Trafika Europe 3 - Latvian Sojourn

Five Fingers (excerpt)

Māra Zālīte

Māra Zālīte was born in 1952 in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, where her family had been deported by the Soviet regime. When she

was four years old, they returned to Latvia. In 1975 she graduated from the Department of Philology of the University of Latvia. She has led the Young Writers’ Studio, been editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Karogs , and headed the copyright agency of Latvia. She is the author of five poetry books and 21 staged plays and musicals, including several rock librettos, as well as children’s books and collections of essays. She was in the forefront of Latvian intellectuals during the so-called Singing Revolution, and continues to have a prominent voice in current events. Five Fingers is her first novel, treating of the period her family returned to her grandfather’s farm in Latvia, where she had to reconcile the life she found there compared with the distant fairyland Latvia she had heard about in Siberia. This work debuts in English in our pages.

Translated from Latvian by Margita Gailitis; edited by Vija Kostoff.

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