Those of you (still?) (ever?) on Facebook might check out this page… for fresh material on what seems to obsess this forum in many a rancid way.

I meant that nicely—I promise!

Visu gaišu visiem Melnā pūķa gadā!
/P

Hi Pēter C:

Where’s Waldo?....and if you find him, would you mind asking him where he hid the link your Post alluded to?

Lai veicās (grin),

Alberts

Oops! Lai nu kā—Waldo valda!

Link—

te.

(This is actually a Chekist plot to see who signs up, of course—I am dying to learn Ambersun’s true identity…)

/P

Hi Peter C:

Visited the link - now that Waldo fessed up and told you where he hid it - and saw a mention of an intriguing new book:

Baltic Biographies at Historical Crossroads (Hardback) - Routledge
http://www.routledge.com
This book brings together life stories from five generations of Balts, living through the diverse and recurring transformations of the twentieth century: occupations, war, independence, totalitarianism, and democratic rule and market economy.

Summary of the book’s contents:
1. Introduction: on living through the Twentieth century in the Baltic States by Aili Aarelaid-Tart and Li Bennich-Björkman
2. Locating memory within history: Baltic lives in their context by Vieda Skultans
3. Everyday life, power and agency in Soviet Latvia by Baiba Bela
4. Before we return home: the collective strategies of Latvian World War II refugees adapting to Swedish Society by Maija Runcis
5. Working through mature Socialism: private and public in the Estonians’ meaning-making of the Soviet past by Kirsti Jõesalu & Ene Kõresaar
6. Tell me Your story – Russians in Independent Estonia by Aili Aarelaid-Tart
7. Discussing ethnic identities with Russian-speakers in rural Estonia and Latvia by Laura Assmuth
8. Exit from communism: career decisions of the Lithuanian young Communist functionaries by Vaida Obelenė
9. Catching up with the West? An insider’s perspective from Lithuania by Herwig Reiter
10. Mobilizing capitals during transitions – the stories of Toomas and Nikolai by Raili Nugin and Aida Hachatyrian
11. Basic human values’ dynamics and biographical findings by Indrek Tart

Also dropped by Amazon.com to see if anyone had posted a review of it. The answer is “No”.

Couldn’t help but notice the $130 USD price tag (not including tax). That’ll keep most private customers at arms’ length, I suspect.

Lasīšana paliek ar vien dārgāka,

Alberts

For books like that—yeah. We anarchists steal them by the truckload, of course. Not that I’m an anarchist…

Enigmatically yours,
/P

Quickly chime in to mention that I/we had a delightful conversation with Vieda Skultans just last month. She was in Riga for a conference and I met her (with the reluctant agreement of my wife) at a trollybus pietura. We ended up on the same bus and she will read a diary compiled by a LV colleagues grandfather and come to visit a school where I teach (http://www.patnis.lv).

Her work (published in various academic journals) is quite interesting, though (maybe “and”) a bit challenging to some trimdaesque beliefs about memory. My PhD pursuing wife uses some of her observations regarding the conformance of these self-reports to various literary genres in talking about this literature of exile. That “the present changes the past” is quite evident in these reports and the interviews that Vieda writes about.

Of course, Woman in Amber is the most challenging to western trimda. We have had people (western trimda) actually call it “that awful book.” Goodness knows that it is just plain wrong to acknowledge the full blown humanity of people who ran away at the end of WWII. To understand that people had fears, prejudice etc. is, evidently, just plain dangerous. This self-belief in their own courage often blinds them (personal observation) to the (mere) humanity of others.

Tom writes: “Of course, Woman in Amber is the most challenging to western trimda. We have had people (western trimda) actually call it “that awful book.” Goodness knows that it is just plain wrong to acknowledge the full blown humanity of people who ran away at the end of WWII. To understand that people had fears, prejudice etc. is, evidently, just plain dangerous. This self-belief in their own courage often blinds them (personal observation) to the (mere) humanity of others.”

Tom,
Where do you get your information about trimda Latvians and what supposedly they think about anything? “Of course [?], Woman in Amber is the most challenging to western trimda.”  My italics and my “HARDLY!!!”  What is the actual source of your ignorance and apparent hostility and prejudice?  Do you really know any trimda Latvians ?  In addition, have you read any of the countless memoirs and other writings available to you written by trimda Latvians other than this one work you are so attached to because it is available to you in English?  It would be worth paying some attention to your comments about trimda Latvians if I felt you really knew “the full blown humanity” of these varied and complex Latvian people who in your brave American comment “ran away at the end of WWII.” 

You returned to LOL for these comments?  It’s so awfully annoying to have someone who has no real contact with trimda Latvians and who has a very limited experience with Latvia (living there for only a few years of an old trimdnieks experience with Latvia) and with a boring (always free!) American perspective - not even European - jump in to point out that Latvians should accept that they are real and complex human beings, by gosh, just like, well, any normal human beings.  Rather than spending time pointing out how brutal occupation(s) and war conditions and circumstances showed Latvians to be a truly remarkable and decent people, far better people in the whole than most unoccupied, barely occupied, briefly occupied Europeans who “collaborated” with anyone and everyone and your Americans who chose in some primal fear to send their own people to “concentration camps” within the sacred and unoccupied and free U.S.; chose to use ghastly A-weapons to incinerate civilian human beings; who in inhuman retribution and retaliation bombed the bygeezus and life out of “collateral” Europeans going after one mortal man (how many bombs and civilian deaths did it take to try and kill Hitler?); who did little to save Jews (starting even with Stalin’s purges - same bloody Stalin who later became your U.S. friends and relatives ally Uncle Joe) but blamed OCCUPIED Latvians and occupied “bloodlands” victims for not saving the Jews from Hitler and Stalin and general world impotence, even apathy and blatant disregard for the suffering and murder of Jews; who capitulated to Stalin and let him deport, rape, murder and imprison for half-a-century Latvians and millions of other innocent children, women, old people.  You need to take a closer look at your fellow Americans before you jump to speculate about the behavior of Latvians, especially about those poor trimda Latvians your Americans betrayed and thought should be willing to stay imprisoned behind THE IRON CURTAIN.  If you’re going to comment with such obvious slants and slams, please do so first in relation to the Americans you know far better.  Can you explain to me how free Americans living in a democracy allowed “the U.S. concentration camps” for “U.S. citizens?”  How could the Americans allow the Latvians (and so many others) to suffer Uncle Joe Stalin’s and Soviet reprisals and deportations after the war ended for the Americans and they were once again safe in their old family homes in the U.S.?  Why did the Americans “run away” from their responsibility to bring this adopted monster relative “Uncle Joe” into line with “normal human values” when the Latvians did not want to have to flee from Uncle Joe’s primitive savagery?  How many of your American friends and relatives “ran away” to safe and happy homes and lives while my Latvian family and friends faced impossible choices, unimaginable devastation, and heartbreaking loss?

ambersun, even with all your ranting and raving and italicizing and insulting and free-associating, you never commented on the book that was the topic.  Have you read it?  What did you think of it?

Tom, I didn’t like A Woman in Amber but not because of the trimda portrayal.  It was the whining (yes, I’ll probably catch flak for that word, but it’s the best I can come up with at the moment) and the poor choices that got to me.

I should go back and re-read it; but for me, the book was extremely depressing on a very personal, emotional level, that was tough to handle.  I’ve discussed this very topic before, but I was actually shocked when I first read it.  I know that terrible, unspeakable horrors happened during the war but generally those days back in the DP camps for the trimda seem to be remembered with fondness by many who spent years of their lives living there.  At first there was little if nothing to eat, no fun; some of my friends have told me they had to eat onions, nothing but onions, from morning to night and then there were the stories about those ‘zalas briesmas’—the green horror ( pea soup) and nothing else for days on end.  But gradually conditions did improve and although it was hardly a life of luxury and ease, there was a certain camaraderie, sense of community—lots of stories infused with much humor.  That’s why Woman in Amber shocked me when I read it.  I had never heard any other stories depicting life in the nometne, quite like this—so dark, grim and absolutely hopeless.  When I mentioned it to my mother (she never read the book), she said that it sounded as if this woman and her mother were in the Russian zone, which could be a living nightmare, such as described in the book; most I think were lucky enough to be in the American or British zones.

I’m not really aware of what too many other former trimdenieki think of this book, but what Tom says wouldn’t surprise me and Anita you make some interesting references about the characters which I don’t really recall.  But just to make it clear, I’m not criticizing the book on it’s own merits, and/or denying what may very well be true; it’s just that for me personally, it was too dark…

Just a few afterthoughts about your comments re: “whining”, Anita.  Many of the Latvian trimda of our parent’s generation were very stoic; we have often discussed this.  Our fathers having gone through all kinds of unimaginable hell, during the war, yet never openly talking about their experiences—maybe some bits and pieces sometimes when they had had too much to drink, that’s it.  So this type of book where the author openly talks about her innermost feelings, fears, the dynamics of her relationship between herself, her mother even seeks counseling(?) is so out of the norm of what most Latvians during that time were like; there wasn’t this airing out of ones thoughts, getting it out in the open, counseling, etc.  it was more, pick yourself up and go on!

I haven’t the time to really compose my thoughts, nor probably will i, so I’m just throwing out some of what comes to mind, randomly.

Irena

Irena,
She was in the American zone. I think that she simply did not gloss over things that were difficult and distressing for people to see in themselves (as Latvians). Particularly, the treatment by fellow Latvians of the woman who sacrificed herself to the RU troops (for rape) was difficult to read and did not reflect well on those who were fleeing. Also, the father-daughter relationship and the near psychological emasculation of the father that occurred during their flight from Latvia is very difficult.

From my perspective, she INesaule) did take responsibility for her own personal choices and ended up very accomplished. 

For many reasons Vieda Skultans work is very interesting. Try her article here http://www.cfe.lu.se/upload/LUPDF/CentrumforEuropaforskning/confpap3.pdf .

Amber- what the heck, I’ll play. Every day I share an office with a trimda guy with the three-star order. We talk about everything. His politics are more conservative than mine, but so be it. I have worked for and hired various well known returnee trimda friends for projects that I have done.

By the way- when do I pass the “few years” bar? I have lived here for ten years.

Tom, since this thread began I chatted with someone who told me that Laiks, at the time that Woman in Amber was published, had an interview with the author and that she was surprised by the response.  That the men who contacted her acknowledged that the war/flight had affected them, and through them their families, negatively, but that the women were the ones vitriolically attacking the author for what she had written.  Interesting that even all these many (many) years later, that’s still the case.  Even though the woman attacking now is attacking you rather than directly attacking the author.

Me - well, I can be judgmental.  The concepts of the war, the camps, trimda, were powerful - but in my opinion told from a very self-centered and “oh poor me” point of view.  And that her subsequent bad choices happened because of all she experienced. 

Would I have done better in her position?  Very likely not.  But I still had little respect or even sympathy for the author on the basis of that book.  Had I met her in person, I very well might have.  But not on the basis of the words between the 8 corners of the book.

For some Nesaules book is too dark,for others,especially trimda Latvians it hits home.How can it
be too dark,when it is dark.Don’t be surprised if you go outside at midnight and it’s dark.Us,the DP’s
have a deeper understanding what this book is all about,you just have had to travel that road.
Yes,yes Tom,we ran away,you have stated so many a time,and how you’re father in-law won the Siberia
prize by staying,was he not too smart you had asked.
So far you have not replied to anything Ambersun wrote,do you plan to?Do you feel there is much truth
to what she is saying?
Did your country, the great Shining star of humanity,turn away a ship with Jewish refugees at that time?

Really, aivar?  The “Siberia prize”?  I don’t know what trimda corner you grew up in, but I was raised with respect for the Latvians who were deported to Siberia and those who lost their lives there.

aivars t - 28 December 2011 06:09 PM

So far you have not replied to anything Ambersun wrote,do you plan to?

But he did. Ambersun challenged the validity of Thomas’ opinion because of his ‘ignorance’ resulting from insufficient contact with trimda Latvians.  Thomas responded that he had such contact and gave actual details, and showed more civility than the hysterical raving he was responding to.

Tom,

I take particular issue with the sense that the Baltic diaspora “ran away”. Maybe its semantics or my missing detail as to how you intended to present your comment with respect to the tragedy that was the post war emigration.

“Goodness knows that it is just plain wrong to acknowledge the full blown humanity of people who ran away at the end of WWII.”

Focusing on -ran away- this leans more toward propaganda than reality. It’s a very soviet POV and it has been repeated many times by those who were taught to understand the diaspora as run aways who abandoned the Shining Light of Stalin. It’s a sentiment I’ve confronted personally on several occasions in Lithuania. I didn’t run away from anything obviously. Neither did my parents. They were 13 and 8 years old at the time. Unless soviet propaganda (that still may live in some form) wants to present that diaspora pre-teens were the ultimate decision makers - it remains a very silly point of view.

Survival is the most basic of human instincts. Leaving a place thats being subjected to multiple waves of war is a natural response to that instinct.

I understand Amber consistently presents the diaspora in a light that places them above the “soviet infected”. The “Woman in Amber” book appears to describe the dysfunction associated with traumatic displacement that plagued many post war families forced to relocate and try and recreate an existence after being subjected to absolute hell. Those stories are a dime a dozen. We all know them.

But “run away” ? I strongly disagree.