Austra, trio led by Latvian-Canadian, performs at SXSW festival

After several years in which musical acts from Latvia were among those performing at the notable South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, it appears the Baltic country has come up short. However, that does not mean SXSW will lack a Latvian presence.

Latvian-Canadian vocalist Katie Stelmanis and the rest of her new trio, Austra, are scheduled to take the stage during the festival’s music programming, which runs from March 15-20.

For Stelmanis, it will be her second time at SXSW. She performed there last year, too.

Stelmanis, who is part Latvian, also identifies with Toronto’s GLBT community, according to interviews with Canadian Dimension, AfterEllen.com and Dummy.

She is a classically trained musician who at one point was headed for a career in opera. Now she produces and performs music described as dark and electronic.

Previously in a band called Galaxy, Stelmanis in 2008 released a solo album, Join Us. In 2010, she got together with bassist Dorian Wolf and drummer Maya Postepski to form the band Private Life. The trio subsequently changed its name to Austra.

Austra is set to release its debut album, Feel It Break, in May on Canadian label Paper Bag Records and British label Domino Records. The latter’s website notes that Stelmanis is a “a unique talent in possession of some seriously evocative vocal stylings who grew up on a diverse musical diet.”

Austra’s most recent single from the forthcoming album is the wonderful “Lose It,” which can be heard on the SoundCloud website.

During SXSW, Austra is scheduled to perform at 10 p.m. March 17 in Emo’s Main Room, 603 Red River St., Austin.

For more on Austra, visit the band’s website, www.austramusic.com, or its Facebook or MySpace pages.

Austra

The electronica trio Austra consists of guitarist Dorian Wolf, vocalist Katie Stelmanis and drummer Maya Postepski.

Andris Straumanis is a special correspondent for and a co-founder of Latvians Online. From 2000–2012 he was editor of the website.

Powerful biography traces mother’s life through prose, photos

Portrait of a Latvian Beauty

Portrait of a Latvian Beauty, a book of 113 pages and more than 120 photographs, presents a powerful visual odyssey of a Latvian refugee family after it is forced to leave Latvia for Germany and then Canada.

The author, Ilze Berzins, focuses on her mother’s story and provides a vision of the past as perceived by the “Latvian beauty” through many of her life’s wrenching changes.

In general one can trace very similar patterns for thousands of Latvian refugees who fled from the menace of the Red Army and a Stalinist occupation with all of its death threats and repressions. To be sure each family’s story has its own unique characteristics. This particular story is coloured in part by the reminiscenses of a dutiful daughter, intermingled with a touch of hero worship and a certain innocent nostalgia for a lost mythical paradise whose images have been passed down from one generation to the next.

The mother, Ilze Henriette Bērziņš (née Beldavs), was born in the Russian Empire in 1912, and died in Canada in 2008. Ironically, at the age of three, her family fled into Russia, running away from the Germans, but in 1944 she was forced to flee to Germany, running away from the Russians. This aspect of Latvia, as a major crossroad for foreign armies and killing fields, is briefly but well captured by the author in her broad overview of Latvia’s history.

The idyllic life of her mother in pre-war Latvia is described in almost poetic paragraphs. The mother spent winters in the city of Valmiera, a historical jewel on the banks of the Gauja river, but her most fervent emotional attachment was to the summer residence near Stende in Kurzeme, called Bēķi. Indeed the first chapter in the book describes the mother’s first trip by herself to Bēķi, recounting emotions and details which no doubt the author has heard countless times in the family’s kitchen.

The memory of Bēķi suffuses the book and the book well describes the dream-like impact and the virus-like contagion of such a mystic vision:

The sun always shone at Bēķi. Despite her beautiful gardens in Canada, Bēķi always remained for my mother her special enchanted place, shining all her life with untarnished nostalgia. From her rose-tinted storehouse of memory, an idyll emerged and I too became enchanted by Bēķi.

This dream of course could not survive reality and certainly not the heavy burden of Bolshevik kolhoz imprimatur. Indeed throughout all Latvia this period of occupation has left the most ugly scars and broken cement jetsam in the countryside where once natural beauty reigned. The author visited Bēķi after Latvia’s independence and was glad that her mother had not seen the devastation.

Nevertheless this corner of paradise provides the bookend statement of the importance of Bēķi. A superimposed photo of a young girlish mother walking above the tree tops is framed by the dream of Beki as stated in the mother’s “own words”:

I have been promised that, when my turn comes, I will be taken to Bēķi and to our ancestral resting place where my grandparents lie, and my parents, and my beloved husband. There I will again be free to race with the wind through the fields and meadows, wander the burgeoning woods, and then, when exhausted, happily throw myself down in the orchard under the fragrant apple trees and turn my gaze up to the limitless sky.

The book’s clear advantage is its compact nature. It can be offered to friends or younger family members who would otherwise not read a bigger and fuller tome. It offers a visual and punchy answer to anyone asking “how did you (or we) end up in Canada?”

The photographs alone provide a portal into a lost world of ancient Latvia and the Displaced Persons camps of Germany where Latvian culture pulsated as never before or after. No doubt many will be surprised by the elegant clothing worn by Latvians in czarist and independence days. Only Bolshevik anti-bourgeois ideology was able to dent this tendency for Latvians to present themselves in the best garb. One photo in particular intrigued me. As a result of wartime fuel shortages, a vintage family car was outfitted with a gasification carburetor enabling wood to be used for the internal combustion engine. Is this the next big idea that could counter the demands of a $300 oil barrel?

On a personal note I should point out a certain resonance of the experiences of my own family that parallel those of the author’s descriptions. The author’s parents met as agronomy students and married May 31, 1941. My father (born in 1914) also studied agronomy and did his practicum duties at Auce. Indeed, he might have attended the same classes. My parents married in June 1941, immediately after the Soviet army retreated ahead of Nazi Germany’s “Operation Barbarossa.” Turbulent times did not allow for the luxury of drawn-out trial “common law” cohabitation. Our family also boarded a ship from Liepāja, braving the Soviet attack planes and submarines to reach DP camps in Germany. Our trip to Canada was also rough and sea sickness was rampant. I also remember the first view of Canada at Halifax, when our ship docked at the same Pier 21 described by the author as the equivalent of Ellis Island in the United States. I do remember the ugly warehouse building of Pier 21 now a recognized historical memorial. Thereafter the view of Canada from the train window improved immeasurably with the alternating fields and forests and the many waving schoolchildren. Finally I share a common year of birth with the author and can visualize many of the described events from a similar age platform.

While the book has many positive qualities, one can always find room for alternative approaches. For example, the introductory chapter could have been better placed after the next chapter, which outlines the mother’s essential background and ancestry. The second half of the book dealing with Germany and Canada seemed at times uninspired although providing some individual masterful paragraphs. The reader is also left to guess about the last few years of the mother’s life when she became more “difficult.” Given the title it is obvious that the mother would receive the most attention. Nevertheless the father, who is mentioned almost en passant seems deserving of a much larger part in the book. Indeed, his diary and his numerous photos form the basis of much of the book’s content.

One index of the strength of attachment to Latvia by the author’s parents is the retention of the original Latvian names by their children. The author’s brother, who became crown attorney for Canada’s capital region, was frequently seen on Canadian television as Andrejs Berzins rather than “Andrew,” which was a common practice among many intent on blending in. Similarly the author herself has retained her original Latvian version of Ilze.

In conclusion I should mention that Ilze Berzins has written many books. One of these, Happy Girl, dealt with her return and experiences in Latvia. The murder mystery Riga Mortis was a book I could not lay down before having read it from cover to cover.

Details

Portrait of a Latvian Beauty

Ilze Berzins

Ottawa:  Albert Street Press,  2009

Notes: The book is available from the author’s website, www.ilzeberzins.com.

A new ombudsman in the service of political manipulators?

The appointment March 3 of new Ombudsman Juris Jansons showed the extreme political difficulties faced by the government of Prime Minister Dombrovskis, and gives ominous signs of continuing political corruption in Latvia.

In this unsavoury incident, Dombrovskis’ coalition partner—the Union of Greens and Farmers (Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība, or ZZS)—refused to come to an agreement on which candidate to put forward, and supported Jansons, who had been nominated as a candidate by the Russian-oriented Harmony Centre (Saskaņas centrs). 

In an exchange of accusations, Dombrovskis warned that by supporting this candidate ZZS was threatening to destabilise the coalition, and was going against the spirit and letter of the formal written coalition agreement. ZZS’s leader, the highly manipulative former apparatchik Augusts Brigmanis, countered by saying this did not go against the agreement at all and demanded an apology from Dombrovskis for suggesting destabilisation. Moreover, he argued that ZZS had supported Jansons when the prime minister’s party, Unity (Vienotība), had dawdled in presenting its own candidate.

This issue had been going on for several months, with a previous candidate of Unity being blackballed by ZZS in earlier discussions. In the end Unity did select another candidate, Anita Kovaļevska, a judge in the Administrative Court with a strong academic and judicial background in human rights, who was strongly supported by several non-government organisations and convincingly won a phone-in vote in a televised debate with her opponent.

Jansons, also a lawyer, has worked in mostly judicial-administrative and financial areas, and after his election said he was desiring to consult with Kovaļevska with her expertise on human rights. More tellingly, he also said that he would work to make the future selection process for the ombudsman more “democratic and publicly understandable”!

Secret ballots, transparent manipulations

This appointment and its machinations raises a number of issues. First, to vote on the candidates the Saeima again engaged in that most unusual of parliamentary practices: a secret ballot. Never used in most parliamenatry systems, the secret ballot showed its ability to hide corrupt practices in April last year with the appointment of a new chief prosecutor, when incumbent Juris Maizītis was not re-elected though all parties had publicly supported him and not a single speech was made in the Saeima against his candidature.

Jansons was elected 53-40, but at least this time all parties had openly declared their support for the various candidates (so the result was not the shock it was in Maizitis’ case). Moreover, there was debate in the Saeima on the relative merits of the candidates. For those supporting Kovaļevska, the emphasis was on her judicial and academic background and expertise in human rights. Those supporting Jansons argued that administrative expertise, not human rights expertise, was more important in this position.

One other argument emerged for Jansons. The odious oligarch Ainars Šlesers reached the nadir of debate when he argued that he would favour Jansons as he openly supported “family values,” the usual code for politicians employing conservative moral and religious values to mask their actual view of politics as lucrative business and promoting one’s own. Suitability for the job was never a highly ranked criterion for those like Šlesers in the hypocritically named For a Good Latvia! (Par labu Latviju!), which sided with ZZS and Harmony Centre to push their candidate through.

Second, these proceedings give us an insight into the political lie of the land in the parliament, and particularly the central place that ZZS now occupies. The great strength of ZZS is not just its own 22 seats in the 100-member Saeima, but in its strategic position to be able to go with either Unity (33 seats) or Harmony Centre (29 seats) to form a majority. Formally in coalition with Unity, the Jansons episode, like the Maizītis episode where ZZS was clearly the force that stopped his appointment, shows it cares little for coalition niceties when it seeks to assert its influence. A strong ombudsman is not in ZZS interests. In recent months there have been a series of appointments to various government boards and institutions with ZZS people well represented, but the appointments have come often with little transparency.

In other ways, however, ZZS at the moment seems to have no thought of abandoning the coalition. It is aware that its own party and membership would be solidly against going into coalition with SC, and currently ZZS has the best of all possible worlds—being in a coaliton, so contributing to overall policy and governance through its ministers and appointments, but also able to play the field, picking and chosing issues on which to diverge from its coalition partner, and always reminding Dombrovskis of his limited capacity to determine policy. The presidential elections due mid-year may be the next time for ZZS to move in this fashion.

An ombudsman in difficult times

Finally, spare a thought for the ombudsman, or tiesībsargs. This position has only been established for three years, and the process of finding a candidate led to a prolonged standoff. Finally Judge Romāns Apsītis, a reluctant candidate from Day 1, was elected as a compromise candidate. He did not vie for re-election, and rated his own work in the office as middling. As is custom, the ombudsman only has powers to recommend, and the frustration Apsītis felt in battling the bureaucracy was evident. Each of the years of his office has seen a decline in the numbers of people seeking its help, a problem that Jansons promised to address.

However, this is not to give up hope for Jansons. In recent years several appointments that were seen as politically favouring lesser qualified candidates have turned to bite those who appointed them and believed they could be kept on a leash.

Aleksejs Loskutovs, former director of the Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau (Korupcijas novēršanas un apkarošanas birojs) is one such example. He became a popular hero when the government attempted to sack him in 2007.

President Valdis Zatlers, elected by the Saeima in 2007, was widely seen as a lap dog for the then government but has also shown far greater independence than what his appointers had hoped. We shall watch with interest how candidates are found for the presidency.