by Rutt Hindrikus.

We all remember our own personal past. It lives in our memory in the form of an hazy story or a cluster of stories. Converting such a cloud into a narrative is often very difficult and complicated. Photos are sometimes like little ready-made narratives of family history.

Elin: is the central figure of the story. In the archive there are many  photos of her mother, grandmother, relatives,  and an old photo of her grandfather in his student days with his brothers and parents.

 

Who are the members of Elin’s family ? Herself, her mother and grandmother, three women of different  generations.

Elin’s grandfather Ernst Enno (1875-1934) was and Estonian poet, journalist,  and  teacher.
He married Ella Saul in 1909. In November 1910  their  daughter Liki was born.
Liki married  Enn Toona.
Elin was born in Tallinn on July 12^th 1937.

FOTO Elin’s birth certificate

 

Elin: „At that time I did not know anything about my grandfather, the poet. I knew him only as “black Papa” by the dark, stern profile he presented a top his statue. When my grandmother and I walked around Haapsalu, we often stopped by the statue (on the Evening Lagoon) to rest our legs. Hers were old, mine were short. We tired easily. Sitting there countless times, my grandmother told me about  “Ernie”, who had died young because he had had a “poet’s soul”.

FOTO EKLA…28548 Ernst Enno’s monument _Black papa

Elin seldom saw her parents. They were actors. Elin lived with her grandmother Ella Enno, who  was an artist. She had studied painting  in Tartu and in 1913 and 1914 at the Atheneum in Helsinki, Finland.This was unusual for women in Estonia at the beginning of 20th century. She “lived” for her art.  Elin  recalls:

I lived in Haapsalu with my grandmother, whom I called Mämmä and her sister, my great-aunt Alma, whom I called Tätä.
We were always together,  my grandmother and I:  weeding in the garden, /—/, walking along the Promenade , or going to the open air market.

We had a grand piano in the living-room, /—/  There was always someone playing the piano.  We lived quietly, slowly and harmoniously to the strains of  Chopin, Beethoven, and Bach.

Elin’s father was an artist through and through; he was a good man, but not a family man. He had risen to the very top of his career in theatre.

 

 Elin’s memoir: I grabbed a handful of grass and ran into the street after him.  When I reached him I stuffed the grass into his jacket pocket.

“What’s this,” he asked?

“Nothing,” I told him seriously. “But when you next put your hand into your pocket you will remember that you are my father and that you have a daughter.”

When I came back to Estonia in 1990 I heard that my father had kept a small plastic bag of dried grass on his desk, all of his life

In the fall 1944 ELIN’s mother and grandmother with Elin fled to Germany, Elin’s father has not come with them because he has a new family.

After the war ended there were about 7 million refugees in Germany. Most of them were dispersed into displaced persons camps. Elin’s  mother, grandmother, and Elin ended up at Meerbeck, near Hannover.

We all remember our own personal past. It lives in our memory in the form of an hazy story or a cluster of stories. Converting of such a cloud into a narrative is often very difficult and complicated. It seems to me that photos are the easiest to describe, and for structuring a life-story narrative, photo albums are the best. They are sometimes like ready-made narratives of family history.

What I mean by family story is a text or cluster of texts that centers not on an individual but the story of a kinship network or the stories of many representatives of the same family.  I see two ways of writing a family story: first, one narrator gathers together the stories of many people, either by recording their different voices on tape, or assembling the thoughts and views of various family members as seen in their letters or other autobiographical texts.  The result is the  collective „I“, an entity consisting of different points of view. The other possibility is that one individual writes down the biographies of various family members as longer or shorter narratives, but presents them all from one narrative point of view.

Elin’s life story   begins with an account of her first trip to Estonia. She knows  the previous generations in her family through their stories told for several times. All the stories are connected with Estonia.

Who are  in Elin’s family ?/kes moodustavad Elini perekonna/ Mother and grandmother, the three women of different generations.

Elin’s father has not come with them because he has a new family.

In Estonia she has relatives –the most important  was   aunt Alma(grandmother’s sister).

Grandmother has told very much about the other relatives who were already dead or lived somewhere in Estonia.  All these stories were parts of  Family  history. There was a very important  person –  her grandfather –actually it was Grandfather’s statue, Black Papa.

Elin’s case is a special case. She fulfilled her wish to  write her grandfather’s history . Monograph’s (?) title is  Rõõm teeb taeva taga tuld,  it is a verse from  Ernst Ennos poetry. We can see this book as a ideal family history. IT starts   with chapter Ennode päritolu ja perekond  and ends with Family tree. It consists all kind’s of rumors and legends what were told in family,     the most intriguing among them was the rumor, that local baron was the real father of one predecessor.. Such cases were not rare but such rumors are very common too.

Sellejuures on see raamat korralik kirjandusajaloolisest traditsioonist lähtuv biograafia

A book of that kind needs  much more archival sources than we have demonstrated.

But that book is itself an archival source for the new generationes.

Elin’s  story is a good example to speak about  war and peace and about life in different countires..

 

After the war ended in 1946, Elin her mother and grandmother ended up at Meerbeck, near Hannover. The camp was actually a village which had been turned into a DP Camp as punishment for the villagers.  (It  happnes in the British zone).

In May of the  year 1947 the mother signed an  contract to work in an English hospital.  The questions regarding that period of Elin’s life (like why was she living in the hospital woods and why was she not allowed to further his education?) –  was cleared up in 1999 when she was reading old newspapers and came across articles that had been written at the time her  mother went to England. “ Newspaper “Eesti Teataja” on 5^th February  1947 wrotes “Baltic Swans fly to England”  The jobs were for women between the ages of 18 and 45 in  hospitals, sanatoriums, orphanages and nursing homes. Mother signed up  for five years. Gandmother and Elin  remained in Meerbeck until March 1948, when  grandmother also signed up (she was 69 years old by then), to work in the hospital sewing-room. The hospidal was  Ida Hospital, Cookridge, Yorkshire.

One of the characteristics of exile is the loss of one’s previous status. English society was very hierarchical, and the “fall” was very steep for most of the refugees. . Nobody knew about Estonia or where it was, this country did not exist. And, as it did not exist, the labourers from there were simply liars. Elin very well remembers such attitude towards them.

At that time, the so-called Eleven Plus exam segregated children into two groups at the age of eleven. Any child who did not pass the 11+ exam was denied further education. Elin arrived in England in March 1948; the test was held in two months, which was too short a period for learning the language. Her new homeland designated her for the labour force

Starting at the age of 15, Elin had to work at a textile mill together with other foreign workers. For the next three years she got up half past four every morning. She secretly attended some educational courses and received a stipend to an acting school in London. This was a private school, since public education was still closed for her. She found work in TV and got some film roles. Finally, she could leave the hardships behind, and she also got rid of her Yorkshire accent. In a few years she was even able to find a good position in the BBC.

In 2008, Elin Toona published a book about her grandmother with title  Ella. Despite the radiant figure of Ella Enno , it is a sad book. For the first time, Toona is talking about the events in her life she has never before touched upon or which she has only briefly mentioned. Toona’s private life has had some crazy turns, she has twice been married to a millionaire. The first time, she escaped from her husband after a few weeks of living together in Hong Kong. Her husband’s family had threatened her and she realised that she did not fit into the lives of rich people of this kind. During her escape through India and Iran she met an American journalist who became her second husband; with him she liveed in the USA. She is not yet ready to write detailed memoirs of this period of her life. These problems can still be found in her fictional text, and it is not difficult to realise that the hidden autobiographical undercurrent in The Last Daughter of Kaleviküla originates from this period. After the death of her second husband, Toona lived for a while in a camper in Florida, had a job and spent time writing. The title of her latest book is Into Exile.

She recalls: As a child of refugees, I had no role models for a conventional life or a proper family. People married to get to America or Canada, they put their “bread into one cupboard”, to live cheaply.

HER best friend was her grandmother.

About her mother she writes: I  did not know my mother until I was an adult.  We had lived together only briefly and as a child I had always referred to her as “my friend”. We became really good friends in London and very close until she had her first stroke in the summer of 1975.

 

Elaborate pedagogical relevance on the resource, relating it to one or more pedagogical cotext:

High school, adult education, museum education. concrete plans how this material can be used for teaching

Küsimused: kes on Elin Toona (tekstist lähtudes)? Miks ta põgenes kodumaalt ?  Miks oli Elini kõige parem sõber  ta vanaema ?

Missuguse  perekonna lugu  peaks käsitlema enne kõike ?

Otsige Google’it kasutades internetist Elin Toona kohta 6 lauset.

Otsige välja Elin Toona raamat „Into Exile „(2013), mida majandusväljanne „ The Economist” peab 2013 aasta parimate raamatute hulka kuuluvaks.

 

by Leena Kurvet-Käosaar.

The case study is based on the correspondence across the Iron Curtain of two sisters, Helga Sitska (1914-1989) and Aino Pargas (1922-2000) between Estonia (then the Soviet Socialist Republic of Estonia) and UK and the USA. Helga Sitska was my maternal grandmother and Aino Pargas my greataunt. Their correspondence, both sides of which have been preserved, consists of approximately 450 letters, cards and postcards. The correspondence is today preserved at the Sitska family home in Tartu and kept by my mother. I have her approval to use the correspondence for research purposes.

Illustrative material: photos of the letters and envelopes, photos of Helga Sitska and Aino Pargas. For ethical reasons, all photos of the letters have been taken so that the text of the letter in unintelligible. The contents of the letters is mediated only via a selection of translated quotes.

 

 Aino’s Letter

 

Birthday card to Aino

 

  Aino’s livingroom wallpaper samples

Aino’s livingroom wallpaper samples (this should also go with question nr 3 where I discuss how the sisters maintained a close bond by sharing their everyday life experience with each other)

 

Photo 7: Aino and Helga in Washington DC. In 1969, the first time they met after parting in 1944 (here I would like to add excertps from Aino’s letter where she wirtes about her last memory of homw and her mother before she left Estonia in 1944.)

 

Work in progress on the letters.

(My) work in progress on the letters, systematizing, identifying themes (This would go with a section where I talk about my work process on the letters, also problems and difficulties

 

 

My great-aunt Aino Pargas (1922-2000) fled Estonia in 1944, after the war settled down in UK, moved to the US in 1958, lived most of her life there Maryland and worked for the Library of Congress. Aino’s husband was a German POW in the Soviet Union for 6 years. They reunited in 1950.

My maternal grandmother Helga Valgerist-Sitska (1914-1989) studied law at the University of Tartu before WW II, had three children, and was for many years considered unemployable for political reasons by the Soviet regime. Gradually, she found employment in the field of the Soviet equivalent of real estate law and worked for Tartu municipal goverment. It is not possible to completely identify the exact beginning of the correspondence between the sisters. Among the preserved letters there are some letters by Helga Sitska to Aino Pargas from the year 1948 that were among Aino’s possessions, yet there are no responses to Helga. Most probably Aino’s letters were confiscated by the Soviet authorities or she did not reply to them. Systematic correspondence started in the late summer or fall of 1956 and continued until the spring of 1989 when Helga Sitska died.

 

As travel into and from the countries behind the Iron Curtain was severely restricted, the sisters were able to meet only a few times during their whole lifetime and letters became their primary medium of communication, the sole vehicle for the intimate dynamics of sisterly affection, where lives lived on two continents in vastly different sociopolitical and material contexts were not only represented through the correspondence, but in a way lived within the possibilities and boundaries of the medium.  The correspondence makes visible different agendas and influences (sociopolitical, family-oriented, national, gendered, intimate) that intertwine and shape the correspondence and ultimately the nature of the relationship itself.
As such, the correspondence is far from exceptional as for thousands of families who were separated by the World War II and the change of political regime in Estonia this was a common (and the only available) means of keeping during the Cold War period. Such correspondences have not been systematically collected by Estonian memory institutions. However, for instance the Archives of Cultural History in the Estonian Literary Museum preserve various ‘across the Iron Curtain’ correspondences between men and women of letters and public intellectuals. Taken together, these correspondences provide valuable information about possibilities of communication during the Soviet period, level of trust that was established between the corresponding parties, ways of dealing with issues of censorship, etc. From the more narrow perspective of family history, the dynamics of correspondence between family members is of primary interest. However, correspondences between family members are not widely available for research or other kinds of public use. Firstly, at the present moment, many the corresponding parties have died and the correspondences may not have been preserved at all. The preserved correspondences are in family archives and cannot be accessed for research purposes. The current correspondence therefore constitutes a unique textual evidence of dynamics of communication across the Iron Curtain, yet this it is important to bear in mind that this correspondence is also part of a family archive and can (selectively) be accessed only because of the overlapping of different positions that I represent: that of a family member and that of a researcher.

The correspondence provides rich and multifaceted insights into different strategies of developing and maintaining sibling intimacy. Intergenerational importance of the letters for strengthening family ties can be seen in the text of the letters themselves as well as the reading process and reception of the letters in my family. In the letters, the sisters use past memories of their childhood and youth and memories of their parents to build up and maintain a close bond with each other. Through the letters a family bond is also created between Aino and Helga’s children (Aino had no children of her own). Helga provides detailed updates of the lives of her three children to Aino and Aino responds with comments to Helga as well as with letters and gifts to her niece and nephews. Later, my generation was also successfully included in the correspondence.

Intercultural aspects of the correspondence include the ways in which the sisters mediated their lives in two very different political systems to each other, an aspect that, at least over the first years, was subject to Soviet censorship and awareness of this can be traced in the letters. In her letters, Aino provided detailed descriptions of her life in UK and later in the US, focusing not only on her life but also on society and culture at large, way of life, fashion, nature etc. Although Estonia and Tartu were familiar to Aino, in her letters, Helga strove to describe the changes that had taken place during the war and the following years. Both sisters often rely on familiar places, attitudes and aspects of life and then proceed to elaborate on a new experience or a change. Over the years, when Aino settles down comfortably in Maryland in the USA and starts perceiving the US as her home, a tension is created between the sisters as Helga, my grandmother finds it impossible to accept that any other country than one’s native land can be called home.

 

Here I try to include some brief examples of different aspects of the correspondence and elaborate on them

In one of her first letters my grandmother writes:

Your letter arrived on Sept 20 (1956). What a wonderful surprise: all these long years of silence and now, at last, your letter. …Twelve years ago you were suddenly lost in the turmoil of war. We thought that you had perished … I sit here and write as the midnight is drawing near and a beautiful symphony is playing on the radio. No words can describe how I feel. What can I write in just one letter? I should write a book, not a letter.

A Bundle of Aino’s Letters 

On October 22, 1956, Aino reponds to Helga:

It is so hard to believe that after so many years I am receiving a letter from home again. I am looking again and again at the photos of you and your childrenand no words can express how dear you are to me.

Grandma’s First Letters

 

As the sections of quoted letters demonstrate, a strong desire to reestablish and recover intimacy between the sisters can be found already in the very first letters. Over the years, the correspondence developed its own textual strategies for creating intimacy and its evolvement in time makes visible the ways in which the epistolary medium catered for the needs of maintaining and developing these intimate exchanges as well as where it seemed to have failed. From my readings of mostly the letters of the 50’s and 60s, three main different strategies of creating intimacy have emerged:
1) reliance on common memories
2) verbal confirmation of closeness that also involves epistolary exchanges concerning photos
3) different ways of familiarizing each other with the details of everyday life and with the cultural contexts of their life.

Here I add examples and themes, e.g.
1) reliance on common childhood memories,
2) ways of integrating Aino into Helga’s family life
3)ways of sharing everyday life,
4 mediating cultural change (Helga) and specificity (Aino)

This resource can be used for different pedagogical purposes for different levels of education, yet the purpose would be roughly the same:
to promote awareness of one’s own family history,
to encourage people to conduct research into their own family history,
to identify new sources and to frame them both in immediate familial context as well as wider cultural contexts.

The source can be used to demonstrate that the concept of the archive is not limited to official national memory institutions but can be used in more fluid and informal contexts within the framework of one’s family.

 

Description how the resource could be used for teaching/learning purposes

A Bundle of Helga’s letters

Here I will add a description how the resource could be used for teaching/learning purposes. It will be more or less one task to start with – to think about and to look for/ask for  family documents and sources that facilitate intergenerational and intercultural exchange.
For university level teaching, the task would be to think about more general theoretical issues concerning intimate recording and reading of lives and see if and in what manner these relate to students’ own family histories.
For adult/museum education the focus could be on one kind of source  – the letter or the correspondence and the during training, participants would be shown examples of different family correspondences and correspondences across the Iron Curtain.
The training could consist of two sessions: one where they are familiarized with that type of source and the second where they find similar sources within their own family and discuss the process of looking for them, what they have found (also what could not be found)  and the importance of the sources. Along the same lines, a training session can also be organized for schoolchildren but the explanations and tasks should be simpler.