94 years ago ...

Nancy Drew debuted on April 28, 1930. She'd been conceived by Edward Stratemeyer, son of German immigrants, and fleshed out by a ghostwriter we all knew as Carolyn Keene.  After his early death, his daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams kept Nancy Drew alive, by supplying outlines for her mysteries. Carolyn Keene, as mysterious as the mysteries she penned, was Mildred Wirt Benson for the first 23  books. 

But this post isn’t about the authors.  I’m  thinking about the timing. April 28, 1930.  Even though the Great Depression had descended with a thud, it didn't dampen the success of the series.  Nancy Drew and The Secret of the Old Clock was an immediate hit.  Her earliest ghostwriter, Benson, said: “ … (ND) was everything her author—or any girl, in fact—wanted to be and then some.” (page 117, Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak).

Because I’ve been obsessed with my mom’s history for the last twenty years, I can’t help but compare my eleven-year-old reading habits to hers. What was Katya, aka my mom, reading in 1930? (Hint: It wasn't Nancy Drew because the Russian translation for Nensi Dru didn’t come out until 1994.)

My mom wasn’t much of a reader.  Kulak daughters like her weren’t visiting libraries or bookstores to find adventure.  At 11 years old she was about to embark on a journey to Siberia. She did have a bit in common with Nancy though.  Both lost their mothers at a young age. Both adored their fathers. Both had a pet dog. 

But while girls on this side of the Atlantic escaped with mystery novels, girls in the Soviet Union were either joining the compulsory Young Pioneers or dealing with homelessness, exile and imprisonment.  No wonder my mom seemed jealous and even discouraged my love of reading. But forbidden fruit is so very sweet. During the sixties, I read and reread Nancy Drew along with a required dose of German poetry and Martin Luther bible verses. While the German translation of Nancy Drew debuted in 1966, I didn't get a copy.

April 28, 2024. Nancy Drew is still on bookshelves. Forever young. Forever single.  Forever driving her blue roadster. Once regarded as a trashy serial, too low-brow to be ‘real’ literature, she finally made it to library shelves in the 1960s and she's been in circulation ever since. 

The power of novels ... such a mystery. 

Border Issues

Another one of my former EAL students recently received her Canadian citizenship and I'm so happy for her.  Applying for a passport will be the next step.  It’s been a long and tedious journey. Dealing with bureaucracy takes tenacity and patience.  Her new-found Canadian pride reminds me of how fortunate I am to have a passport and to not have border issues … at least not with most countries.  Borders around the world seem to be growing in importance.  How did that John Lennon song go?

 “Imagine there's no countries/It isn't hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion, too."

My mom's family: fresh arrivals in Winnipeg 1953

Winnipeg attracted many European immigrants back in the late 1940s and 1950s. I remember the term DPs quite well. It wasn’t a positive label. DPs, often Eastern Europeans, came to Canada after the war to avoid repatriation to the USSR.  Resettlement in our overcrowded city was marked with language issues and financial strains. 

My mom’s family experienced decades of homelessness and went from displaced people, (as kulaks) to migrants (as orphans), to refugees (fleeing war), to forced labourers (war reparations) to migrants again (to Germany) to Permanent Residents (in Canada), to full citizens (in Canada). 35 years of not belonging. 

At the former border between East and West Berlin

This rootlessness probably started back in the 1860s when my great-grandparents migrated from the Gdansk/Danzig area to settle in newly opened farmland of the Volhynia area. In Volhynia they stayed long enough to establish not only villages but an infrastructure filled with schools, churchs and business.  They stayed enough years to call Volhynia home. 

Then in the 1930s, Stalin forcibly ‘resettled’ kulaks into Siberia and other remote areas. (See Red Stone)  A few years later, family in pieces, my mom and her siblings crossed the border from Soviet Ukraine into East Prussia (explored in Broken Stone). Later, in 1945, she crossed the border back into the USSR.(Crow Stone) A 1947 travel visa let her travel to Soviet-occupied Frankfurt an der Oder. She then needed to do an illegal border crossing into Western Europe, where she registered as an official ‘refugee’. 

She had no documents to prove her birthplace. The refugee category allowed her to obtain eventual German citizenship and further, an opportunity to immigrate to Canada. It took her until 1964 to get her Canadian citizenship. (A scene in my new book!) She was so proud of her Canadian document and of her new passport.  

I cross international borders without much worry except about the carry-on liquids I carry.  Passports are keys to safety, to opportunity and to new lives.  As long as there are borders, we will need passports to unlock the gate.

Now our country has new waves of immigrants, wanting only peace and freedom. Seems simple.

 

Fitting In

Just read Call Me Al, written by Wali Shah and Eric Walters. It’s a middle grade novel exploring the immigrant experience in Canada. Having spent the past seven years meeting with newcomers as an ‘English language facilitator,’ I can appreciate the challenges of adjusting to Canadian culture.  I grew up in an immigrant family and know what it’s like to live in two worlds. Call Me Al was told from an insightful and captivating young person’s perspective.

 

Wali Shah, author and spoken word poet

Wikipedia image

Like any young person, 13-year-old Ali desperately wants to fit in, hence his name Ali, becomes Al. This reminded me of an incident working in an after-school science program, a few years back. We had Syrian refugees in the grade three class and I was unsure of one boy’s name. “Just call him Mohammed,” one white boy shouted. “My dad says they all have the same name.” Like skin colour, names matter when you’re a kid … they can label you as different. 

While I didn’t have to deal with the challenges of racism, back in the sixties I had to deal with the post-war stigma of having German parents. My father had been in the Luftwaffe and still had a rough, military exterior. My mother … well, we dismissed her messed up past as too confusing … something I’ve tried to make up for with my novels. 

'Gangsta'-posing at Anita Daher's potluck
May, 2023
with the award-winning & prolific
Eric Walters

In Call Me Al, Ali needs to please his self-sacrificing Pakistani parents who expect him to become a doctor. Turns out that at 13, Ali has emotional and social needs that can’t be neatly resolved with perfect math scores. 

Without giving too much away, the novel ends with a compromise. I’m not sure every immigrant child’s story ends so neatly, so happily. But middle-graders might feel empowered by Ali’s story. It’s the kind of novel I wish I had an opportunity to read when I was an awkward grade eight kid, ashamed of her family and living in two worlds. 

About April

My backyard in April

T.S. Eliot, in The Wasteland, called April the cruelest month and I’d have to agree. It’s a month of transition and even change for the better is difficult. Stronger sunlight battles brisker winds. Snow turns to puddles, which return to ice before grudgingly retreating back to puddles, which shrink ever so slowly. Skinny, naked branches thicken with buds and eventually green sprouts emerge in even the shadiest spots. 

April was a cruel month in Europe, back in 1945. Sifting through old magazines I’ve collected over the years, I’m reminded of Nazi atrocities. That April, the Allies were like a spring sun bringing warm winds and exposing Nazi crimes of unbelievable proportions. Charred bodies, ditches filled with corpses, stick-like survivors. Images befitting the cruel month of April. Hitler belongs to April, too. Born April 20, 1889, he shot himself on April 30, 1945. 

Gardelegen Massacre in April, 1945:  CC  Max Stuck

So April is a month of endings, of beginnings, of transition. Ugly, cruel and yet hopeful. I’ll take it one day at a time.

And if this sounds too depressing, I also have fond memories of this month. Of anniversaries, of birthdays and of unexpectedly warm, summer-like days. My favorite April moment: finding pussy willows ... so tenacious, soft and brave. 

April … cruel to be kind?  A lyric from a modern poet. Thanks, Nick Lowe.  Let’s hope the cruelest month will finally be kind to us all. 

A Purple Light

Our city glowed purple this past week thanks to a national epilepsy awareness campaign. A long time friend and member of my writing group, was instrumental in bringing an Epilepsy and Neurosurgery Care unit to our city.  Thanks, Pat. With my own family directly affected by epilepsy I’m well aware of the need for epilepsy treatment facilities. 

It was my family connection to epilepsy that prompted my research into the condition and I used what I learned to write Tainted Amber. In that novel I highlighted the Nazi intolerance to epilepsy and their attempts to sterilize or even murder people with the condition.

What is epilepsy? Surging electrical brain activity that leads to seizures or convulsions.  (Think of an electrical thunder storm).  Modern medicine can monitor electrical surges through EEG. Locating the electrical misfirings can lead to proper medication to control these 'storms'.

CC  https://www.flickr.com/photos/tim_uk/8135755109/

How many Canadians are affected by it? About 300,000 (1% of the population) or more than 3 million people worldwide.

Famous people with the condition include: Albert Einstein, Socrates, Charles Dickens and Elton John. 

Thankfully, modern science has found medication that can control unwanted and unexpected seizures. There is no need to sterilize or euthanize people diagnosed with the condition. And with more research, more awareness, more purple light campaigns … we can now support and not stigmatize this seizure disorder. 

Thanks to advocates like my friend, Pat, our city is taking positive steps in that direction. Pat, you look great in purple!

Puzzling Memories

My aunt who inspired 'Marthe' in Crow Stone

Crow Stone was inspired by my mom who died back in 2011 at the age of 92. I’d been collecting her chaotic memories all along, and later put them together into narratives … filling in the missing pieces with background reading and travels … almost like doing a puzzle. As I quoted Kate Morton, last week, I was fulfilling the universal human need to create a narrative.  

A few months after Mom's funeral, I visited her youngest sister who'd been unable to come to the funeral. This aunt lived up in northern BC and passed away the following year.  It was from her that I learned the story about the child she'd fostered during the flight from the Soviet Army in the final months of the war. She claimed that it was this little girl, whom I call ‘Erika’* in the novel, that saved her from my mom’s fate in a POW camp in the Urals. My aunt was 19 in 1945 and looked after little ‘Erika’ until she came to Canada in 1953 after ‘Erika’ had finally reconnected with some of her own family. 

My aunt, date unknown, prob. about 1950

I’d been trying to meet up with ‘Erika’ as I researched the book, to no avail. Imagine my thrill to now finally connect via email. Imagine my surprise to have ‘Erika’ asking me to fill in the details of her early childhood. Imagine my absolute delight to be able to share my book and my research with this woman, now in her early eighties, living in northern Germany. 

from The Guardian, Jan.3, 1947, p.8

I told ‘Erika’ of how much my aunt loved her. My aunt had shared stories about how the surviving East Prussian women and children were forced to work in the newly formed collectives or kolkhozes’.  Those were extremely difficult years. Food was scarce ... hunger and disease was everywhere. But my aunt, smiled with gratitude as she shared, “little ‘Erika’ was our sunshine as she sat amongst the vegetables with us as we worked. She sang to us with her sweet voice and gave us so much happiness.”

To be able to share this memory with the real ‘Erika’ makes me so very happy. Of course, I sent her a copy of Crow Stone. I know it’s not the factual truth … it’s not a memoir. But the magic of story transforms facts into emotional truths that can be just as valid. 

It's making these sort of connections that makes my writing and research efforts seem so worthwhile.

*See Crow Stone, pages 91, 98 and 101 for mention of Erika

welcome sign of collective or kolkhoz in the former USSR
from my own collection
'

Reading Kate Morton

Kate Morton’s one of my favourite novelists. Her latest novel, Homecoming, had been on my TBR pile for a while. I’ve really lost myself in the worlds of two of her earlier novels, The Forgotten Garden and The Clockmaker’s Daughter. This new one, Homecoming, however, was not quite as compelling. The pace seemed plodding, the characters and POVs too confusing, and the convoluted plot line more irritating than intriguing.  What saved it was the writing!

I love Kate Morton’s writing. Her novels evoke mood through a neglected natural setting. Besides nature gone wild, there are the inevitable neglected homes in her stories ... revealing complicated pasts. I’m reminded of the ruins of East Prussia inside modern Kaliningrad.  Here in Canada, ruins are sparse. If we have any ruins, they're soon razed for new development or burned by homeless people keeping warm. 

Besides nature and history, Morton’s ardent love of books and old things infuses her work. She braids mystery, nature and human frailty into compelling narratives. 

Here are some of my favourite lines from Homecoming. 

About story:

 “…the first and firmest human addiction is to narrative.” (p. 116)

About walking:

“…to walk was to think, to think was to breathe, to breathe was to stay alive.” (p. 193)

About home:

“Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete.” (p. 543)

About time:

“…a sense of timelessness, of nature, older and more pervasive than anything human beings and their histories could generate, grew thick and warm around them.”  (p.544)

about travelling

Me and Lenin in Zhytomyr in 2004

People travel for different reasons. Some, of course, travel because of work. But many deal with the stresses of new time zones, busy airports, and passport controls by choice.  Some travel to escape … and any random destination will do. Some travel to re-connect … with people, times, or places. Some travel to get lost. Some travel to find themselves. Some travel because of weather. In spite of our warm houses, warm cars and layered clothes, we still wimp out on the cold. Some travel to relax in spite of  luxuries in their own homes. Some travel for adventure. Some travel, not by choice … some are exiled. 

Others don’t travel much at all. Like me. I’ve been restrained by finances and family health issues. Past family travel carefully avoided the big (expensive) spectacles of the world and focused on local, nature-centred camping trips. 

As I youngster, I had my first suitcase at age three … a round blue-with-white trim affair, with a slot for an umbrella. I was sent on a journey as my parents prepared for the arrival of my only sibling. I guess that trip made me an exile.

sunset in Bucerias

As a student, I traveled to escape and find myself … doing the requisite year-long backpacking trek through Europe. Later, the few trips I managed to squeeze in while raising kids focused on exploring my roots. 

This last trip was the first time, in 40 years, that I went on a trip for fun. Holidaying in Mexico, last month, was weird. I felt strangely out of step with my fellow tourists. Hedonistic even. This is what people do? Eat in restaurants, have drinks, buy stuff they don’t need and get too much sun? Just for the fun of it? 

It doesn’t explain why I’ve booked a holiday in Mexico for next year. Practice, perhaps? I need to practice. But mostly, I promised my family that I’d share. After all, they were house-sitting, care-giving, and dog-walking while I was soaking up the sun. 

Truth be told, I find reading to be an awesome way to travel. Right now, I’m in southern Australia, soaking up the drama of a Kate Morton historical novel. Love how she time travels between present and past. 

And for me, time-travel is the best kind of travel!

Déjà vu

I recently learned about Ksenia Karelina’s arrest in Russia. According to CNN, “Ksenia, a dual citizen, went to Russia to visit her 90-year-old grandmother, parents and younger sister. She has been accused of treason for allegedly donating $51.80 to a Ukrainian charity in the US.”

She became an American citizen in 2021 but Russia does not accept dual citizenship and she now faces a potential 20 year prison sentence if found guilty. Treason? Because of a fifty-dollar donation supporting Ukraine? Boggles the mind. Putin’s re-creating a Stalin terror-state.

My grandfather was found guilty of treason back in 1937.  That was under Stalin. A person charged under Article 58 was considered an ‘enemy of the people’ and a counter-revolutionary.   The law was in place until 1958 under Nikita Krushev. That was the same year my surviving relatives received letters of ‘rehabilitation’ from the Soviet government, entitling them to pensions. 

With Yuri, translator who helped me peruse a thick file
involving my grandfather in the secret police files/Zhytomyr

Modern Russia’s version of Article 58 is Article 275, updated in April 2023. It defines treason as "espionage, disclosure of state secrets, or any other assistance rendered to a foreign State, a foreign organization, or their representatives in hostile activities to the detriment of the external security of the Russian Federation, committed by a citizen of the Russian Federation."

It’s been 20 years since I accessed the secret police files in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. With the help of a translator, I read through my grandfather’s file along with the files of his brothers. On thin pink papers, I read of the money he received from family and a church group in Poland and East Prussia. Eight DM (Deutsch Marks) in July, 1934, 11 DM (Deutsch Marks) in November, 1934, another 8 DM in April, 1934. A pittance of money to help him survive as he struggled to get an exit visa out of the country.  A pittance was all it took to charge him with treason. Translated, from his file:

Executions were carried out in the basement of this building
- former NKVD headquarters in Zhytomyr

 “Found guilty on August 28 and  condemned to death.  This should be carried out on September 19, 1937 at 3:13.” 

And now, a young woman, accused of treason for sending a Ukrainian charity fifty-one dollars. Déjà vu, indeed!

What I'm Reading

This book, Nancy Drew and Company, came out in 1997 so its perspective is a tad dated. Nevertheless, as a first book I've read about the phenomena of Nancy Drew, it was insightful. I appreciated learning about series fiction in general and its influence on 20th century readers. I was an avid Nancy Drew fan and remember the stigma of being one. Not surprised to learn that it wasn't until the mid 1970s that the NYC public library would carry the series. Forever young, Nancy Drew was a role model for me and this book confirmed that she was also a role models for millions of other young readers.

And now, because I'm going on a trip, I've pulled out a book I found this past summer in a Little Free Library ... Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel.  Not sure what sort of internet connection I will have ...  and don't want to risk sand on my electronics.  I won't be gone long ... two weeks. But I've suddenly got 'ants in my pants' and need to get out of dodge!

puzzle pieces

What I’ve tried to do through past stories is shine a bit of light on forgotten lives. Take my grandmother, Matilde, age 41. She was put into an unmarked grave in Yaya, Siberia back in February of 1931. 

Then there’s her youngest son, Jonathan, a toddler who died along the way … left somewhere along the train tracks crisscrossing Russia. No birth or death certificates to mark their lives. Faded photographs and confused memories. Even red granite stones become anonymous over time. 

My grandmother with Jonathan on her lap

Current temperature in Yaya, Siberia is minus ten. Keeping track of the weather in Yaya is a way for me to stay in touch with my grandmother. Crazy? I know. I still hope to visit the town which orphaned my mom and her siblings. To get there I need a two-day train trip east from Moscow to Novosibirsk, and then change trains for another four-hour ride. Maybe, someday.

In the meantime, there are two other youngsters I’ve been trying to remember. My father’s two sons from his first marriage were born during the war … perhaps in Posen (now Poznan, Poland) The stigma of his subsequent divorce after five years' Soviet imprisonment, of being German, and the ubiquitous nature of death at the end of the war—means their short lives … like the lives of countless other young children … flow into an anonymous ocean of tears. For our family, their lives belonged to dark closets and forbidden photo

My father with his first son in his arms

albums. I’m still searching for a way to weave their brief lives into my stories. With only vague clues to their histories, my imagination meanders.

Did unremembered lives really live? Of course, they did. And we, the story-makers, try our best to recreate life from the lifeless.  It’s like putting a puzzle together without a picture for reference. 

This post was inspired by a Eurasian Knot podcast I listened to last night while dog-walking. While their conversation focused on Mennonite repression, my family’s German Baptists/Lutherans shared similar stories. 

Curious, Kind, and Brave

Absolutely thrilled that my new manuscript, “Waltraut” (working title) has been accepted for publication. This book was so much fun to write, that it barely felt like I was working. I loved playing with my protagonist, Waltraut. She’s been a good friend to me over the last few years. Re-visiting childhood memories like Saturday German school, summer church camp or the show-home dream, put me into a youthful headspace, decades away from today. 

Waltraut also reminded me of the challenges that come with being in two worlds … the stress of fitting into a Canadian school and community. Whether it’s the obvious issue of language, or the subtler issues of culture including food, hair, clothes and parental expectations …there can be huge demands on a young person in a new country. The issues Waltraut faced back in the 1960s, still exist today. Immigration—due to war—is a current affair.

What I want readers of this middle grade novel to discover is the empowerment of being themselves … of embracing and loving who they are … of speaking their truths. Diversity is a strength. We’re all unique, all different and yet we’re all on the same journey. To be you is not a noun … not a reflection in the mirror defined by hair, skin colour or clothes. It’s not a language to speak or read, or a food to cook and eat.  To be you is to be a verb … to accept, to share, to learn, to be a friend. 

I thank Nancy Drew for inspiring me to strive to be curious, kind, and brave!

p.s. More information about my new publisher and release date will be coming soon. But I just couldn’t wait to express some of my excitement! 

what's in a word?

Raphael Lemkin

Having spent most of the last ten years immersed in researching 20th century violence that involved my own family, it’s disconcerting to view this new century’s headlines offering up real-time atrocities. Last night I listened to CBC Ideas, which broadcast parts of the Genocide debate speeches at the Hague. 

Definition of genocide:  a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not include political groups or so called “cultural genocide”.  The word, created in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer, didn’t get legal status until 1946. 

Memorial to drowning victims in Yantarny

This month, 78 years later, the Hague's international court dithers about its application as vulnerable people suffer … ironically, being killed by a people once themselves almost destroyed by genocide. 

January is also the month when more than 10,000 Jewish women, from up to thirty of Stuffhof’s external camps in East Prussia, were forced to march along the Baltic’s amber coast to the mine in Palmnicken (now Yantarny). Only 3000 made it. Instead of being stuffed into one of the amber mining shafts, as originally planned, the emaciated prisoners were forced into the icy Baltic.   

The Baltic near Yantarny on a summer's day

I’ve blogged about this particular atrocity before, but it’s an event that I can’t help but remember every January here in Winnipeg, where it’s cold and windy. I’m grateful for the grace of life that gives me the comforts of warm clothes, food and home. 

While these Jewish prisoners were dying, controlled by a heartless Nazi leadership, the East Prussian civilians were about to embark on their own trek of cold and suffering. 

January is a cruel month … why can’t we all just have a group hug, tend our home fires and read a good book?

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” ― Albert Einstein

Reading and writing books, listening to others share their stories … it’s the way towards peace. 

Amber Mine entrance 

 

can revenge ever be justified?

I’ve been reading with intense interest, Nicole Eaton’s 2023 release, German Blood, Slavic Soil, How Nazi Königsberg became Soviet Kaliningrad. Eaton’s academic style makes for slow reading, but it’s jam-packed with information. Her thorough study showcases what I fictionalized in Crow Stone.  My mother’s time in East Prussia ended with her deportation to the Urals in the spring of 1945, but her sisters stayed behind. They would have witnessed the renaming of Königsberg to Kaliningrad in July of 1946, staying in the Soviet-occupied enclave until their forced expulsion in 1948. 

As I prepared for my 2019 trip to Kaliningrad, I asked a surviving cousin about her time in East Prussia after the war. She shared some place names Pillkallen (which I wrote about here), but it was difficult because I didn’t even know what questions to ask. Eaton’s book might have helped me understand the situation better. 

Mikhail Kalinin

I’d read several memoirs written by East Prussian survivors, but nothing that summarized the events with objective detachment. Eaton’s research confirms, what many memoirists shared:  East Prussia received the bulk of Soviet revenge. They were not liberating the civilians from Nazi rule, they were punishing them for being fascist. Eaton writes, “East Prussia, as the first German territory the soldiers entered and a place where so many refugees were intercepted during their flight, suffered the worst violence of any German conquered territory, including even Berlin.” (page 129). 

Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad in honour of one of Stalin's buddies who'd died earlier in the year. Changing names, changing identities. The final act of ownership.

With current world conflicts raging, it’s again revenge not liberation that seems to be fuelling violence. Can revenge ever be justified? 

For more about how Königsberg became Kaliningrad, watch this on Youtube.

the power of attitude

I started off the year listening to Viktor Frankl’s short essay collection, Yes, to Life. It caught my attention because I’ve been following the alarming trajectory of Alexei Navalny’s life. How does one stay positive in spite of horrendous circumstances? 

As a Holocaust survivor, Frankl knew that attitude is the one thing that cannot be taken from a person who’s lost health, freedom, dignity and family. 

In this book, Frankl posits crisis as offering opportunity. The Chinese word for crisis includes the word opportunity. 

Like Eve in that metaphorical Paradise, we always have a choice.  I need to remind myself, again and again, that it’s not strength that creates power … it’s courage. 

I also appreciated Frankl's thoughts on collective guilt. Like Thomas Mann, in his 1945 BBC radio broadcast,  Frankl says that we are liable for collective actions of a society even if we were not personally responsible. 

CC by Dmitry Aleshkovskiy 

Alexei Navalny, Viktor Frankl and countless unseen, untold people continue to generate hope throughout our messed-up world.  May our own acts of courage empower Alexei Navalny, as he continues to Say Yes to Life.