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Skylarks and Rebels
A vision of Latvia began to form in my mind at a very early age. I remember lying in bed as a child and listening to my mother read Latvian folk tales to me. It was like being teleported into another realm, another era, a place outside of time. My favorite was a funny story about the doomed friendship between a straw, a lump of coal, and a bean. I heard many whimsical yarns about animals and magical beings and places. Many of these folk tales had a didactic meaning. Printed in Soviet Latvia, this book featured superb illustrations by an artist named Pāvils Šenhofs. Latvia as I imagined it and Latvia as it was would later merge, when I was living there.
In my teens, slouching on the living room chair that swiveled back and forth, I began to read and enjoy Latvian books. I devoured works by the great Latvian classics Rūdolfs Blaumanis, Jānis Akurāters, Anna Brigadere, Ēriks Ādamsons, Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš, Jānis Ezeriņš, and other writers of the pre-war era. Reading these works expanded my Latvian vocabulary and deepended my sense of the place I knew I belonged to but had never seen.
Only now as a parent I can understand the reasons for my mother’s rigid language rules and TV curfews. She could not stand American TV, hated commercial TV and radio stations, and controlled our TV time carefully. She pored through the weekly New York Times TV guide circling programs and movies that she approved of. Our television was in the basement, and we often snuck down there to watch TV without her permission.
Curled up in beat-up garden chairs, I watched a lot of World War II documentaries, thanks to my father’s interest in the subject. The grainy black and white footage of German Luftwaffe planes zipping through the sky blasting their Allied targets; bombs crashing to earth and exploding in fiery blooms; tanks rolling over the scorched earth: these images of my parents’ war became mine. I was drawn to my father’s book The Second World War by Winston S. Churchill (Time Incorporated, 1959) with its illustrations of bloody soldiers, corpses, gore, and destruction.
No wonder my older brother became interested in military paraphernalia. Without realizing it, my parents passed their experience and legacy of World War II on to us. It was an inheritance of loss that we, too, had to process as young Americans of Latvian descent. We were attracted to the subject of the war.
In 1980 we huddled together in the basement to watch the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. One of my greatest memories is seeing the underdog American men’s hockey team beat the heavily favored Soviets in the game for the gold medal. How we screamed and jumped with joy when it was over, and Coach Herb Brooks and his players were crowned champions, stunning the Soviets into silence! We defeated those “Russian bastards”! I bet every single Baltic American was cheering like us. The young American boys who played their hearts out against the formidable Soviet team that included the famous Latvian player Helmuts Balderis were our heroes and true champions. We felt that the American team had righted some terrible wrong. My brother Arvils and his Latvian buddies had gone up to Lake Placid to protest Latvian athletes being forced to compete under the Soviet flag. It was a hard time for Latvians.
For many years our Hillside Avenue home was a gathering place for our extended family and Latvian friends. Christmas was the most memorable occasion, with great food, musical entertainment and games, and impromptu skits. It was mandatory for us children to recite poetry in order to receive our presents. Forty years later, I can still remember the words to some of these poems: Balts sniedziņš snieg uz skujiņām / Un maigi dziedot pulkstens skan. / Mirdz šur tur ciemos ugunis / Un sirds tā laimīgi pukst man… (“White snow falls on fir needles, / And the clock gently sings. / The lights come on in village homes,/ And my heart happily rings.” (Jānis Poruks, 1871–1911)
Kārļonkuls (Uncle Kārlis), a cousin of my paternal grandmother Omamma, inevitably fell asleep after our three-course dinner. He lived on the third floor above my grandparents in Montclair. Kārlis Velme was born in 1891 in Dikļi Parish, where his father worked as a scribe. His mother, born Kristīna Cālītis, died while traveling back to Latvia from Ukraine, presumably after World War I. Kārļonkuls studied in Moscow. He was mobilized into the Russian Army during World War I and sent to Ukraine. He returned to Latvia in 1922 and began studying law at the University of Latvia. He worked as a judge in Daugavpils, Dagda, Subāte, and Rīga. In 1938 he became a judge at the Rīga Regional Court. In 1944 Kārļonkuls joined the mass of refugees bound for Germany. He came to America in 1949. He was a kind old soul, our “Humpty Dumpty” who never said much but who thrilled us at Christmas by giving each of us kids a real check, which made me feel grownup. We missed the golden opportunity to ask him about his youth. If Kārļonkuls’ and my grandparents’ memories could have been replayed like a video recording, they would have been great movies to watch. I remember Kārļonkuls sitting at our dining room table recounting how he and the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, briefly locked eyes during the Tsar’s visit to Rīga in 1910. This unexpected revelation, insignificant in the grand scheme of things, nevertheless startled me, for I had already read Robert Massie’s riveting portrait of the doomed last tsar and his family, Nicholas and Alexandra (1967). My grandparents and Kārļonkuls were a bridge to the past. Years later the Internet provided me with the opportunity to view several historic photographs of the last Russian Tsar and his family strolling about Rīga. Kārļonkuls died in Montclair at the age of 94.
Opaps died at our home on Hillside Avenue on December 17, 1978, as we were celebrating my brother’s 15th birthday. I stayed all night on our living room couch listening to Luciano Pavarotti’s “O Holy Night,” crying and staring at the winking lights of the Christmas tree. Every Christmas Eve since I could remember he had read the Gospel of Luke about the birth of Jesus (Luke 2: 1–20), emphasizing the words “Gods Dievam augstībā, un miers virs zemes, un cilvēkiem labs prāts.” (“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”) My paternal grandfather was deeply religious and actively involved in the Latvian Lutheran Church in North America. My childhood was over, as death intruded in the shape of an old man’s body slumped over in a chair. Born in Latvia at the end of the 19th century, Opaps and Kārļonkuls were witnesses to the tumultuous events that shaped the fates of my countrymen in the 20th century.
Some years later, standing on a hill and gazing across the undulating hills and valleys of central Vidzeme in Latvia, I felt the landscape keenly: it had been passed down to me through my genes, the folk tales read to me in my childhood, my grandparents’ stories, and the Latvian literature that I had consumed in my youth. Under a sky filled with fluffy, quintessentially Latvian clouds a prickly hedgehog—just maybe a prince in the making—was scurrying across the road…
Chapter source:
1 * Andersons, Edgars, Ed. “Kārlis Velme.” Latviju Enciklopēdija 1962–1982. Rockville, Maryland: Amerikas Latviešu apvienības Latviešu Institūts, 2006. P. 319.
A caricature of a pupil attending Latvian school by Latvian actor Reinis Birzgalis (1907–1990) from his book Letiņš trimdā (“Latvian in Exile”). (New York: Grāmatu Draugs, 1977.) Illustration courtesy of Rasma Vītola.
Our parents spoke only Latvian to us at home, laying it down as the law. “Runājiet latviski!” (“Speak Latvian!”) “Šajā mājā runā tikai latviski!” (“In this house we speak only Latvian!”) For years this mantra was repeated, while our ears were glued to the radio spewing American and British pop tunes and our eyes to the television set, which was brainwashing us with commercials about squeezable toilet paper, a man named Mr. Clean, and “Snap, Crackle, and Pop” cereal. We were enrolled in a Latvian School in Newark, which held classes on Saturdays. From an early age our weekends appeared ruined; these were innumerable days of boredom and suffering, which managed to set us apart from our American peers early on, creating a sometimes uncomfortable schism in our youthful identities.
My brothers and I each reacted to this cultural indoctrination differently. Unknowingly, I absorbed it deeply, and it has manifested itself in my priorities and choices, including moving to Latvia. At one time my older brother rebelled: he was turned off by Latvian society’s self-absorption and cliquishness. He succeeded in reconnecting with his Latvian side at the Latvian “2x2” camps and traveled to the International Latvian Youth Congress in Floreffe, Belgium in 1975. Much later in life he visited Latvia, where he felt like a reborn Latvian, blown away by the amount of history around him. My younger brother’s best friends were all Latvian, and he remained strongly connected to Latvian American society through his positive experience at Latvian summer high school in Pennsylvania, his marriage to a Latvian American, and his children’s school and camp. He embraced the life that the United States offered him. We were exposed to Latvian identity in the same way, yet we each chose a different route in life.
My parents and the vanguard of Latvian American society expected us to shoulder our legacy and carry it forward into the future, when the sun would rise over Latvia once more, figuratively speaking. They firmly believed this would happen, even as the decades of Soviet occupation wore on. Unfortunately, many of my peers of Latvian descent vanished into the American melting pot.
Our Latvian primary school, which moved from Newark to East Orange, provided a remarkably solid base for awareness of Latvia’s history and culture. While American kids threw baseballs and Frisbees and rode their bikes, we were glued to the hard wooden seats of our classroom’s chairs, where we practiced declensions and vocabulary, listened to lectures about Latvian history, wrote domraksti (essays) and endless diktāti (dictations), and took lots of tests. Latvian school improved my handwriting.
For someone like me, afraid of math and numbers, the memorization of important dates was torture. We were required to know the names of famous figures in Latvian history and when they lived, like Georgius Mancelius (1593–1654), Christoph Fürecker (1615–1685), Johann Ernst Glück (1652–1705), “Blind” Indriķis (1783–1828), Juris Neikens (1826–1868), Atis Kronvalds (1837–1875), Krišjānis Barons (1835–1923), etc. All of this, as well as poems and fiction and the rules of Latvian grammar, was stuffed into our pliable minds. Growing up Latvian was a lot of work and took up time that could otherwise have been devoted to leisure and fun activities.
Our Latvian history lessons ended abruptly with the year 1945. We were left with the impression that in 1945 Latvia was wiped off the map. All those cities, towns, ports, rivers, lakes, bogs, people, and bacon exports that we had to memorize seemed to vanish into nothingness. (Latvia’s lucrative bacon exports really did vanish under the communists.) We were left with many questions. As I grew older, I found out about family members living in Latvia. My Omamma was still there, receiving parcels of leopard and tiger skin pattern fabrics from Opaps to help her get by. Perhaps this abrupt end to Latvian history was unintentional, or there wasn’t enough time, or there simply wasn’t enough information to tell us what life in Soviet-occupied Latvia was like. In fact, we knew very little about the “forgotten” or “hidden” war—“the war after the war”—in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. This was the war of the “forest brothers”—our national partisans who valiantly resisted the Soviets by hiding in Latvia’s deep forests. Outnumbered, they would eventually be defeated, flushed out, and shot or deported. Another wave of deportations in 1949 would send tens of thousands of Latvians to Siberia. Decades of arrests and imprisonment in our part of the world continued after World War II. This part of Latvian history remained veiled to us for many years because of Soviet repression, secrecy, censorship, and hindered contacts.
Our school’s icy atmosphere and emphasis on memorization instilled us with fear and anxiety. Yet I still recall some stanzas from 40 years ago, such as Edvarts Virza’s (1883–1940) poem “Karogs” (“The Flag”)… “Pūšat taures, skanat, zvani, saule plašu gaismu lej! / Karogs sarkanbaltisarkans vējos atraisījies skrej. / Skrej pa laukiem, skrej pa klajiem, sauc arvienu dzirdamāk, / Lai no mājām, lai no namiem, lai no kapiem ārā nāk.” (“Blow the trumpets, sound the bells, the sun is spreading light around! / A red-white-red flag races unfurled in the winds. / ‘Cross fields and meadows it races, summoning ever louder / For all to emerge from houses, buildings, graves.”) Virza’s patriotic poetry was banned for the most part of the Soviet era. (Tr. RL)
Our Latvian school repertoire included dark, depressing songs about oppression, such as “Ej, saulīte, drīz pie Dieva” (“Hurry, Sun, to God”) about a black snake grinding flour on a stone. The song was about slavery under our former masters, the Baltic Germans: “A black snake ground flour / On a rock in the middle of the sea / To be eaten by those masters / Who made us work at night.” We also sang songs about abused orphans and war.
Many of the girls stayed after school to practice rhythmic gymnastics under our principal’s scrutiny, stretching and bopping around with hula hoops and plastic balls. Luckily, my parents didn’t sign me up. I was always very happy to scramble into the car and go home as soon as we were dismissed. One Saturday in my last year in school, as our principal was describing some dreary part of Latvian World War II history to us, I saw tears well up in her eyes. She struggled for composure. It was that fleeting moment, the crack in her steely armor, that made me realize she was human, that she had suffered, and that she had painful memories. That flash of emotion changed my perception of my teachers; I forgave them their “meanness,” realizing that I owed them gratitude for their passionate, selfless devotion to the school and our education.
We had pored over the map of Latvia—that clog-shaped puzzle piece in Europe’s northeastern corner—year after year, as our shoe sizes grew bigger. To us, Latvia seemed as remote as the Moon. Several times we listened to the story about Ivan the Terrible and the massacres in Vidzeme during the Livonian War in the 16th century.
“Along the road from Rīga to Tartu not a rooster crows, not a dog barks.” The chronicler (Matsey) Strykovsky described it with these words: “I myself have seen Latvians burying their dead accompanied by the blowing of horns, as they sing, ‘Go, unfortunate one, from the world of misery into eternal happiness, where you will no longer suffer at the hand of the pompous German, the vicious Lithuanian, and the Muscovite.’ An English traveler (…) paints a descriptive image of this time: “Alas, this terrible, inhumane massacre, drowning, and burning! Women and girls are caught, stripped in the freezing cold, and then in threes and fours tied to horses’ tails and dragged alive or dead along roads and streets. Everywhere lie corpses, old people, children—some wealthy, dressed in velvet and silk, their jewels, gold, and pearls hidden. These people—the most beautiful in the world on account of their origin and climate—now lie cold and frozen. Many have been sent to Russia. It is impossible to calculate the wealth in money, goods, and possessions that are being sent out of the cities and countryside and from 600 plundered and sacked churches.” (Dr. N. Vīksniņš. Latvijas vēsture jaunā gaismā. Oak Park, Illinois: Krolla Kultūras biroja izdevums/Draugas Publishers, 1968, pp. 112–113. Tr. RL)
We took our final exams, graduated, and grew up. Zinta married our Latvian camp’s tennis coach and moved to Canada. Maijroze moved to California and back again. Marty turned into a serious man who drove a BMW and a shiny black Porsche, owned a nice house with a pool in northern Jersey, had two kids, and supported our Latvian school and camp. Many of my peers did not take to Latvian indoctrination well. The school felt like prison. Also, conservative Latvian society scared some people away. It is not easy to live in two parallel cultures. To get rid of the discomfort, many chose to block out one of two competing identities. Unfortunately, in many cases the Latvian identity was sacrificed.
Catskill Summers
When I was little, we spent our family summer vacations at the Jersey shore. I can still remember the feel of the hot sand grasping my little feet and dragging me down, the scent of the ocean’s salty spray, and tar baking in the hot sun. When we got older, my parents packed us off to Latvian “Nometne” (“camp”) in the beautiful Catskill Mountains. The trip was a nightmare for me, as I inevitably ended up vomiting in the back of the car or by the side of the road. With the introduction of Coca Cola and Dramamine into my life, these awful bouts of nausea ceased. Nometne filled me with excitement, anxiety, and even dread: would I have friends?
For our parents Latvian camp was a godsend. They could deposit us in a place where speaking Latvian was the rule, and where we would be occupied all day long for two to four weeks at a time. Who wants their kids at home in the suburbs in the summer, bored out of their minds? With Latvian school in the winter and Latvian camp in the summer, they had us “covered.” Our parents hoped that camp would deepen our exposure to Latvian values, culture, the Lutheran faith, and lasting friendships. There was the added bonus of a gorgeous natural setting: tall, forested mountains; fields where Latvian kids could run around in the fresh air and sunshine; a lake fed by a mountain stream; and hide-and-seek and treasure hunts in the pristine woods around us. Evening candlelight services by the lake or up in the lovely debesspļavas (“Fields of Heaven”) nurtured our spirituality.
The camp kitchen run by Latvian moms provided great meals. Sports were interspersed with Bible studies, art, music, song, dance, theater, and great hiking excursions. We began our mornings by raising the American and Latvian flags and singing an uplifting chorale. The sound of our young voices floated up and out into the beautiful valley between the mountains. We gazed at the mysterious lookout tower on Spruce Top, where our neighbors, German Americans, had established an exclusive residential club in the late 19th century. The words of many of these chorales have stayed with me: “Rīta gaisma mūžīga, / Atspīdums no Dieva vaiga, / Tavu staru spožumā / Izzūd tumsas vara baiga! / Tavu spēku liec mums just, / Naktij zust. (“Eternal morning sun, / Reflected from God’s brow, / In your brilliant rays / Night’s terror wanes! / Let us feel your power, / Let night fade.” (K. Rosenrot, 17th century. Tr. RL) It was nice to start the day with a song.
While eating a breakfast of oatmeal of a glue-like consistency with cinnamon or the more preferable pancakes with sticky syrup, I would often gaze at Ēvalds Dajevskis’ (1914–1990) fantastic painting of an ancient Latvian fortress on the Daugava River. Its dramatic orange sunset hues bathed the ancient scene in suspense and drama. And wasn’t it so, that my people’s history was full of suspense, drama, and never-ending conflict? Dajevskis’ art was archetypal for Latvians, and in it we recognized ourselves.
In the Catskills summers were cooler with none of the awful humidity of New Jersey. These mountains were also popular with New York’s Hasidic Jews who fondly called them Borscht Belt or the Jewish Alps. Sometimes we saw them walking along the roads outside of Tannersville. The streams that cut through the camp’s territory seemed clean enough to drink from; on the weekends, as we waited for our parents to arrive, we hopped from rock to rock, studying the small pools in search of tiny fish.
Gvīdo, Andris, Ēriks, Pēters, Vidvuds, Andris, Aldis… We giggled, gawked, sighed, and blushed, and hoped to dance with our crushes. We stole glances at them, as we paraded around to Chopin’s Polonaise. Our parents hoped that we would marry Latvians. They were uncomfortable with the idea that we might stray outside our Latvian bubble. They came to our balles and sat in the corner staring and smiling. It made us uncomfortable and even angry.
Nometne ran like a clock: we were responsible for keeping our cabins in order and clean, and we took turns sweeping and mopping the camp’s facilities with PineSol and setting and clearing our tables at meal times. Campers were split into teams that competed against each other in sports and other activities. We chatted in English amongst ourselves but switched to Latvian around the counselors and managers. There were two main camp rules: “Runājiet latviski!” (“Speak Latvian!”) and “Akmeņi nelido!” (“Rocks don’t fly!”).
Not everyone had sweet memories of Latvian camp. One summer, when my older brother was about 15, he begged our parents to take him home after his friends left camp. Some of the new camp arrivals were reputed to be bullies, and my brother suddenly felt very much alone. Our parents refused. They had signed him up for a month, and he was going to stay, no “ifs, ands, or buts.” Shortly after our parents left, my brother famously “escaped” from camp, walking the 3.5 miles to to Tannersville, where he boarded a bus to New York City. He showed up on our block in Glen Ridge in the evening, striding past our house, too afraid to ring at the door. My mother, who had been alerted to the fact by the camp director and my grandfather (who was vacationing on the camp property), recalls standing in the veranda at dusk watching her son walk by, her heart breaking. When it got dark, he came to the door and rang the bell. As mother and son hugged, he said, “I told you I wasn’t going to stay at camp!” The pain and guilt of this incident stayed with my mother for years: she blamed herself for inflexibility and insensitivity. “We were so obsessed with this Latvian thing!” she lamented more than 40 years later.
Latvian Bohēma
Raised in the countryside, in the city I fell in love with its lights,
Though the signs, languages, and sounds masked fright.
For example, the letters “Capri” in the nighttime sky–
Could easily devour it
With their loudness
And split that sky, which was one, into two.
Whether these letters advertised
Pigeon delicacies or nail polish,
I drew from their lights
As if from wells with a rustic clay pitcher.
These lights, these sounds offer me a new gospel,
But closing my eyes I see: the light falling from milky apples,
And in my blood pigeons
Like grandmother’s tea kettle coo.
(From Linards Tauns’ poem “Plīvošana ar pilsētu” [“Streaming with the City”] from his book Mūžīgais mākonis [“Endless Cloud”], 1958. Tr. RL)