They Took My Father: Finnish Americans in Stalin's Russia by Mayme Sevander PDF

By Mayme Sevander

ISBN-10: 0816643369

ISBN-13: 9780816643363

What an account. Sevander's father used to be one of the leaders of a stream of idealistic Finnish-Americans (from the USA and Canada) dedicated to making a socialist neighborhood in Soviet Karelia. in its place, he and hundreds and hundreds of others fell sufferer to Stalin's ruthless paranoia within the purges of the overdue Nineteen Thirties.

Sevander spent a part of her adolescence in a gulag prior to discovering her position in Soviet society in global battle II. the ultimate irony (actually, it opens the book): through the Glasnost period, the onetime Karelian pioneer city of Petrozavodsk establishes a sister-city courting with Duluth, Minn., dual urban to Sevander's adolescence homeland of stronger, Wis. while Duluth sends a citizen's delegation, she's on the railway station to welcome her onetime neighbors.

I learn no specific propaganda right here, only a first-person recitation of empirical truth. in truth, Sevander concludes by way of reaffirming her socialism, even after returning to the USA to dwell out her ultimate days.

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Extra info for They Took My Father: Finnish Americans in Stalin's Russia

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Ulitsa Uritskovo was one of the main streets of the city; it stretched the length of Petrozavodsk, ending at Lake Onega. The Lososinka River was not far from our room, just down the road, past a grove of trees and down a small 45 T H E Y T O O K M Y F A T H E R hill. Our building was called the Hotel because it was the first stop for the American immigrants. They came here, stayed awhile, and then moved on to logging communities up north or to cooperative flats within Petrozavodsk. But we were among the last of the immigrants; only one other American family came to the Hotel after we did.

I was still a child, of course, only eleven years old, and I didn't really understand the concepts of freedom and socialism and equality. But I knew my father believed in them, and I knew my mother did, and I knew that when I was old enough, I would, too. On the ninth day we landed in Goteborg, a seaport on the western shore of Sweden. My mother, brother and sister emerged from the cabin, pale and shaky but otherwise fine. All around us was the hustle and bustle of shipbuilding and commerce, people hurrying past us, the smell of new wood and sawdust and the salty tang of ocean in the air.

We discovered it when my mother unrolled a blanket that contained Leo's things. Out fell Leo's violin. It was broken into two pieces, its neck cracked. I was secretly delighted, though of course I didn't tell my mother that. After three tortured years of violin lessons, I was finally able to play simple tunes, but all of the instrument's tone and sweetness seemed to have died with Leo. I loved music, but I knew I had no business trying to produce it myself. "Well, that's that," my mother said with a sigh, laying the ruined violin in a drawer.

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They Took My Father: Finnish Americans in Stalin's Russia by Mayme Sevander


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