Although the tragic tale of the approximately 6,500 Finnish North Americans who succumbed to “Karelian Fever” in the early 1930s is relatively well known—thanks to the work of Alexey Golubev, Irina Takala, Auvo Kostiainen, Varpu Lindström, Markku Kangaspuro, Reino Kero, Nick Baron, and many other scholars and memoir writers—Samira Saramo has made a particularly valuable contribution to the field. Rooted in “life writing studies,” her work makes extensive use of the handful of extant letters and memoirs penned by North American Finns who emigrated to Soviet Karelia, primarily between 1931 and 1935. Using these sources, Saramo has produced a history of everyday life—a microhistory—of the transnational community of Canadian and American Finns who moved to Soviet Karelia in hopes of building a new workers’ paradise among the forests, fields, fisheries, and developing towns and cities of the region.
Drawing on the work of scholars of the North American Finnish left,...
