There are just a handful of photographs to record my mother’s early years in Latvia. She was born in November 1926 in Liepaja, the city on the coast where both her parents were working in the Liepaja Theatre. She was an only child and by all accounts quite reserved and shy, which she remained all her life. You can see this character trait in her face even at a young age - she looks wary and unsure. I’m not sure how they managed to structure family life with both parents working in the theatre and no grandparents on hand to help out but I presume at some point my grandmother gave up work as there is a gap of three years from 1928 to 1931 in her theatrical CV.
My mother aged about 3 with her parents and their Divorce Certificate dated 1938
Studio portrait of my mother with her mother, April 1930
Studio portrait of my mother with her father, undated
These are the two earliest photographs I could find of my mother - the proud father with his daughter on his knee and the mother and child portrait caught as though just in the act of reading. In fact these were studio portraits as there seem to be no family snapshots until later in the 1930s and they probably didn’t own a camera at that time. There is a studio stamp on the photo of my mother and her father - Foto Kino Grafija LEGATO which was a motion picture studio in Liepaja. The one with her mother is inscribed on the back with Easter greetings from Daugavpils and dated 19th April 1930. According to Evalds Valters’ Wikipedia page he worked at the Daugavpils Theatre from 1929 to 1930 so perhaps they lived there. The two photos below are a slightly later date - I think my mother was about four - and are also studio portraits.
Studio portrait of my mother, her friend and her dog
Studio portrait of my mother and her dog aged about four
Some time in the 1930s the marriage started to break down. My mother didn’t have a very stable home life as her father moved around to various theatres after 1928 - to Daugavpils, to Riga, then back to Liepaja. I think as a small child she worshipped him but, although he loved her very much, I don’t think he made a lot of time for her. Things were different then and childrens’ emotional well-being probably didn’t seem as important as it does nowadays - they just had to fit in with adult lifestyles. I find these pictures of my mother as a young child rather melancholy - staring out at the camera with her guarded expression, hunched in on herself, clutching her beloved dog. I can’t help thinking that this start in life must have shaped her introverted personality in some way and paved the way for a lifetime of reticence and reserve.