Dainis Kalns publishes family saga honoring postwar women

Doctor and opera festival organiser Dainis Kalns has published a family saga about his mother’s struggle to keep her family alive in poverty after the war. LSM reports that the book, titled “Lielā laime” (“Great Happiness”), is also dedicated to women who faced similar hardships.

The book recounts how, in 1949, Kalns’s mother Līze and her five children avoided deportation after an uninvited man saw her photograph and said he would leave her. She was 32 at the time. Kalns said his father was deported because he was an aizsargs.

After her husband’s deportation, Līze struggled to support the family. Pay for hard work on the collective farm was very low, so she took flour from the pig farm to feed the family’s sow. Selling its piglets at market became one of their main sources of income, Kalns said.

Kalns said his mother is the only real-life character in the book; the other characters are composites, while the events are based on what happened. He described the saga as both his duty to his mother and a tribute to women who endured difficult postwar years.

One of the meetings with readers took place in Kuldīga, where Kalns began school. Former classmates attended, and one brought class photographs.