Farewell Atlantis: Recollections

Before the start of WWII, some 93,000 Jews lived in Latvia. Almost half of them, 43,000 people, resided in Riga. Only 14,000 survived WWII.

Valentīna Freimane's memoir Farewell, Atlantis is unusual among the works dealing with the Holocaust in Latvia. In beautiful prose, Freimane describes her early life in the "lost Atlantis" of Europe before Hitler's rise to power. She spent her youth in Paris, Berlin, and Riga - a member of a fascinating extended Jewish family, the daughter of a prominent...