Raised by her Latvian grandparents in Washington State, Inara Verzemnieks grew up among expatriates, scattering smuggled Latvian sand over the coffins of the dead, singing folk songs with other children about a land none of them had visited. Her grandmother’s stories re-created in vivid, nostalgic detail the family farm she’d left behind in a borderland violently contested during the Second World War. In the fighting, her grandmother Livija and her grandmother’s sister, Ausma, were separated and would not see each other again for more than fifty years. Journeying back to the remote village where her family broke apart, Inara comes to know Ausma and the trauma of her exile to Siberia under Stalin, while reconstructing Livija’s survival through her years as a refugee. In bringing together these two sides of the family story, Inara honors both sisters in a deeply cathartic and moving account of loss, survival, resilience, and love.
Author
Inara Verzemnieks has written for The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The Atlantic, The Iowa Review, and Creative Nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. After working for thirteen years as a newspaper journalist, she received her MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, where she now teaches as an assistant professor.
