INNOCENCE IN A TURBULENT WORLD

In her debut memoir, Bardell reflects on her early childhood in the idyllic Estonian countryside before the Soviet Union annexed her country in during World War II.

In 1938 Bardell’s parents built a small farmhouse in a pastoral setting near the Baltic Sea in Estonia. “Everyone knew each other and there were no strangers,” the author writes. Prior to World War II, Bardell’s childhood was peaceful. She was very independent, entrusted to walk over two kilometers to fetch yeast from a neighbor’s when she was just shy of 4 years old. Her dress caught on fire from a hearth twice, but she sees such incidents as small ones caused by “my misunderstanding of how the world worked.” War came to the Raudsepp family when the Soviet Union occupied Estonia in 1940, followed by a German invasion in 1941. Bardell’s father was conscripted into the German army but escaped and hid in the forest behind the farm. Her family was in danger: “My blissful life had abruptly changed....All that had been joyful was no longer as it was.” The Raudsepps packed what they could carry, and in September 1944 made a perilous 52-hour voyage in a leaky fishing boat to Sweden. After their arrival, they realized it was Bardell’s fifth birthday and sang the prescient traditional birthday song “Sa Elagu,” or “You shall live.” Although the Soviet Union tried to repatriate refugees, her family successfully relocated to Canada. Her parents never went back to their homeland. But Bardell visited Estonia after the fall of the Soviet Union found many places just as she remembered them. She calls her brief, episodic memoir “a fond reflection” but paints a poignant picture of a vanished world, which may appeal both to middle-graders and to adults. Reminiscent of Laura Ingalls’ Wilder’s The Little House on the Prairie series, the book abounds with uncredited soft, upbeat watercolor illustrations in the spirt of Garth Williams’ beloved artwork for those tales or the paintings of contemporary artist Lauren Castillo. Vintage black-and-white and more recent color photos add to the appeal of this reminiscence of a county underrepresented in children’s literature.

A fond remembrance of a rural childhood in Estonia charms with its story and pictures.