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For thousands of years, the windswept plains of the eastern Baltic attracted migrant tribes from all over Eurasia. These peoples lived together, sometimes uneasily, sometimes at peace, forging the multiethnic cultures of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. The last two centuries have brought one army after another to the Baltic, led by Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas, Hitler's generals, and Stalin's field marshals. In the wake of World War II, the multiethnic cultures of the Baltic splintered, and millions of citizens, including Canadian historian
Modris Eksteins, born in Latvia in 1943, were sent into flight.
Eksteins's narrative, haunted by ghosts and unconventional in structure, embraces many stories. At one level, he offers a requiem for the Baltic past. At another, he composes a personal history of his family, driven so far from its homeland. At yet another, he ponders the nature of history itself in a tale that "must reflect the loss of authority, of history as ideal and of the author-historian as agent of that ideal. What we are left with is the intimacy not of truth but of experience." The terrible experience of war and conflagration propels his beautifully rendered, eyes-wide-open narrative. During his childhood, Eksteins concludes, "for regret and tears there was no time, no point." Half a century later, he is able to mourn the loss of the old Baltic world--and readers of contemporary history will find much to think about as he does. --Gregory McNamee
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Kirkus Reviews
Part history, part memoir, this unconventional account of the fate of the Baltic nations is also an important reassessment of WWII and its outcome. Acclaimed for his study of WWI (Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, 1989), Eksteins, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, here combines his role of historian with that of autobiographer, rapidly shifting among events before, during, and after WWII. First he provides the drama of his family history (clearly presented, with a literary sensibility, though at times overwritten); the pivotal character is Eksteins's maternal great-grandmother Grieta. The tale of this Latvian chambermaid, made pregnant and then rejected by her Baltic-German baron, serves as a mirror of Latvian-German relations over the centuries. In addition, the family history opens up the subject of displacement, with a heavy focus on the fate of DPs in the postwar years and the struggle and hope of the immigrant experience. A history of the Baltic nations is squeezed in as well, with special emphasis on these nations vulnerable position between Germany and Russia, with an eye to WWII. Finally, at the books core is a serious questioning of our culture's attitudes about the outcome of the war. Eksteins argues that, in a postmodern age, we must write history that doesnt dictate but provokes us with ``layers of suggestion.'' In the postCold War era, he contends, we must face the realities of the war and the fact that 1945 ``is not our victory, as we often like to think; 1945 is our problem.'' Given this statement, Eksteins's treatment of the Holocaust will be closely scrutinized. The author goes about things in his own way: while the Jews are noticeably absent from his examination of the Baltic communities, he gives the Baltic Jewish situation separate and bold attention; Eksteins discusses the ``willing executioners'' among Hitler's conquered subjects. A multifaceted study of the Baltics and WWII, provocative and ambitious, that evokes the enormity of the loss and destruction caused by the war. --
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