My Very Own Christmas Miracle

Personal History

I was born out of wedlock in 1951 to a beautiful Latvian immigrant woman, Inta Penka.

Mom and me with Birth father Deutrelle (Duke) Paige.

Latvia is one of the three Baltic states (Lithuania and Estonia) on the west side of Russia and has a history of constant occupation and liberation from Germany and Russia. In 1940 the Russians invaded and occupied Latvia.

“The brutality of the First Soviet occupation (1940-1941) was such that it has been named the “Year of Terror“. All Latvian property was nationalized. Some 35,000 were arrested, murdered or expelled to inhospitably cold Siberia – most never to return."

The Russians would show up at an apartment, tell the family to grab what they essentially needed, a few clothes, some pots and pans, toiletries, not much else. They were then taken to distressed low rent apartments and assigned one. Then a Russian family would move into their apartment and use their clothing and furniture.

I know it doesn't sound too Christmassy yet, but bear with me…

In 1941 the Germans invaded and began their brutal regime and murder of Latvian Jews and sympathizers (that would have been you and me). Then in 1944 the Russians re-invaded, expelled the Germans, and reoccupied Latvia until 1991. Latvia is now a NATO state.

My family did not escape suffering the atrocities inflicted on the Latvians by the Russians, My grandmother and Aunt Velta were sent to Siberia for 10 years, their land was seized and my grandfather was forced to stay and continue to work the land, but not benefit from it.

The day the Russians came over the border in 1944, my mother, in her mid-teens, was immediately sent home from her ballet school in the capital of Riga. She had to take a boat up the coast of the Gulf of Riga to get to her town of Tulsi, but it did not stop. The captain knew the horrors that were coming and realized this was a last chance to escape. So he kept going and crossed the Baltic Sea. We are not sure where the boat landed outside of Latvia, (probably Germany because there are pictures of my mother in an American displaced persons camp in Germany when the Americans won a few years later) but mom would never see her family again. Suffering from a form of PTSD, she carried the fear of being captured by Russians throughout her life,

Inta eventually made her way to Canada where I was conceived and born out of wedlock. A year later my mother had another child out of wedlock and unable to care for two children, gave him up for adoption.

Yet she continued a relationship with his father and four years later married him and had two more children with him. My half brother Sam and sister Phyllis. Full siblings to the lost child. My parents made themselves available in case he came looking for them, but he never showed up before they passed away.

Nine years ago, I got an email entitled “I think I’m related to you.” Curiously, I opened it up and the first line said “In fact, I think I'm your brother.” I scrolled down and there was a picture of a man who looked exactly like my stepfather, Irv. We had found him or rather, he had found us.

Valerie, Scott and I. Our first get together.

Scott and I got along like gangbusters. When I asked him what he had done with his life, he told me he’d sold ads for newspapers. It just so happened that I had my own news magazine which I supported by selling ads. He was living up in Canada and married to a wonderful woman named Valerie whose family also came from Northern Europe and who worked for the Canadian government. Retired, he spent his time listening to his extensive record collection, reading books and taking care of the house cats while his wife worked. Valerie suggested that he had time to look for his birth mother. Unfamiliar with computers he did it the old-fashioned way, by hunting down leads. Mom’s last name, Penka, narrowed the search field, and eventually, he found his way to my cousin who directed him to me.

After the joyful first contact, the following years were spent visiting each other and monthly catch-up phone calls. He came down to Los Angeles and we went everywhere from Malibu to the desert. I went up to visit him and Valerie in St. Albert's in Alberta. They took me up into the Rockies and the hot springs of Marietta. I remember standing in the Hot Springs, as my brother came out of the dressing room, and he looked exactly like my stepfather. The way he walked, the way his hair was combed back.

Irv had been an alcoholic for most of my childhood. Thank goodness never a mean drunk. He had a sweet funny side. Whenever we passed a cemetery he would say “People are dying to get in there!” Whenever I had to go to the bathroom I would say “I’m going to the bathroom.” He would always respond with “Mention my name and you’ll get a good seat!” But between his alcoholism and my mother’s lingering anxieties, there had been much drama and healthy communication in our family was impossible. Now, having this new brother, I was allowed to reinvent the experience of family as a source of love, easy communication and genuine interest in the other.

One of the biggest gifts my brother gave me was encouraging me to reconnect with my birth father and us, with our mother's family back in Europe. Through ancestry.com I found my birth father, who had unfortunately passed away, but I also found a whole new source of affectionate connection when I discovered I had 30 cousins! I went back to visit everybody, had a party in the house my dad grew up in. He had become a professional piano player playing in bands and touring a variety of cities on the east coast. I saw the place where he would practice in the home he grew up in. It so happens that I have had several bands that played black music from the 20s and 30s. I just knew how to sing this music and always found musicians who could play it. So I wasn't surprised to find my father had played this music his whole life. “He played so good” one of my cousins told me, that “he could play with one hand and sound like he was playing with two”. I could have been in his band!

I've also been an activist and wondered where this need to make a difference came from. It turned out my great grandfather on his side was one of the first African-American Representatives in the Virginia legislature and a well respected orator and lawyer who fought for African American causes. From the Journal of Negro History “Paige and Harris were among the principal leaders of the House, and certainly, few were the men in that house whether democrats or republicans who could outrank them in oratory or public debate.” Well that explains my love of a good argument.

Scott then turned his attention to reconnecting with my mother's family in Latvia and discovered that my second cousin, Iveta, had created an online family tree. My mothers branch had her name but no one attached to it. With great excitement we reached out and suddenly we were all on Zoom speaking with our four cousins and one of their sons, Kaspar, who interpreted. Within two years, I was visiting with them in Latvia. I brought a collage made up of images from my mother's life and buried it at the farm she grew up in. We buried a collage in each of her parents graves. In one of the more memorable moments we visited the small museum in the town of Talsi where my mother was raised. It had a display of my grandfather's work table, his picture and the tools he used to carve the wooden hand holding a wreath that was placed atop the towns monument. It also displayed the original carving. We had a postcard of that monument placed on the wall of every apartment we lived in.

While touring the museum, I heard someone playing a piano and followed the sound to find one of the museum workers sitting at a piano with my little third cousin. My mother had sung a Latvian lullaby to me and I asked her if she knew it. Of course she did. My cousins gathered in the room and I sang the song as my cousins joined in. It felt as if the song sang me and came out so sweet and pure. My mother could've never imagined, while she sang me this song in my little bed on the other side of the world from her homeland, that sometime in the future I would be standing in her small town singing this song to my cousins near the memorial to her father.

Going Away Party

Which brings me to this current Christmas miracle. My brother Scott was in communication with our cousin Daiga. She is a celebrated Latvian literature teacher at Riga State High School No. 1 and the daughter of mom’s favorite sibling, Velta, the middle name my mother gave me. Scott asked her if she would come to visit him for Christmas and she jumped at the chance. He lives in Saint Albert's in the province of Alberta up in Canada and he offered her a nice snowy Christmas which involved two Christmas family dinners, lots of baking and cooking, bowling, visits to art museums and libraries. I reached out and told her since she was going to be this way she should come down to Los Angeles for New Year's. She arrived Dec. 28th. Her first time in America. We have packed in movies, museums, desert trips, beach trips, Hollywood and more.

In one of my conversations with brother Scott we marveled at the miracle unfolding. When my mother was on that boat sailing away from the family and a favorite sister she would never see again, as she fiercely endured bombs, displacement, moving to a whole new continent where she barely spoke the language, as she coped with bearing a child out of wedlock, then having another child out of wedlock, giving him up for adoption and spending her life wondering where he was…never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined looking into the future and seeing the daughter of her beloved sister flying across the country to see the son she never met. And then continuing on to visit with the rebel daughter, the one who gave her the most anxiety and who was now doing her proud by living a happy, healthy, fruitful, contributing life in Los Angeles.

Scott said that when he met Daiga at the airport they held each other for at least a full 10 minutes. We agreed that our mother and Aunt Velta are still hugging each other with joy over what is happening. And I feel certain they had a hand in this Christmas miracle.