Zatlers begins weeklong visit to United States

Andris Straumanis | 

Latvian President Valdis Zatlers has begun a weeklong working visit to the United States that will include meetings with government officials and politicians, speaking to Baltic-Americans and participating in an ethnic school’s commencement ceremony.

The president’s agenda, according to his press office, begins May 14 with a speech to the U.S.-Baltic Foundation’s business development conference in Washington, D.C. The conference is part of the foundation’s annual Gala weekend program.

The same day the president is set to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California; Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida, who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Europe; Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio.

He also will visit the Latvian Embassy in Washington, D.C., where he will view the art exhibit “Latvian Dimensions: Contemporary Installations and Sculpture” and present Latvian state honors to a number of U.S. officials and Latvian-American community activists.
 
On May 15, the president is slated to visit The Brooking Institution, where he will present a speech, “Opportunities and Challenges Beyond 2009: The Role of Transatlantic Partnership in a Post-Economic Crisis World.” The presentation is scheduled from 10-11:30 a.m. at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1779 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Washington. Also on the schedule is a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and a speech during a reception for the U.S.-Baltic Foundation’s Gala.
 
The next day, May 16, sees the president speaking at the opening of the Joint Baltic American National Committee’s conference on Baltic security. In the evening, Zatlers will speak again during the U.S.-Baltic Foundation’s Gala, when he will be the guest of honor.

Before leaving May 17 for Seattle, the president and First Lady Lilita Zatlers will attend a Family Day church service and Latvian school commencement ceremony beginning at 11 a.m. in the Latvian Ev. Latvian Lutheran Church of Washington, 400 Hurley Ave., Rockville, Md.

On the West Coast, Zatlers is scheduled May 18 to visit the University of Washington, where among other agenda items he is to visit with Assistant Professor Guntis Šmidchens and students in the Baltic Studies Program. Later in the day he will meet with the Seattle Latvian community at the Latvian Cultural Center, 11710 Third Ave. N.E., Seattle.

The president on May 19 will visit Microsoft Corp. and meet with company CEO Steve Ballmer. Zatlers also is to meet with Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who is president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program. Finally, Zatlers is to speak to the World Affairs Council at 7 p.m. in the Town Hall Seattle, 1119 Eighth Ave., Seattle. To register for the event, telephone the World Affairs Council at +1 (206) 441-5910. Tickets are USD 10 for council members and for students, USD 20 for nonmembers.

The First Lady’s schedule during the U.S. trip includes a tour of a Ronald McDonald House Charities mobile assistance center in Washington, D.C. A similar project could be implemented in Latvia, according to the president’s press office.

Mrs. Zatlers, who is patroness of a boarding school and developmental center for children with hearing difficulties in Valmiera, will visit similar schools in the Washington area. Among these are Key Elementary School, which has integrated students with special educational needs, and Gallaudet University, where she will learn about a program for children with hearing loss.

Also in the nation’s capital, Mrs. Zatlers is to visit the Newseum, a museum about journalism and the news industry, where she will present the book Latvia Under the Rule of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, 1940-1991 as a gift from the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. The First Lady also will tour the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
 
In Seattle, Mrs. Zatlers will accompany the president when he meets with the Latvian community and when he visits Microsoft.

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

Dealing with the deficit and with Rubiks

Uldis Ozoliņš | 

Since Latvia’s new government came into office two months ago, the atmosphere of Latvian politics has changed almost beyond recognition. When President Valdis Zatlers picked Valdis Dombrovskis to be prime minister, a sequence of events began that now show us a government facing up to the realities both of the catastrophic financial crisis engulfing Latvia, and of the need to change a political culture of corruption and self serving.

Dombrovskis is from the New Era Party (Jaunais laiks, or JL), which stood outside the previous coalition, but he quickly stitched together a coalition that has been remarkably trouble free. Paradoxically, the situation made it easier to form a government, in that all the former coaliton parties were keen to do so quickly, or face a possible early Saeima election. Dombrovskis was also able to sideline a mortal enemy of JL. Ainārs Šlesers’ First Party of Latvia (Latvijas Pirmā partija, or LPP) was not accepted into the coalition, leaving it and the two Russian-oriented parties in opposition. To show he does not give a damn, strongman Šlesers himself is now a candidate for the mayor of Rīga, another source of potential kickbacks now that his political businesses in the national government (transport, communications, infrastructure) are no longer accessible. The former coalition-leading People’s Party (Tautas partija), the Union of Greens and Farmers (Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība) as well as the much bruised and discredited For Fatherland and Freedom (Tēvzemei un brīvībai / LNNK) make up the coalition together with JL.

Overshadowing the politics is the daunting economic situation, with Latvia needing to borrow several billion euros from the International Monetary Fund but needing to bring in severe cutbacks in spending. Budget cuts of just under LVL 1 billion (EUR 1.4 billion) will reduce the deficit to an acceptable level. Latvia must be able to eventually bring its budget deficit down to 3 percent of gross domestic product to qualify for acceptance into the euro zone. This time around it is intent on limiting the budget to a 7 percent deficit, fearful that revenue decline will even make this hard to achieve.

Dombrovskis gained his credentials as a Europarliamentarian, with a penchant for economic and infrastructure issues. His team includes the extraodinary return of a previous superstar, Einars Repše, who was the celebrated director of the Bank of Latvia that maintained the currency despite all adversity, then the ill-fated self-directed prime minister of the first JL government, and then a petulant isolate. Now Repše is back in the hot seat as finance minister, and seems to have regained much of his financial credentials. He and the government are in an almost impossible situation: given falling revenues, cuts to government spending must now approach some 40 percent. The government has indicated there will be protected core areas: health, education, internal affairs (including fighting corruption) and justice, but even they must restructure many of their activities. And “protected” is a very relative term: both teachers and health workers are facing salary cuts.

One other area that has already been cut savagely was the raft of committees, councils, advisory panels, secretariats and boards of dozens of enterprises and semi-government institutions where representatives—almost all with close links to one or other former coalition parties—gained enormous salaries for little work. These sinecures have been almost totally abolished. There is an ongoing reduction of numbers in all government departments. More worryingly, both the state-owned TV and radio face massive cuts. There are concerns over their maintianing programming standards and questions have been raised even about their viability. Other state-owned institutons of national importance, including libraries, also face uncertain futures.

Under this barrage of financial woe a remarkable scene is unfolding of ministers relatively rarely openly squabbling, and even those who despised JL and kept it out of previous coalitions have had to put their heads down and follow Dombrovskis and Repše into financial responsibility. While it is certain that drastic cuts in the upcoming budget will be unpopular, ministers of all parties are caught in a bind: Each wants to fight for their area of responsibility, but each knows that if IMF requirements are not met, the country will be in even greater financial chaos, and they will be blamed.

The first test of the new political order will soon be upon us with local government and European Parliament elections on June 6. Here other, more traditional, political issues are to the fore. Both elections will be a test to see what support the former coalition parties still have in the electorate. The People’s Party has been down to less than 2 percent popularity in some recent opinion polls, and although it holds power in many local government areas it could be in for a shellacking. For Fatherland and Freedom may share a similar fate, and even the traditional Union of Farmers and Greens has struggled to gain 5 percent support. JL is now the leading party, according to opinion polls, alongside the Russian-oriented Harmony Centre (Saskaņas centrs, or SC).

Yet it will be the Europarliament elections that will generate most heat, and there the SC is at the heart of the issue. The SC is a peculiar organisation. At the last Saeima elections it had considerable success in vastly outpolling the other traditional hardline Russia-leaning party, For Human Rights in United Latvia (Par cilvēktiesībām vienotā Latvijā, or PCTVL). SC consists of three factions. Two are moderate, gaining most of their votes for Russians who are Latvian citizens, but gaining some support among Latvians as well. Their very presentable leader, Nīls Ušakovs, is running for mayor of Rīga in the local government elections. Many Latvians indeed would prefer him to Šlesers, the other celebrity candidate. Ušakovs’ faction runs a moderate line on ethnic and national issues.

The third faction is headed by the notorious Alfreds Rubiks—former mayor of Rīga, Communist Party first secretary and unreconstructed pro-Moscow advocate—who was jailed in 1991 for six years because of his treason against the new Latvian state. Detesting the very existence of the Latvian state, he has worked hard to align himself with the SC instead of the PCTVL.

Now Rubiks is the No. 1 candidate for the SC in the European Parliament elections. Having a possible Latvian representative of this calibre in the EP has shocked many. It also raises questions about the “moderate” credentials of the SC. Was it really a put-up piece of political craftsmanship to assume a moderate face while still harbouring anti-Latvian and pro-Moscow policies? Although voters have the option of crossing off names and even many SC voters may balk at electing this troglodyte figure, there is a chance Rubiks may become one of Latvia’s Europarliament deputies. If PCTVL still manages enough votes, we may have two such deputies representing Latvia.

If you are a Latvian citizen your vote on June 6 may be more than usually needed.

In Nesaule’s novel, tenderness prevails tentatively

Diana Kiesners | 

In Love with Jerzy Kosinski

Fans of Agate Nesaule’s 1995 memoir A Woman in Amber have been eagerly awaiting her first novel. Now, 13 years after her memoir received an American Book Award and international praise, it has arrived.

In Love with Jerzy Kosinski explores some of the same issues as A Woman in Amber in a fictional context: immigration, exile and the search for an authentic self after the trauma of war. It’s the story of Anna Dūja, an immigrant to America who escaped from Latvia as a child during the Second World War. Now 43, Anna finds herself in a trap largely of her own devising.

Anna is married to Stanley, an occasionally charming but manipulative Polish-American man. It’s a relationship that is at best disappointing. Stanley undermines Anna‘s self-esteem by offering a punishing kind of love, and the assurance that no one else could ever love her.

She finds solace in an imaginary love affair with the novelist Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird, a book Anna reveres. (In A Woman in Amber, Nesaule described teaching this book to her American students.) Kosinski, she feels, is someone who could understand her fractured past, her post-traumatic present. They could comfort each other.

But even in her fantasies Anna has to admit that it’s unlikely that she could ever encounter the glamorous Kosinski in the northern Wisconsin countryside where she and Stanley live. Anna’s feelings of isolation there are reinforced by the fact that she can’t drive and must rely on Stanley or her neighbors to go anywhere.

Into the lake of her discontent Anna drops a tiny pebble: she learns how to drive.

The ripple effect is far reaching. One act leads to another, and eventually to the demise of Anna’s marriage. Though she remains susceptible to Stanley’s guilt-mongering and attacks on her self-worth, she begins to act in her own defence and on her own behalf, sometimes in surprisingly vigorous ways. 

Once established in her own apartment, Anna must deal with the usual struggles of a newly single middle-aged woman and face the challenges of anxiety and loneliness. She longs for companionship, for love. Her neighbor Molly tells her: “In real life it’s always women who find men. Always. So let’s get busy.” Nesaule doesn’t shrink from detailing the discrepancies between feminist beliefs and female actions and longings.

Here the novel flirts with the outlines of what can almost be called a genre: the middle-aged woman who leaves an unsatisfying marriage to find herself. Thus we are not surprised when a younger lover shows up in Anna’s life, nor that she discovers in her new relationship that the patterns of a lifetime die hard and can sometimes reincarnate in surprising guises. 

Perhaps not wishing to retrace territory already covered in A Woman in Amber, Nesaule reveals Anna’s traumatic wartime history in brief, dream-like fragments. She deals more directly with the personal histories of others. One is a Jewish survivor named Sara who becomes a friend (”…did all exiles automatically recognize and respond to each other like this? Did a complex past unite people even when they did not talk about it?”). The other is of course Jerzy Kosinski, whose autobiographical details become increasingly suspect over time. Are the events of The Painted Bird really based on his own experiences, as he once claimed? Or is the book a self-serving betrayal of those who helped him during the war? Are the growing criticisms of him, including accusations of plagiarism, true?

There is a book that Anna keeps hoping Jerzy Kosinski will write, one that will illuminate her own story as well as the stories of others. It will explain what happens when you live on the edge of war, even if you’re not one of its direct victims. When, in a line of stalled traffic, she hears that Kosinski has committed suicide, Anna thinks she knows why: “He was a child during the war: he was one of the hunted; he was one of the millions marked for death.”

One of the questions Nesaule asks in In Love with Jerzy Kosinski is about the purpose of retelling all the different narratives of suffering, of victimhood. What is the point of reliving these stories, of telling them? She comes up with a tentative possibility: “Maybe instead of clashing and competing, all the stories will weave together into a great tapestry, each thread part of an intricate, somber pattern. Maybe tenderness will prevail.”

Through her stubborn, almost unconscious quest for happiness, in the end Anna learns to have some tenderness, some compassion for herself as well. She finally manages to extricate her fate from that of the beloved Jerzy, “her idol, her soul mate, but not her twin.”

I wondered about Anna’s last name, Dūja. It wasn’t a word I recognized. My Latvian-English dictionary translated it as both “pigeon” and “dove.” In fact the two birds are close relatives and belong to the same family. Both have mournful songs and tend to build relatively flimsy nests, often in insecure places. But they are the strongest fliers of all birds, and are highly manoeuvrable in flight.

Details

In Love with Jerzy Kosinski

Agate Nesaule

Madison, Wis.:  University of Wisconsin Press,  2009

ISBN 978-0-299-23130-9

Where to buy

Purchase In Love with Jerzy Kosinski from Amazon.com.

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