Four books that put you in Latvia. Two are by writers from Latvia and set there: Soviet Milk and High Tide. The other two are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
Latvia's national epic is Lāčplēsis, an 1888 poem by Andrejs Pumpurs about a hero with a bear's ears. Its oral tradition includes the dainas, short folk songs passed down by singing. Very little contemporary Latvian writing has been translated into English, so readers also find the country through historians, memoirists and survivors. Occupation and exile run through much of Latvia's twentieth-century history.
Nora Ikstena's Soviet Milk, translated from Latvian, tells of a mother and daughter in occupied Soviet Latvia, with scarcity and KGB surveillance in Riga and the countryside. Inga Ābele's High Tide shows a woman's life shaped by the upheavals after independence. Frida Michelson's I Survived Rumbuli is a Riga Jewish woman's firsthand account of the ghetto, the Rumbula massacre and her escape, and Andrejs Plakans's The Latvians: A Short History traces national identity from the medieval Baltic German period to the Soviet era.
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A mother-daughter story in occupied Soviet Latvia, showing the repression, scarcity and KGB surveillance of the 1960s to 1980s, including the countryside and Riga.
A contemporary Latvian family drama in which a woman's life is shaped by the country's social and economic upheavals after independence.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Latvia.
A Latvian-born historian follows his family and Riga through independence, Soviet and Nazi occupation, and exile in the 20th century.
A Riga Jewish woman's firsthand account of the Riga ghetto, the Rumbula massacre and her escape during German occupation.
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