Taimi Pitkanen last saw her brother Aate (AH-tay) in a Leningrad
railway station in 1931. Taimi was returning to Canada from
Moscow; Aate was headed for Soviet Karelia, on the border with
Finland, where his skills in electricity and languages - both
English and Finnish - were badly needed. Aate never came back.
Even when the dream went sour, Aate held on, writing home until,
in 1941, Hitler attacked the USSR. After that, no one in Canada
heard anything more of Aate Pitkanen. Sixty years later, the
discovery of his last letters - written but never mailed from a
Finnish prisoner-of-war camp - reveals his fate and brings
together Taimi and Alfred, the son Aate never met. Visiting
Taimi in Canada, Alfred Pitkanen learns the dramatic story of
his father's Canadian family and of "Karelia Fever," the
enthusiasm that gripped so many Finnish Canadians in the 1930s.
Almost forgotten now, it lured thousands to a tragic fate in the
Soviet Union. Alfred follows his father's journey from Thunder
Bay, Ontario, to Karelia, f