Why a Booktrail?
1969 – 1989: A mother daughter relationship in a country now under Soviet rule
Soviet Milk
What you need to know before your trail
The effects of Soviet rule on a single individual. The central character in the story tries to follow her calling as a doctor. But then the state steps in. She is deprived first of her professional future, then of her identity and finally of her relationship with her daughter. Banished to a village in the Latvian countryside, her sense of isolation increases. Will she and her daughter be able to return to Riga when political change begins to stir? ‘At first glance this novel depicts a troubled mother-daughter relationship set in the the Soviet-ruled Baltics between 1969 and 1989.
Locations
Reset- Latvia - Riga
- A: Tomsona iela
- B: Daugava River
- C: University of latvia
- D: Alojas iela
- Russia - "Leningrad"
- E: Nevsky pr
Travel Guide
Riga, Latvia, October 1969
A young doctor goes missing for five days, abandoning her newborn baby to the care of her parents. She believes her milk is so tainted it will harm the child
This is a story which mirrors the many years of Soviet occupation when Latvia was not its own country.
“Crimes against the regime were an everyday occurrence. I had to go through the formality of this circle of hell. Leningrad was waiting for me with its new scientific discovering and free spirit which oppressed Riga was not allowed”
Russia in Latvia
“At the crossing a granite Vladiir IIyich Lenin greeted me. Lenin had cooked up all of this bitter miser, and for more than half a century thousands had had to stomach it. I was born into this mess and I would have to die in it. I didn’t even have the memories that my parents had. My father used to talk about the time when Latvia was independent, and about the Milk Restaurant , which stood when the Hotel Latvia now reached for the sky”
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
A bleak yet soul searching read.
It’s a story about mothers and daughters, links to the motherland in all its forms and having to break free from a motherland’s grasp – or wanting to return to it from a foreign land. It’s a slow, quiet read, with lots of hidden pain and shadows of a human soul on every page. A girl is denied her mother’s milk and a country is denied the love and cafe of its motherland – for a foreign power, another ‘mother’ looking after their new charge. But this mother is bossy and cruel, the child wants to break free from its cage but when the cage is open, does a caged animal escape straight away?
There’s lots of imagery and symbolism in this novel. There’s a lot of depth and inner pain pressed into each and every letter of every word. As the story develops, as the year of independence of 1991 approaches, the message of the story really comes into its own.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Soviet Milk
Destination: Riga, Latvia Author/Guide: Nora Ikstena Departure Time: 1969 – 1989
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