395. SPECIAL BULLETIN: “Petersons in Ireland” in English has Dropped!
The long-awaited English translation of Sandra Bondarevska’s The Petersons in Ireland has dropped and is available now at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.de (Germany).
In case you’re new to the party, let me tell you just how important The Petersons in Ireland is: without it, The Peterson Pipe would not be what it is. The first, crucial foundational chapters simply couldn’t have been written without help, advice and research provided by Sandra Bondarevska.
Sandra is a Latvian journalist who has lived in Dublin for several decades now, and years before Gary Malmberg and I embarked on our venture to create a history of K&P, she was there, working in the archive of the old Peterson factory in Dún Laoghaire. It was through her contacts with the Brady family (who were the godchildren of Charles Peterson’s daughter Isolde) that K&P was given not only the famous “If Stolen, Please Return to Charles Peterson” pipe, but several other artifacts and a host of documents.
When she learned about Charles’s wife Annie’s involvement with the Irish nationalists and Irish Free State and his cousin’s long involvement in politics and near-escape from the Soviets, she knew she had a book. Over the next several years she would bookend her day job with with research on the Petersons: Charles, his parents and family in Latvia, his first and second wives, his son Con, daughter Isolde and cousin Conrad, as well as his brother John. While Latvians aren’t the largest number of EU nationals living in Ireland, they do number around 20,000, and as Sandra demonstrates, no other Latvian has been as important to Ireland as our own Charles Peterson—who was even mentioned in the Irish Parliament not so long ago.
I need to be clear that The Petersons in Ireland is not “a pipe book,” but rather the ground-zero history book of Charles Peterson and his immediate family—of their work in Ireland, their politics, their work ethic, their achievement. If you’re at all interested in the biography of Charles Peterson and his family, I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.
While the book is divided up into three sections—Charles, Conrad (his cousin) and Isolde (his daughter), each chapter contains fascinating accounts of narrow escapes, living conditions, Irish politics, the British secret police (who had Charles under surveillance for a number of weeks, suspecting him of being a spy), and what it was like to grow up and live in Latvia. In addition, while the focus of each chapter is primarily on one of the three main figures, there is a great deal of cross-over, with enough information on Charles’s wife Annie Forde, for example, to make one wish for an Apple+ mini-series just on her.
Like nearly every human being on the planet (except me), Sandra is bilingual. She achieved her primarily goal when the book was published in Latvian in 2019 (see Post #134). By the very nature of the world of independent research and publishing (plus something we remember as Covid), getting the book translated and then published in English has been a long, arduous task.
Kapp & Peterson, I just found out last week, sponsored the English translation, which was done by Madara Eglite, a Latvian-speaking librarian at Trinity College just across the street from the old Peterson Grafton Street shop. With the book in word-for-word translation, Sandra asked me to work through the text to make it more idiomatic for English speakers.
I’m not going to prolong this but skip to the chase: whether you live in the US or Europe, or anywhere you have access to Amazon, you can order Sandra’s book in paperback ($13.99), hardcover ($19.99), or on Kindle ($4.99).
What are you waiting for?