Born in Riga to a well-educated Jewish family, Valentīna Freimane (1922-2018) lived in Riga, Paris, and Berlin as a child, but returned to Riga with the rise of Nazism in Germany. She married a Latvian medical student and went into hiding when Germany occupied Latvia, but she lost most of her family in the Riga ghetto. In Latvia, she became a well-known film and theater critic and scholar. She has published extensively in the arts. Her celebrated memoir Farewell Atlantis documents her losses, life, and career and has been published in Latvian, Russian, Lithuanian, German, and now in English.
