Amity Gaige —

“Liberated in Germany by the Americans, seven-year-old Valya Brekeleva and her family of slave labourers went home to Novgorod as non-persons. "Most of the people from our village who went to Latvia survived. But most of those who were sent to Germany had died. For those of us who remained, the suspicion was always there." Most of her family were killed by one side or the other in the course of the war. Her mother died in 1947, worn out by the struggle to keep her daughters alive. She was thirty-six. Her father completed his sentence for "political crimes" and came home from the Urals in 1951, an old man. Even after Valya had completed university and applied for work at a Kazan shipbuilders in the 1960s, when the manager saw that her papers showed her to be an ex-Nazi prisoner he said grimly: "Before we consider anything else, we have got to establish whether you have done damage to the state.”

— Max Hastings

“I was born in Eastern Europe, in Latvia, and I'm fluent in Russian.”

— Ksenia Solo

“My mother was born in Latvia. She and most of her family fled from the capital city of Riga in 1944 with the final approach of the Soviet army.”

— Amity Gaige

“I wanted - and still want - to tell my mother's story. She fled Stalin's army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11.”

— Amity Gaige

“In the name of 'mutual assistance,' the Soviet Union would occupy Latvia until 1991, and it continues to occupy Latvia: in the obedient, epic lines at the post office, in the fug of coal smoke outside cities, in the notorious apartment buildings made of bricks of radioactive compressed ash.”

— Amity Gaige

“It goes without saying that before its culture and literature can continue to evolve, Latvia first must endure the political comedy of creating a stable, functioning and unthreatened democracy.”

— Amity Gaige

“The sole literary presence from my childhood was my grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, who eccentrically copied poems into the backs of his books. After he died, when I was 8 years old, my grandmother gave his books away, and his poems were lost.”