Product Description

Agate was six when she and her family fled their comfortable parsonage in rural Latvia to avoid the Russian advance. First interned in Germany, they were sent to work at an institute in East Germany where they were bombed and then captured after all by brutal Russian Mongolian troops. A witness to rape, torture and executions, Agate and her sister played among the corpses as the family starved, awaiting death. Time and again it was their mother who kept them going, and yet it was one moment in which she lost hope that changes their relationship and haunts Agate. Ultimately the family is admitted to a Displaced Persons Camp in the British Zone. There Agate goes to school once more. It is her mother's wish for her daughters that they be well-educated; that although she was deprived of her chance, that the life of the mind will be theirs. In her spare time Agate reads a battered paperback first volume of Gone With the Wind, in Latvian. Five years later the Nesaules arrive, penniless, in Indianapolis where Agate teaches herself to read English from a library copy of the book. The Latvian community in exile clings together but Agate wins a scholarship to the university, fulfilling her mother's dream. Yet, though she assimilates, part of Agate is still frozen in the past, still overcome with the shame of "not being worth feeding, " and the terror of captivity, never at ease with her mother, always missing the affection they once shared. And she in unable to choose fulfillment over degradation in her private life... until she begins to tell her story.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #564816 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The memoir of a Latvian woman who grew up amid the horrors of WWII.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A woman in amber is one trapped and preserved in her past. Nesaule (literature and women's studies, Univ. of Wisconsin) tells a moving story to promote the reader's understanding and her own healing. As a child in Latvia, she endured the terror and dislocation of World War II at the hands of both Soviets and Germans, lived in a postwar refugee camp, and became an immigrant to the American Midwest, establishing a life there shaped by survivor's guilt and a sense of victimization. Integral to her life are family relationships, especially estrangement from her mother, stemming from the war years and the author's own unhappy marriage. In middle age, Nesaule at last comes to terms with her past, builds a new life, and offers her audience a well-written and insightful memoir. For subject collections and general readers.
Rena Fowler, Humboldt State Univ., Arcata, Cal.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ingram
Witnesses to rape, torture, and executions, Agate Nesaule and her family survived against all odds in World War II Europe to emmigrate to America where Agate could receive the education her mother had always dreamed of. But the trauma of war was not so easily buried. For years she has been secretly tormented by memories. Now, in this 1995 American Book Award winner, she finally tells her powerful story.