Work has been wild recently, so I stole some time from family colleauges and friends to read Sofi Oksanen’s book, Purge.
I have recently felt a prompting by God to learn more about sexual violence, sexual slavery, and sexual abuse. So, you can imagine the shock of my librarians at Enoch Pratt when I walked to the information desk and asked them for fiction books on the topic of sexual slavery. They sent me a couple places in the stacks, and I eventually left the library with Oksanen.
I couldn’t have asked for a better recommendation.
Usually, I like to post quotes or key themes from these books to illustrate why I think you should read them too. For this one, unfortunately, I don’t think any one passage or quote illustrates her meaning effectively. The whole book is a masterful journey through the linked lives of three generations of Estonian women from Estonia, to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, and back to Estonia. There are significant parts of their lives set in Vladivostok, Russian Federation, and Berlin, Germany.
I think you should read this book because it makes the invisible lives of those who have suffered in the East-West economic conflict visible at a very visceral and emotional level. You should read this book, as an American, because it shows very clearly the perilous balancing acts of loyalty and devotion ordinary citizens had to make as the very ground beneath their feet became completely different nations overnight. One day, one master, another day, the next.
I think the most important takeaway for me is the way this book describes the devastating consequences of the breakdown in the rule of law and trustworthy authority for the cohesion of the family and the physical security of women, especially. For example, one of the characters fought for the German occupying forces when Estonia was occupied by Hitler. After Hitler’s force was defeated by Stalin, the Soviet forces cracked down on every opponent. In order to redeem her father one of the characters, a 13 year old Estonian girl, was forced to visit the Soviet barracks and be subjected to various sexual abuses. It is not clear that her father knew this, but his record was purged and there was no “official” memory of his anti-Soviet activities. This story haunted one of the main characters, as the father of the 13-year old girl was one of the main chracters’ infatuations’ comrade in anti-Soviet dealings. Indeed, the three generations of women who are the subject of the story were brutally interrogated because of the pursuit of the man of the house.
I don’t think I want to deal with any more of such horrifying details, because the story is full of them. I will close with this: one of the themes through much of the fiction I’d been reading over the past year deals with life’s purpose. When you read things like Purge, you realize that our worldview and teleology has to answer such helplessness and darkness. How is redemption achieved out of such perversion? What can be done to restore the image of God among those who have seen, lived, and felt such horror?