Acceptance, Healing and Reflective Nostalgia in the Works of Elin Toona and Agate Nesaule

Abstract

The Estonian and Latvian diaspora communities that formed in the United States after World War Two anchored their identity and cultural practices in hopes of survival and eventual freedom for their occupied homelands. Younger generations, increasingly distanced from direct ties to these homelands, often faced tensions and pressures within their communities to maintain ethnic and cultural continuity. The arts have served both as a means to affirm diaspora identity and as a vital space to articulate internal conflicts, including generational tension and cultural dissonance.

This article examines the novels Kaleviküla viimne tütar (The Last Daughter of Kaleviküla, 1988) and Lost Midsummers: A Novel of Women’s Friendship in Exile (2018), alongside the memoirs Into Exile: A Life Story of War and Peace (2013) and A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile (1995), by Estonian and Latvian exile authors Elin Toona-Gottschalk and Agate Nesaule. These works provide rich portrayals of the ambivalent – or even negative – and often silenced experiences of exile across two distinct yet parallel communities. Narrating displacement, loss of identity, in-betweenness and violence, they reveal how individual journeys in exile negotiate trauma, identity, and belonging.

Through the lens of reflective nostalgia, these narratives illustrate that healing from displacement does not require the reversal or restoration of loss but rather its acceptance in all its complexity and contradiction. The arts thus create pathways for reconciliation and nuanced understanding within diaspora life.