Daughters of the Occupation by Shelly Sanders - Book Review

It is strange to be reading about the Soviet invasion of Latvia in 1940 at this precise moment in time, the crowding into shelters, the wanton killing and destruction.  Is this art imitating life or the other way round, given that Shelly Sanders’ latest work is about another war in another time and place?

Sanders does not claim Daughters of the Occupation to be autobiographical, but it is inspired by actual events during World War II when members of her own family became victims of the infamous Latvian Holocaust.  Also known as the Rumbula massacre, 25,000 Jews were slaughtered over two days in 1941.

‘I had to (write this book) for my family, for the Latvian Jews who didn’t live to tell their own stories and for myself to try and understand the people who came before me,’ she writes in the acknowledgements.

That she achieves her goal in this multi-layered novel provides the reader with a remarkable window into the comfortable and successful prewar world of Baltic Jewish society and how quickly and brutally an entire society can be extinguished.

Leavening this heartbreaking tale of devastation is the quest undertaken thirty years later by a descendant, twenty-four-year-old Sarah who lives in Chicago and, on the death of her mother, attempts to understand the hidden family wartime trauma.  She is, very reluctantly, helped by her grandmother. 

Moving between the 1940s and the 1970s, we experience the family’s tragedy with Sarah, as we follow her search for truth and understanding.  She visits Riga, Latvia’s capital, which was a satellite Soviet state back then.  Consequently, Sarah lives in constant fear of the authorities finding out what she is really doing there.

This dual storytelling provides a strong narrative drive, highlighting the generational sadness and trauma endured by so many victims of the cruelty of war but also the resilience of the human spirit. 

Oakville resident Sanders is a journalist who has written for many of Canada’s best-known newspapers and periodicals.  She did not learn of her Jewish roots until she was an adult. The knowledge of her family’s trauma and resilience led this successful writer down this particular historical path.  

She has also written three award-winning Young Adult novels, Rachel’s Secret, Rachel’s Promise and Rachel’s Hope, inspired by her grandmother’s escape from a Russian program.

Novels based on past times are perennially popular and even more so today when the historical genre has expanded to include so much more diversity of eras, countries and peoples. In fact, this reviewer finds that when visiting somewhere for the first time, it is not always the guidebook that, on reflection, has proved the most insightful. Although guidebooks and maps certainly have their place, nothing can beat a really good ‘read’ about a destination that provides the visitor with understanding as well as that elusive sense of time and place.

by Shelly Sanders is published by Harper Collins Canada and released on April 11, 2022, for $24.99.