"This volume is an attempt to shed light on my family's life-or-death decision of the summer of 1944 and on a grateful immigrant's struggle to earn a Ph. D. in economics in America in the 1950s." - Page [5]

Latvia, a small country on the Baltic Sea, became independent in 1918, but was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940. Like its neighbours, Estonia and Lithuania, Latvia has a skewed resource pattern, small domestic market, and an export concentration into commodities. Prior to the Soviet...