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Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena opens with two women who cannot remember ‘I don’t remember 15 October 1969,’ says the first ‘I don’t remember 22 October 1944,’ says the second, ‘but I can reconstruct it’ They can only reconstruct what happened because these are the days on which they were born Birth reminds us that we are always dependent upon another to know the truth of who we are, something few of us ever come to terms with These two women are never named: the first, born in Riga in 1969 in the early years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule over the Soviet Union, is the daughter of the second, born when Riga was liberated from the Nazis at the end of the Second World War This mother is also a daughter, born to a woman who resolved to forget the independent Latvia of her youth, and a father who refused to forget that Latvia condemned him to the gulag Soviet Milk consists of these two women telling their stories in short alternating sections, manifesting in its form the intimacy and distance of what the daughter calls their ‘two parallel worlds’   This is one among many instances of the ‘Soviet absurdity of parallel lives’ the daughter experiences while growing up, as she alternates between public enthusiasm for Soviet rule and private rebellion through studying Latvian poetry The absurdity ends when her generation re-achieves independence: ‘the return of their mother – the land of their birth’ But her mother cannot escape absurdity by being reunited with her nation, because absurdity is the condition of her existence ‘My birth obliged me to be alive: an absurd happenstance’ Unlike her daughter, identification with a nation does not provide an answer to the question that haunts her life: ‘There were so many who more than anything had wished to live but hadn’t been born Who decided this?’   Ikstena’s novel, which is lucidly translated by Margita Gailitis, was written as part of a series called ‘We Latvia The 20th Century’, comprised of thirteen novels telling the history of twentieth-century Latvia Ikstena has been publishing novels, essays, plays