Roxana Spicer says her mother had a “personal Iron Curtain” and refused to divulge secrets that would explain her unpredictable behaviour, the anger that erupted in their home in the tiny community of Netherhill, Sask. in the 1950s and ‘60s. But sometimes a memory or a fear would leak out.
Children remember. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * Roxana Spicer says her mother had a “personal Iron Curtain” and refused to divulge secrets that would explain her unpredictable behaviour, the anger that erupted in their home in the tiny community of Netherhill, Sask. in the 1950s and ‘60s.
But sometimes a memory or a fear would leak out. Children remember. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? Roxana Spicer says her mother had a “personal Iron Curtain” and refused to divulge secrets that would explain her unpredictable behaviour, the anger that erupted in their home in the tiny community of Netherhill, Sask.
in the 1950s and ‘60s. But sometimes a memory or a fear would leak out. Children remember.
Spicer, who became a CBC documentary and filmmaker as an adult, grabbed onto those tidbits to uncover her mother’s story about growing up in the early days of the Soviet Union and then surviving the Second World War. Spicer’s years-long journey to discover her mother’s truth is recalled in her memoir, , a heartfelt but flawed memoir. Her research ramped up after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a challenging process given that her mother repeatedly said she didn’t want to talk about the dark times (“It hurts too much”).
Emotions often overrode Spicer’s journalistic inclination to dig deeper; the subject of the interview was, after all, her own mother. What she did reveal left Spicer with more questions, which she pursued after her mother died in 2009. The Traitor’s Daughter Over the years, by teasing information from Russian relatives, exploring archives, tracing names, meeting historians and visiting the sites of tragic events, Spicer learned that her mother was not really Agnes Bulatova, but Rosa Butorina, that her mother served in the effort against the Nazis and was captured by German forces, that she was probably interned in a concentration camp and escaped and that she fled forced repatriation to the U.
S.S.R.
after the end of the war. Like many stories of survival, Agnes often escaped death by using her skills — in her case, her ability to translate from Russian to German made her valuable to her captors — and by sheer luck, as happened when she dove into the Rhine River to wash herself and found she was surrounded by mines intended to blow up pontoon bridges floating on the water. It’s a wrenching story that took an emotional and financial toll on Spicer as she tracked down leads, sometimes to no avail.
Her research of the specifics of the era and events shows the keen eye of the documentarian, which is one of the problems. As a filmmaker, the details of daily life would be evident to the viewer. But in print she relates them all to set the stage, overwhelming the narrative with every fact, ingredient, taste, smell, shape, size and colour, and repeating them over and over.
Her personal connection to the story is intense, but her need to segue and shift back and forth in time and place within the same chapter slows down the reading instead of increasing the reader’s curiosity. Hoping to tantalize, she releases information at a drip pace; it’s only after about a hundred pages of reading that the bits begin to crystallize. While it’s her right to comment, instead of leading the reader to come to conclusions through her description of events in the Soviet Union, Spicer opines about them, continually and unnecessarily.
The amputation of a woman’s hand after the train in which she was riding hits a German landmine doesn’t escape Spicer’s disdain for Lenin, Stalin and socialism: “The piercing sound of saw meeting bone drowned out any memories of Pioneer socialist lectures that may have lingered there.” Weekly A weekly look at what’s happening in Winnipeg’s arts and entertainment scene. The story of a loving daughter trying to “do right” for herself, her mother, her family and history is admirable, the truth traumatizing as Spicer realized the extent of her mother’s suffering and her strength.
But Spicer should go by the dictum “less is more” for the story to unfold on its own. Harriet Zaidman is a writer for young people, a book reviewer and freelancer living in Winnipeg. By Roxana Spicer Viking, 464 pages, $36 Advertisement Advertisement.
