Final Project

Background Notes for Final Project: a closer look at the dominant narrative

The best way I can think of to examine the dominant narrative of Latvian-American identity more closely is to recount my own family’s immigration to and experience in this country. I’m so intimately involved with my community and have so many friends, relatives, teachers, and acquaintances who’d tell the same story - that I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my family’s experience (for my current purpose, anyways) is very much theirs.

This essay doesn’t allow me enough time to delve into earlier history (a shame because it is relevant and I can’t imagine anyone would know much about such a small backwater of Europe) so I’ll have to pick up with my grandparents as young adults, not long before they fled. If you’d like to learn more, the following Web sites are a good start (best I could find in English):

http://www.li.lv/en/?id=83 (Latvian Institute’s Brief History of Latvia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Latvia (Wikipedia version)

Let me just say that if you did look at these details, you’d find that the appearance (mid 19th century) of a “Latvian identity” via the “Tautas Atmoda” movement – lit. “National Awakening” or of a region/nation called Latvia was, clearly, very much a construction in its own right. One highly motivated by political objectives - in this case 2nd class citizen peasants rallying to control the fruits of their labor by elevating the status of their 2,000 year old somewhat-in-common heritage from what their German and Russian masters referred to as that “sudu valoda” - lit. “shit language/culture”.

The most accessible (because their stories will be more familiar to you – a mandatory part of any European history class) analogy might be the development of Italian identity. Before the 19th century, of course, there wasn’t really an Italy or Italians in the way we think of these peoples/places now.

They hadn’t been invented yet because at this time Italy was a loosely organized collection of duchies ruled by various foreign powers. The idea of an Italian national identity was created by a small group of aristocrats and middle class merchants who worked to popularize the notion until it was finally realized by the hero-general unifier Giuseppe Garibaldi: http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761580632/Italian_Unification.html.

Most European nations have followed this model to greater or lesser degrees at some point in their histories. The point is, the foundations of this constructed identity (dominant narrative) are themselves constructions deeply rooted in political objectives…

In the late 1930’s, when my Latvian grandparents wed, they were simple farmers working small plots of land in Latvia’s middle-country, where their families had likely lived and raised crops, cows, sheep, and bees since ancient times.

All Latvian farms have a place name, typically having to do with something from the natural world, and my grandmother lived in Antuzi (name’s so ancient and archaic not even my great-aunts know what it means) with her sisters and mum, while my grandfather lived in Berzaune (Little Birch Stand) with his sisters and parents.

The farms were only several miles apart which is a huge distance in a horse and buggy culture (neither of my grandparents had traveled in a car before they fled the country). My uncles (actually my mum’s cousins) lived close by as did most of our extended family. Latvian farms are organized in clusters with each family’s fields extending out in a circle from a central community of houses, barns, a sauna (where babies were birthed – including my mum and all my friends parents), and buildings to store wheat, linen, rye, barely, cheese, beer, honey and the other traditional staples everyone produced. It looked something like this (although this is a somewhat older late 18th century version):

http://www.muzejs.lv/index.php?akt=3d&menu=dml/5&im=5&dml=all


Everyone, related or not, was very close and you just new and interacted with your neighbors to a degree that’s pretty much non-existent here and now – think Amish.

For example, the old man (who I got drunk with one afternoon) living in the Antuzi farm-cluster where my mum was born (he’s been there his whole life) isn’t related to us but remembers: my grandparents romance and marriage, the birth of my mum (he was ten or so), and being frightened of my great-grandmother and her reputation as the “Queen of Antuzi” – hilarious cause her personality was very much like that, from what I remember as a boy.

I can still picture her throwing tantrums when she didn’t want to take her medicine and the cops who’d routinely come to search for her when she’d “run away” as revenge. This guy even remembered my uncle the minute he saw him (I was there), after 62 years, and how he’d given a rousingly maudlin speech (at the age of 5!) at his favorite relative’s funeral - also very funny cause my uncle is a bit of an emotional loudmouth (he admits it himself) to this day.

The point of all this is everyone lived an extremely innocent, bucolic, close-knit-community pastoral life - much as they had for centuries. With one main exception: for the first time ever they owned their own land in their own country.

Before 1918 (Latvia independent for 1st time) everyone, with some exceptions starting at the turn of the 19th century, was a Russian citizen who had to pay taxes/tribute to the landed German aristocracy (Latvians had already long been freed from serfdom in the 1820’s). The Latvian language/culture was considered unworthy and crude. Good only for rough, uneducated peasants.

To be educated was to speak and study German. But after the 1st independence (in which a rag-tag Latvian army fought of Russia then turned against the German army who’d helped them to drive them out) the aristocrats were sent packing, Latvian became the official language taught in schools, and land was reapportioned to peasant farmers (80% or so of the population) – including my grand-parents and their parents.

My grand-parents generation was filled with the “Jaunais Laiks” or New Era optimism that only young people who had been born free to remake their country as they saw fit could possess. Everyone was enormously proud and a cultural and economic Renaissance began, along with unprecedented progressive social insurance and minority protection programs (the country achieved one of the highest standards of living in contemporary Europe) - complemented by a Roaring Twenties-style social life. Here’s a basic historical summary:

http://www.li.lv/en/?id=84

My favorite Latvian novels are definitely the ones from this time period in which authors (the capital Riga was pretty Bohemian – filled with painters, poets, and writers) sought to take part in the highly experimental, Modernist movements flowering in Europe.

During this period my grand-parents met in a newly built (in a German aristocrat’s castle – a populist move repeated all over the country) college for agricultural studies. They married in 1941 and returned to Berzaune filled with zeal for the good old three D’s – “Dievs, Daba, and Darbs” - God (not the Christian one though – this saying is ancient), Nature, and Hard Work. My granddad was installing his county’s first electric generator when war broke out.

Latvian World War II history is too complex to cover here but a quick summary goes like this: first the Soviets annexed the country in 1941 (mass deportations and killings – 30,000 or so Latvians) – which is referred to as “Baigais Gads” or The Year of Terror. Then the Nazis took over in 1942 and wiped out 70,000 Jews in a matter of months, but left Latvians more or less alone. And finally, the Soviets swept back in 1944 for the last time beginning mass deportations eventually totaling over 200,000 (pretty significant since the pre-war population was approximately 200,000).

About half the people sent away in cattle cars, after being seized in the middle of the night, never made it back. 100,000 or so were killed fighting in either the Soviet or German army. Another 200,000 fled and ultimately went into exile.

My grandparents and extended family, meanwhile, had been working the land as best they could and managed to avoid the first waive of deportations by hiding out in the woods. Everyone who was old enough remembers this quite well and when we tour the countryside my aunts and uncles will point out the little patches of forest where they’d hunkered down while the front swept back and forth.

In the fall of 1944, my mother was a few months old, my grandfather knew he was on the Soviet’s “list” (for owning a thriving farm), and so he and my uncles’ family loaded up a horse and buggy and fled towards the approaching Allies through Poland. My uncles remember this well and still tease my mum– in their child’s minds they thought her crying would attract the dive bombers making their runs everywhere.

Without getting into too much graphic detail, everyone who remembers saw some pretty bad shit – neighbor’s body parts splattered about, corpses lining the roads, etc. My uncles’ dad died in front of them. And the guy (who stayed at Antuzi) I’d mentioned earlier listened to his family (hiding in basement – he’d gone out for some reason) burn to death when the advancing Red army set fire to their farm house.

When you travel the midlands it’s still pretty messed up – huge bullet holes in many of the buildings, farms caved in from explosions – a lot of places were just never cleaned up or used again and have grown wild. It’s not just my family though – everyone has more or less similar stories.

Anyways, thanks mainly to my tough-as-nails great-grandmother (she made audio tapes for me and my brother) who spoke German and Russian (though never English – even after 35 years here!) fluently enough to pass the family off as the right ethnicity depending on which army they encountered, my family arrived in an American controlled section of Germany right before Christmas 1945. Just in time for my mum to play the baby Jesus in a GI Christmas play (crazy but absolutely true).

Eventually 200,000 Latvians made it to Germany and lived there in Displaced Persons Camps until the early 1950’s. Everyone, especially people of my mom’s generation and older, remembers this time fondly, cause you basically just sat around socializing and partying with little work to do (food, as meager – coffee and a potato as I was reminded when I didn’t eat my vegetables! - as it was, was provided free by Marshall Plan type programs).

In fact there’s a popular and ultra-nostalgic musical touring now about life at the biggest Latvian camp in Eslingen, which my best friend’s mom made me take her to when it came to Boston cause I’m a big sucker and he wouldn’t go:

http://www.eslingena.com/

As both the musical and my mum, uncles and teachers have often pointed out, the Latvians in the DP camps all thought, at first, that they’d ride out the Post World War II mess in safety. Then pick up and go right back to farming as soon as the Allies straightened things out and made the Soviet Army go home. But then they began to receive disturbing reports that those daring enough to return were being executed or sent to the Gulag for being Traitors to The Revolution.

Most Latvians (my mum included) will never forgive Roosevelt for “selling them out” and agreeing to let Stalin keep most of Eastern Europe at the Yalta conference.

And so the mass exodus began. This is why I, like most of my friends, have relatives all over the globe. As far as I know we have family in Sweden, Australia, Canada, and Germany. The U.S., of course, was everyone’s top pick but it was tough to get in.

Any history of illness, no job lined up, too many family members below or past working age and you were headed elsewhere. My uncles, because they were too young, lived in Denmark then Sweden until they were in their twenties, for example.

The classic and oft-repeated saying regarding U.S. immigration was a play on a passage from the bible: “drizak ka kamiels caur adatas aci” – “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle [than for us to get into the U.S.]”. There was even a cartoon illustrating this in a super-popular book of memoirs about “life in exile” that came out when I was a kid – drawn by a well-known Latvian (one of my grade school classmate’s grandfathers).

My family’s break came in 1949 when my mum received one of the many Red Cross care packages that were a hot commodity in the DP camps – from a family, last name Williams, living in Bridgewater Massachusetts. She says she’ll never forget how wonderful her first taste of chocolate was. My granddad who was studying English in the hopes of emigrating, wrote a thank you letter to the Williams’s and they struck up a correspondence.

Before you know it, the Williams family had lined up jobs for my grandparents cleaning houses and working as farm hands and in 1950 they came by boat to New York. No one but my granddad wanted to come. My grandmother, great grandmother, and mum were grief stricken – they had left sisters, family and friends behind. This was fairly common. Many families were broken up in this way – one half (often wives and younger children) left behind the Iron Curtain.
My grandparents worked so hard they earned the undying admiration of their sponsors and became lifelong friends. When I was little I’d visit the Williams family often with my mum and when they died they were buried next to my grandparents. My mum still goes every month or so to plant flowers and used to take me with her.

My grandparents were somewhat unique in that most Latvians (maybe 10,000 or so) who came to Massachusetts lived in Boston – almost exclusively in Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and Mattapan. At this point, these neighborhoods were mainly occupied by other immigrants (particularly Jews, Lithuanians, and Poles) although African-Americans were beginning to arrive as well. My mum still knows Roxbury and Jamaica Plain like the back of her hand and likes to drive through these neighborhoods to point out where friends used to live and where the first Latvian Cultural Center (now in Brookline) was – a place well know for its all night dances and parties.

The Latvians worked hard and stuck to their values and before you know it they were in the suburbs, baby! The American Dream realized through determination and sticking to their guns. The whole time, as we’ve discussed previously, they shunned American life as much as they could – except for maybe ensuring their children had the finest in education. They were in exile. And as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed they would go home to their farms and loved ones and pick up life in the Latvian Golden Age they’d left behind.

Until then they’d vote Republican (anti-Communist), teach their children their language and customs and keep their bags packed. We were one big farm-cluster living together naively in the past, no thoughts of the outside world allowed. They’d only interrupt our desire to return.