Preliminary Programme

The framework of this paper is the life and adaptation and of Estonian refugees in their new homelands based on their autobiographical accounts and oral interviews with them. The refugees fled their homeland in autumn 1944, in the days and weeks attending the Soviet reoccupation of Estonia. Over time political exile became resettlement.
Oral history came to Estonia as a new concept in the 1990s.Intentional collection of memories had begun in 1987-88. When a few hundred interviews had been collected around thematic clusters (deportation to Siberia, conscription into the Soviet army, the great flight in 1944, etc) many researchers realised that what they had been gathering was indeed oral history. Besides interviews, the Cultural History Archive of the Estonian Literary Museum organized several campaigns to gather written memoirs. These resultant texts were usually first person narratives. In addition to these personal stories, a few family stories were submitted. By family story, I mean a text that centres not on a single individual, but on a combination of the stories of many representatives of the same family. The profound life changes that result from great historical upheavals create fertile ground for telling stories about the past.
Memory is a way for people to give meaning and transform their personal past.
The specific focus of this presentation is the case of Asta, an Estonian refugee.Life story interviews with Asta began when she was 76 . Asta was excellent storyteller who had told her story several times. However, up to that point she had never seen her story in written form, and now she received a written transcript of her interview. This gave Asta the idea of writing her own memoirs, which she did piece-by –piece over two years. She sent her handwritten manuscript to be entered into the computer, but the manuscript required very little correction, only minimal editing.The memories she had presented orally several times became a book, thus placing Asta into a new light, both for herself and for her community of Canadian Estonians.
The life story interview allowed to break up the pattern of Asta`s life story into pieces, as well as to find answers to questions that the narrator may not have realised at the time. Thus the life history interview does not necessarily create a coherent story. It is of practical, theoretical, and ethical import for life story researchers to consider the different ways in which the oral history interview and the written life story narrative set up expectations—which they can only partially and selectively fulfill.

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Since 2000, the experiment of collecting life stories among the elderly Estonian diaspora in Toronto through a weekly writing workshop has yielded not only 6 volumes of self-published life narratives ( of which two are bilingual, English/ Estonian), and several single-author autobiographies, but a rich, evanescent but persistent matrix of ongoing conversation. At a fascinating crossroads of oral and written remembering, I found myself, as the group`s facilitator sketching the outlines and parameters of conversational „riffs“ in the weekly meetings, which often took their departure in shared objects of daily life, either in Estonia, in the DP camps, or postwar Sweden and Canada. More broadly, the „riffs“ marked an exchange of knowledge, taboo topics, or norms of interpreting historical events as they impacted personal life. The objects—either as parts of daily life in the homeland, the refugee camp, or various homes along the way triggered these „riffs“, either because of verbal description or through the medium of a photograph. Interestingly, stories organized around ruptures (the flight of 1944 or the resettlement in 1949-1951) were deemed more intense and „ historically correct“ than stories in which people survived and life seemed to flow along, drawing on resources, wisdom, and the support of others; this was borne out by the testimony of individuals who had left Estonia later, during the Soviet period, who were initially regarded with suspicion, and people who (particularly two couples) who joined the group after 2007.
My paper will focus on questions (and troubling analytical issues) concerning the dynamics of life-story elicitation through writing workshops, particularly on the relationship between the oral and written components of the writing group as a small „community of interpretation.“ More specific issues to be addressed will be remembering objects of daily life through visual and verbal media, and the life-cycle of life-writing groups: how do participants negotiate reticence around painful memories, and why, after many members have completed written accounts of their lives, do the groups not come to an end?
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The early 1980s was a time of severe stress for the veterans of interwar communist youth politics in Britain. With these men and women entering their seventies in the aftermath of the unmasking of the Soviet ‘Cambridge spy’ Anthony Blunt (formerly a respected academic art historian), they were subject to a generationally-focused disdain in public discourse. This paper considers testimonies collected in that early-eighties context, from men and women of the Left born between 1910 and 1922, by an interviewer who was herself part of the 1930s political milieu. Using those testimonies, this paper considers how the moment of crisis in their lives was represented, often subtextually, in their memory and narrative. The interviewer was Margot Kettle (b. 1916), herself a young communist in the 1930s; and she was the wife of the literary scholar Arnold Kettle, who as a Cambridge student of the 1930s was particularly implicated by the Blunt scandal.

Looking at the relationship between the individual and social memory represented by the testimonies, this paper argues that there was a collective generational memory experienced by this group at that time. In some ways, 1979 (the year of Blunt’s disgrace) had been another 1956 for this group, as the wave of negative media representations about the thirties generation had a profound effect on their subjectivities and personal life-narratives. The agenda of the interviewees in this context appeared to be twofold: to be upbeat and positive about their youths, as one might expect, but also to focus away from what was, for many, the academic sphere of adolescence, and instead to concentrate on the innocence of childhood. The tagline for the group, invented by Kettle, was ‘the boys and girls of the thirties’. As such, I will argue, the project was simultaneously attempting to accomplish three tasks at once – to re/construct a generational identity, to reshape the wider cultural memory of that generation, and to re-write history after the ‘spy histories’ of 1979-80 had made Blunt emblematic of thirties youth – all by shifting the discursive focus of ‘youth’ from adolescence, and young adulthood, back to childhood, family history and the purer influences of the very earliest years of political and personal life. (Show less)