Book Review: My Sister’s Mother: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Stalin’s Siberia
My Sister’s Mother: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Stalin’s Siberia. Donna Solecka Urbikas. University of Wisconsin Press, April 27, 2016, Hardcover and e-Book, 312 pages.
Reviewed by Gerry Souter.
This memoir is a collection of stories nested within a story like Russian dolls fitted inside one another—except here, author Donna Urbikas takes the reader on two journeys. We meet her in today’s world, estranged from her mother Janina and her older half-sister Mira, whose lives have been defined by growing up in Poland, surviving Russian occupation and then the horrors of German reoccupation. Janina and Mira share a bond forged by the crushing indignities forced on innocent civilians by equally vicious regimes.
To bridge the huge gulf between her life in today’s United States and the terrible realities of life in occupied Poland, Donna implores her mother to break the seal of silence and relate those tales of survival.
Like a soldier crippled with post-traumatic stress disorder, Janina dredges up her life first as a child following World War I and then as a young mother caring for Mira, her growing daughter, during imprisonments and treks from one slave camp to the next.
Scenes often surprise, leaping from the routine of daily searches for food and shelter to feral, half-starved dogs surrounding Janina in an abandoned village as they hunt for food. Another scene shows refugees herded up a gangplank into a river steamboat. A child cries and a six-year-old girl plunges into the water. Frozen in fear of the guards, no one goes to her aid. Screaming, she is bumped beneath the boat’s hull and drowns in the thrashing paddle wheel. As the boat moves down river, her entangled corpse keeps bobbing to the surface, an accusation haunting the passengers crammed onto the deck.
Like any reader with relatives who fought or survived in a war zone, remained silent for years, and then suddenly could not stop talking about what they had endured, the book moves from one world to the other along these separate journeys. However, not all the recollections are grim and gray. Janina punctuates the horrific ordeals with memories of beautiful Poland, cherished by Polish citizens who often risked their lives to keep their culture, language, and patriotism alive. Donna struggles to see with her mother’s and sister’s eyes that distant, desperate ordeal while living her own life in a world where she is free to create her personal destiny. Ultimately, she faces that gulf with children of her own. Donna passes forward Janina’s grit, resolve, and roots planted deep into the Polish soil, protected by the gold-crowned White Eagle of a free Poland.
I would recommend this book to adults and young adults who are inspired by tales of courage and may be haunted by a similar curiosity about their own roots.