Farewell Atlantis: Recollections

Before the start of WWII, some 93,000 Jews lived in Latvia. Almost half of them, 43,000 people, resided in Riga. Only 14,000 survived WWII.

Valentīna Freimane's memoir Farewell Atlantis is unusual among the works dealing with the Holocaust in Latvia. In beautiful prose, Freimane describes her early life in the "lost Atlantis" of Europe before Hitler's rise to power. She spent her youth in Paris, Berlin, and Riga - a member of a fascinating extended Jewish family, the daughter of a prominent lawyer whose work brings him and his wife and daughter in contact with many cinema, theater, literary, and musical personalities of the time. The education she enjoys gives her a cosmopolitan perspective on her experiences and on European history, shaped by the classics and German humanists.

She describes her life under the first Soviet occupation of Latvia and the years under Nazi rule, when her parents and most of her extended family members were taken to the Riga Ghetto and murdered, and her husband was imprisoned and killed as well. At the age of 20 she became a fugitive sheltered by families of diverse ethnicities and walks of life. "In the very worst period, in the most cruel, most inhuman time, I regained my faith in human nature," the author said in a 2016 interview.

Extraordinarily intelligent and well-read, Valentīna Freimane allows the reader to share her own intellectual growth in a turbulent era.