An empire collapsesPeters’ story

Cultural immersion

Growing up, I learned Latvian geography, history, grammar, and literature — even penmanship. In the summers, I occasionally frequented Latvian summer camp in the Catskills, but more often, I spent summer up in the Adirondacks↗ by Lake Champlain↗, in Clemons, New York (just up the road from Whitehall↗, the birthplace of the U.S. Navy) where a group of Latvians, many of them my dad's friends from his Art Academy of Latvia days — and all avid fishermen — had found a spot to congregate. But even while I passed my summers listening to stories of the old days, at the same time, I drifted away from the local Latvian community at home in New York.

Still, friends (and also my first wife) told me there was a passion they saw and heard in me only when I spoke of Latvia.

Separation and loss

My mother's family had all been deported. For years she wrote letters to the family home, now "part of" the Soviet Union. Fifteen years after being taken away, the family was allowed to return to Latvia but not to their old home, now a kolkhoz↗. Still, without permission, they would sneak away for an occasionally visit. Someone working at the kolkhoz who knew the family from before the war saw one of my mother's letters, stole it, and gave it to the family the next time they visited. When my mother unexpectedly received a letter back, she was understandably ecstatic!

My mother and her sister Laura exchanged letters under assumed names — my parents had also been slated for deportation, and according to Soviet law, as a Soviet "citizens" who had "defected", also traitors. One day the KGB came and packed my mother's sister-in-law Erna and daughter Gaida into a car to take them away to Siberia, again, for five more years. When the car stopped in front of Laura's apartment building, they feared the worst. But, as it turned out, one of the KGB officers lived in the same building and was only stopping by his apartment.

Growing up, we didn't have a lot, but my mother scrimped, saved, economized, and we got by. It wasn't easy — my father had passed away three months after I turned seven. Nevertheless, we paid "import" duty on behalf of our relatives, $1 per 1 ruble of duty, sending clothes and whatever else we could to relatives. Only, as we found out years later during our first post-Soviet visit, to have apparatchiks remove everything from our boxes and replace the contents one-for-one with inferior substitutes. American jeans replaced with cheap Vietnamese knock-offs. Scarves, sweaters, blankets replaced with cheap threadbare Soviet mass-produced goods.

Reunion after half a century — and Latvian beginnings

Suddenly, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1991, unexpectedly, the catastrophic demise of the Soviet Union offered me the chance to see my relatives, and for my mother, the hope of seeing her family for the first time in over half a century. And so started my voyage back into my heritage.

If we used to pack a lot in our "care" packages, our luggage over the next few years included everything from toilet tissue to folding beds and chain saws. I would typically go over together with my mother, spend a week, two weeks, or even three, and then she would stay for at least another month until I got a small apartment in Rīga and my mom moved there for a number of years.

Less than a decade later came another unexpected date: Sunday, May 23, 1999, not only my father's birthday close to a century earlier—I'm a sentimentalist—but a day that seemed just as improbable. That first time I set foot on Latvian soil, little did I suspect that some day I would be visiting with someone who shared both my life and my Latvian heritage!

That was the day Silvija and I married, the "second time" around for both of us.