a Baltic addendum
Although my post on the culture and history of the Baltics was on the light-hearted side, there is one serious thing that I would like to call attention to, since related topics keep coming up in LJ fandom. I would love it if this book by Ruta Upite were more widely known and widely read (not an easy campaign, seeing as how it's out of print). I suppose you could call Ruta the Latvian equivalent of Anne Frank: when she was 14 years old, she and her family were sent to a Siberian labor camp for five years, where several of her family members died of cold, starvation, and disease. The remaining members were allowed to return to Latvia for several years, but then were imprisoned in Siberia again. Ruta managed to keep a diary through all of it, until she died in her twenties. The diary was smuggled out of the country, translated, and published in 1978 as Dear God, I Wanted To Live, by Ruta U. (initial only, to prevent reprisals against her surviving relatives).
If you want one measure of her obscurity, Ruta doesn't even have a wikipedia stub (although I see that she is on the list of "hey, we need articles about these people!" on the German wikipedia). If I can find my copy of the book when I go home for Christmas, I might remedy that.
If you want one measure of her obscurity, Ruta doesn't even have a wikipedia stub (although I see that she is on the list of "hey, we need articles about these people!" on the German wikipedia). If I can find my copy of the book when I go home for Christmas, I might remedy that.