“Is that Hunger Haunting the Stove?”

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of the ways in which food has been thematized in the deportation narratives of Baltic women (primarily narratives of the 1941 mass deportations). Based on a posthumously published diary of an Estonian woman who died in her deportation location in 1945, the well-known deportation memoir of Lithuanian woman Dalia Grinkevičiūtė as well as a number of deportation stories of Baltic women collected and published in the early 1990s, the article focuses in particular on the following topics: food and identity, communal networks of care, different means of procuring food, and hunger.

Keywords:

• deportation
• Baltic women
• hunger
• Gulag narratives
• historical memory

Notes

1. Issues relating to food can also be found in the narratives of men, although they do not form an equally strong thematic core in comparison with women’s narratives. An important difference here to be taken into account is the fact that most narratives of men focus on the experience of forced-labor camp where the economies of food were different from those found in narratives of forced relocation. In the camps, meals (if this word would apply to the extremely scant food below any human standards) were provided by the stolovaya, or the dining hall (Applebaum 2003, 206). Compared with the deportees, camp inmates had fewer possibilities to improve their situation by the means of, for example, bartering their belongings, pinching, or using edible plants for cooking makeshift meals. Suffering from extended periods of hunger comes up in quite a few narratives, though more via factual mention than in a more elaborate thematic focus. Several narratives highlight the erosion of humanity as a result of dreadful living conditions, crushing workload and starvation. “Hunger dominated [our lives]” writes Igor Kullamaa, an inmate in a forced-labor camp near Magadan (Kullamaa 2000, 414). “In addition to hunger for food,” he continues, “There was a different kind of hunger … a spiritual kind of hunger. Life that had as its leading morale ‘You die today, I’ll die tomorrow’ excluded any humanness” (2000, 414). The narratives of men who were deported together with their mothers or other female narratives as children or adolescents form a separate category with respect to the thematization of food. Such narratives often discuss at length and with uttermost gratitude the efforts of their mothers to run the household and to feed their family well enough to ensure their survival. “Tribute must be paid to the women and mothers with children” writes Aleksandrs Birznieks, deported at the age of 21 and continues: “What the mothers did was nothing short of heroic, because many children did return home” (1999, 303).

2. Erna Nagel came from a wealthy rural background near Tartu, and according to her diary was at the time of her deportation primarily engaged in her studies at the University of Tartu along with an active social life; she was not involved in any household chores. Although the entries focusing on her life in Bondarka show that her mother did most of the cooking, the diary also shows that she had at least some cooking skills and could, for example, prepare a festive meal for her mother’s birthday or for other holidays. Cooking skills of other women whose narratives have been the basis of the current study depend on their social background, but as importantly on their age and familial status: those women, who were married most probably were responsible for cooking back at home and had some culinary skills. Others who were children or adolescents, learned how to cook within the community. Most, though not all narratives, contain at least some information about the social background of the authors, though few if any contain details concerning the culinary traditions at home. Erna Nagel’s diary, which offers a daily record of her life in the village of Bondarka in the Siberian taiga, forms a notable exception, as procuring, preparing, and consumption of food constitute the main thematic focus of her diary.

Additional information

Funding

The article was written with the support of the Estonian Science Foundation grants [grant number ETF 9035], [grant number ETF 8875]; and Institutional Research Funding project Formal and Informal Networks of Literature, Based on Sources of Cultural History [grant number IUT22-2].

Notes on contributors

Leena Kurvet-Käosaar

Leena Kurvet-Käosaar is associate professor of literary theory at the University of Tartu and a senior researcher of the Archives of Cultural History of the Estonian Literary Museum. She is the author of Embodied Subjectivity in the Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Aino Kallas and Anaïs Nin (2006) and the editor (with Lea Rojola) of Aino Kallas, Negotiations with Modernity (2011), a special issue of Methis on Estonian life writing (2010) and numerous articles of Baltic women’s deportation stories within the framework of critical trauma studies.