My Childhood by Toivo Pekkanen

Poignant memoir of poverty and struggle in wartime Finland

In the late 1960s, the University of Wisconsin Press published its Nordic Translation Series, which introduced works of 20th century Scandinavian literature to English-language readers. Eleven books from that series are now available for free at the University of Wisconsin Libraries’ website, where one can read the texts online or download free ebooks. Most of these works are modernist in style, with the authors to some extent experimenting with language and literary form. My Childhood, however, is a straight-up work of old-school naturalism. In this partial autobiography, originally published in 1953, Finnish author Toivo Pekkanen (1902-1957) tells it like it is in clear prose with no ostentation or artifice. In doing so, he vividly brings to life the time and place of his youth and tells the heartbreaking story of his family’s struggle for survival.

Pekkanen was born in Kotka, a town on the southern coast of Finland near the Russian border. For most of this narrative, Finland was under the rule of the Russian Empire. Pekkanen’s father was a stonemason before suffering a stroke that hampered his ability work. Toivo’s early childhood recollections are the idyllic memories of youth, but his view of the world grows darker as his family descends into poverty. Toivo develops a love for books at an early age, but he is unable to pursue an education because of his family’s financial situation. He and his mother are forced to constantly hunt for work and food, sometimes having to resort to begging. The situation only worsens with the coming of World War I and the subsequent Russian Revolution, which bring with them political instability and food insecurity that plunges the entire nation into famine.

As any good memoir should, My Childhood strikes a fine balance between the universal and the specific. On the one hand, Pekkanen tells a coming-of-age story to which anyone can relate: how his childish view of life changed from the romantic to the realistic, how he grew to view his parents as human beings and accept them for their faults, his feelings as an outsider in the world, and his search for inner peace amid challenging circumstances. Pekkanen is able to articulate the thought processes of his younger self with incredible sensitivity and wisdom. Regardless of one’s upbringing, his is a childhood experience that any reader can relate to. On the other hand, this is a story that is specific to Finland, and one does learn quite a bit about Finnish history and Finnish life in the process. The historical details, however, never get in the way of the human narrative.

The plot description above may make My Childhood sound like a relentlessly depressing book, and to some extent it is. One can’t deny the harsh and brutal aspects of the story’s time, place, and situation. It is also, however, a tale of human resilience, one in which Pekkanen’s younger self always manages to find an iota of hope, strength, and perseverance to continue on. This is also a poignant story of family love. Despite the cards stacked against him, young Pekkanen learns to make peace with his lot in life without succumbing to it. At the end of this book, Pekkanen is about 17 and has decided to pursue writing. Calling to mind Leo Tolstoy’s autobiographical works Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, Pekkanen’s My Childhood reads as if it were just the first in a series of memoirs, but Pekkanen died four years after this work was published. If he had another memoir in mind, he never completed it. That’s a shame, because My Childhood is such a compelling read it will leave you wanting more.
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