I discovered ‘Siberian Haiku‘ by Jurga Vilė and Lina Itagaki sometime back. I decided to read it now for ‘Women in Translation Month‘. This is also my first ever Lithuanian book. So, yay! 😊
‘Siberian Haiku‘ is the story of the author Jurga Vilė’s father Algis, when he was young. One day, Russian soldiers knock at their door, ask Algis’ family to leave in ten minutes, and then they and others are taken by a cart to a railway station, they are asked to get into a train, into freight cars, and they are transported to a distant land called Siberia. What happens to them after that forms the rest of the story.
The story is narrated by the voice of the young Algis, and we get to see the events unfolding through his eyes. Being transported to Siberia and being put in a Gulag is terrible and heartbreaking. But hearing it through the voice of a kid, who alongwith real tragic happenings, also imagines beautiful things and regards them as real, we also find that in the middle of all the tragedy, the story is also charming. It is like watching the film ‘Life is Beautiful‘. There are many beautiful characters in the story. Two of my favourites were Aunt Petronella and Aunt Margarita. The ending of the story is bittersweet – there is tragedy and redemption at the same time.
The story is told through a combination of words, illustrations and comics-style panels and it is beautiful to read. The lettering with its idiosyncratic mixture of capital and small letters is charming.
I’ve read stories like this about Nazis knocking the door and taking innocent people and sending them to some far off place and putting them in a concentration camp. But this is the first time I’m reading of Russians doing the same thing. (This story happened in 1941.) It was eye-opening for me. I don’t know why Russians hated Lithuanians so much at that time.
At the end of the Second World War and at the end of the Cold War, the general belief was that this concentration camp thing would be a horror of the past and it will never happen again as the world is an enlightened place now. But unfortunately, thirty years from that time, now we are living in an era, when in many democracies people are voting for right-wing governments who are using the same language as the Nazis and the Russians during the Cold War era, and are dividing people. In other countries, autocrats and dictators have taken over their countries with sham elections, and they are also using the exact same language and dividing people. The disease is widespread now. We are just a blink away from everything turning upside down and new concentration camps being set up. We need to keep our guard up and not let these bad guys win. This is the takeaway for me, from this story.
‘Siberian Haiku‘ is a beautiful, charming, heartbreaking book. It shines a light on an important chapter of history that many of us may not be aware of, a chapter of history which looks more and more relevant with every passing day, looking at contemporary events.
Have you read ‘Siberian Haiku’? What do you think about it?
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