the letters

So I have a couple questions I need to answer for myself before I can move much further.

The first is "do I tell the Latvia half of the story only through letters, or do I use letters and scenes stemming from those letters?"

The second is "How does Alex in the states, who has never been to Latvia get a hold of letters that would have been confiscated or censored by the occupying soviets?"

1. My thoughts on this are two fold: I love the medium of letters but I hate it when letters in stories contrive to tell the story in ways that no real person would ever write in a letter.

My mom recently found the letters that her mother had written to her sister during the soviet occupation. Unfortunately the letters my great aunt wrote have been lost to time and new wives. However, the letters were incredible to read, so personal and vulnerable. This is where the idea for the letters that tell Aleksa's story come from. My own great aunt died single with no children. Though there are hints that she at one time had a male lover, she focused much of her life on surviving occupation and taking care of her elderly parents. I wanted to tell her whole story (modified of course) through letters. But I'm beginning to think that may be somewhat contrived. Perhaps i could use the letters to introduce scenes in that story. Things that Alex doesn't know, but the reader does. That may be the easier way to go. I already wrote the last letter, and i couldn't put many details in there. Besides, i find writing a lot of text in the first person a bit disconcerting for some reason. Perhaps i could use the "censored" letters to open the scenes and then tell the "real" story.

2. My thoughts on this aspect have gone around and around. I've thought of telling the stories separately and only at the end does Alex receive the letters from the recipient. So at the end the reader gets to have the "oh, she's going to know what we know now" feeling. I've also thought about them arriving anonymously addressed to her when someone (the recipient) finds her and her family somehow. But that seems too dramatic really, mysterious though...hmmm.
I've toyed with sending Alex to Latvia to find them in the floorboards herself. However, i don't think i want her to have been to Latvia, it might change her feelings about her nationality and i want her to be proud of it in an "I'm different" way more than an actual founded in reality way.
Right now I'm leaning toward Alex's mother goes to clean out the house after the fall of the soviet union. She finds the letters, and never reads them, just packs them up in a box with all the other documents, and sends them back to the states. She finds them in the floorboards, and later we find that these were the letters Aleksa wanted to write to the recipient but couldn't because of the censors. Alex finds them when she is looking for pictures or documents for a school project. She could end up doing her senior project on this whole letters and life thing.