This Is Not My Sky

ISBN-13: 9781546329213 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 422 str.

Laima Vince

Opis

It is 1950. World War II has ended. The tiny Baltic country of Lithuania has been occupied by the Soviet Union. Here the war after the war is still raging. It is an underground war--a war that is fought by those who have survived and remained behind after Stalin's massive deportations to Siberia, and after a third of the population has fled to the West. It is a war fought by men, women, and children. Maria is 12. Her father is has been deported to Siberia. Her mother is hiding a resistance fighter who has returned from the West under the floorboards of their little wooden house on the edge of the forest. This is Maria's story. It is a coming of age story that spans almost half a century and two continents. The novel follows the life of Maria from when she is a 12-year-old girl in postwar Lithuania to her life in America during the Cold War years, through to the eve of Lithuanian independence. The novel also explores the linguistic and cultural divide that develops between generations when immigration tears people away from their native land. This is a story about what happened to thousands of Baltic people when their countries became the front line for two of the twentieth century's most ruthless dictators, Stalin and Hitler. This is a story of what it takes to survive in a time when hardly anyone survived. I first began writing THIS IS NOT MY SKY the night the United States invaded Iraq in March, 2003. As I was listening to news reports on National Public Radio, President George W. Bush made a statement that Operation Enduring Freedom would be over within weeks. I thought to myself there was no way this invasion would be quick and easy. The human cost would be very real. The people of Iraq and the coalition soldiers and their families would feel the effects of war trauma for generations. My father was a displaced person from Lithuania during World War II. I'd grown up in an emigre community of displaced persons. At the time we had no labels for our experience, but we now know that PTSD is passed down the generations. THIS IS NOT MY SKY is my anti-war novel. I wanted to show through the story of one family how the trauma of war is passed down the generations, even when transplanted to another continent and another time. I wanted to tell this story from the perspective of women who've had to hold things together in the home as the world falls apart around them. As I wrote I realized that this novel is also the story of the great enduring love of mothers and daughters and grandmothers. Love is the fabric that holds a family together through the onslaught of history...