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, by Donna Solecka Urbikas, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2016, xiv + 302 pp., US$26.95 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-299-30850-6Some of the most moving responses received after publishing my book Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II, which focuses on civilian deportees from Eastern Poland to the USSR in 1939-41, came from daughters of women who had been deported. One such daughter, who was born in California after her mother's long journey from a Soviet settlement, through the Middle East, and ending in the US, thanked me for writing the I never understood what was wrong with my mother, why she was so different, she said, until read your book. In conversation, she spoke of the great chasm she felt between herself and her mother, whose traumatic past she found a heavy yet inscrutable presence in her home. Her words came to mind as soon as opened Donna Solecka Urbikas' memoir, My Sister's Mother: A Memoir of War, Exile and Stalin's Siberia. Urbikas is the daughter and sister of Polish exiles. Her father, Wawrzyniec Solecki, was captured and interned by the Soviets as a reserve army officer, while her mother, Janina, and sister Mira (age five at the time) were forcibly deported to the Urals region of Russia in 1940.The very title of Urbikas' book, My sister's mother, highlights the estrangement she felt from her mother for most of her life. Though Urbikas and Mira had the same mother, she could never replicate nor fathom the bond her older sister and mother had forged through the shared torment of exile. She felt an outsider among them, and could neither understand nor see the relevance of her mother's constant reminiscences of their time in the USSR. The book stems from the author's attempt, once she herself had children, to comprehend her mother and her own relationship with her. Though she intended to record her mother's story, in the process of writing Urbikas came to recognize the effects her mother's traumas had on her, and to reflect on how they affected her own mothering. The resultant book moves back and forth between the author's own life, growing up in Chicago and Wisconsin with her family of former exiles, and their histories before her birth.Urbikas details her mother's and sister's lives first in Poland, then the Soviet Union, and the many countries where they subsequently lived (Persia, India, Egypt, Italy, and England) before settling in the United States. While the narrative of her family's history proceeds chronologically, the chapters about the author's experiences do not, requiring some effort on the part of the reader to fit the pieces together. …

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