Karelia; A Finnish-American Couple in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941 by Lawrence and Sylvia Hokkanen with Anita Middleton (North Star Press; 1991, ISBN0-87839-065-0)
As an informal student of Finnish history, I have enjoyed writing about the Finn’s immigration to the United States during the early 1900’s in a fictional context. My novel, Suomalaiset: People of the Marsh is one of my best selling books and remains popular with Finnish-American and Finnish-Canadian readers. I chanced upon this nice little memoir in researching “Karelian Fever”, a term used to denote the Depression-era emigration of Finns from the U.S. and Canada back to Finnish Karelia, which, at the time, was a region within the U.S.S.R. This book, rather than attempt to explain the myriad of reasons over 10,000 people of Finnish descent returned to a place none of them had left (virtually all of the folks who left North America for Karelia had come not from Karelia, but from Finland itself) simply chronicles one married couple’s reasons for taking a chance on Stalin’s empire. Well-written and informative, this book is a quick and easy read and is an essential bit of history told by folks who lived it. Maps and some additional historical pictures, charts, and diagrams supplied by the authors or the publisher would have made this book even better. 3 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
