A Grave in Karelia by Ernesti J. Komulainen (1995. Self-Published. No ISBN. Available through the New World Finn Bookstore. http://www.newworldfinn.com/.)
Thanks to my pal, Gerry Henkel, editor of the New World Finn (http://www.newworldfinn.com/) a fine periodical chronicling the culture, history, and attitudes of the Finns, I recently read this fine little novella (it’s only 128 pages but that’s deceptive; it likely doesn’t exceed 30,000 words). The book depicts the death of Nikolai Kivola, a middle-aged American Finn who, along with his wife and two children, returns to Karlelia in the U.S.S.R. during Stalin’s reign to help build a Socialist paradise. Selling all his worldly possessions to return to a land geographically similar and near in proximity to his native Finland, Nikolai becomes separated by his work from his family and falls ill. More than simply a short tragedy of one man’s demise, the novella packs, in its tiny frame, all the essential elements of the debate that has raged about the why and the wisdom of Karelian Fever. What prompted men and women who had left Finland to escape economic claustrophobia for the greater opportunities available to them in the United States and Canada to, a decade or so after making that perilous journey, jump on another ship and return to a place, a land, devoid of the comforts and freedoms they had at their fingertips in North America?
What sets the book apart from other fiction written about Karelian fever is that Ernesti Komulainen (aka, Ernest Laine) writes from personal experience; as a survivor of the Stalinist purges that killed hundreds, if not thousands, of the immigrants to Karelia out of paranoid fear that the new arrivals were disloyal.
A slender, well-written story that echoes, in its tone and its deliberate pace, Alexis Kivi’s Seven Brothers (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/akivi.htm), this little book is a fine introduction to the complex debate that still rages in the Finnish American and Finnish Canadian communities regarding the motivations of those who left. Nicely translated by noted Finnish American translator, Richard Impola.
4 stars out of 5.
