Baby, Bathwater, Books

My parents crossed the ocean to begin their new life in the New World with only four crates. Three of those crates held books. Much of my father's library --which continued to grow even after his death, the last volumes he had subscribed to still arriving -- lines the walls here in Daugavpils now, the core of my own collection.

Latvian publishing was astonishingly continuous; frail pamphlets were published in the d. p. camps even before the war's end. High quality reappeared remarkably quickly -- the monthly Laiks boasted a full color reproduction of a Lūdolfs Liberts painting as the frontispiece of its inaugural issue in April 1946, when nearly all Latvians in the West were still destitute refugees. Helmārs Rudzītis, the publisher, wrote in his preface of how those fleeing the Soviet advance had to abandon their libraries -- "God only knows who is leafing through our beloved books now." Rudzītis observed that the odd book that had been carried westward was held to be almost holy, the words pored over again and again.

Even in those straitened circumstances, Latvians swiftly set about building a publishing industry in exile. Benjamiņš Jēgers' bibliography of Latvian publications published outside Latvia 1940-1960 fills two thick volumes. Books were seen as vital to national survival. The nation had been born in books -- we date the Awakening to the publication of Dziesmiņas latviešu valodai pārtulkotas in 1856, Alunāns' translations of poetry proving that Latvian is more than a tongue for churchmen and peasants (the peasants getting their due as the study of folklore took off).

When the 300th anniversary of the Latvian book was marked in 1885, 3000 books had been published in Latvian -- 85% of them since 1863. From 1585 to 1918 -- 12 500. In independent Latvia, between 1919 and 1929 alone, nearly the number of titles had been issued in a single decade as had been since Petrus Canisius' catechism (the first known Latvian book) appeared in Vilnius in 1585. Between 1919 and 1939, 26 754 titles were published. In terms of titles per capita, Latvia ranked second in Europe, after Denmark.

There were 166 publishing houses when the Soviets invaded in 1940 -- these were reduced to one, the State Publishing House (later Liesma, which was then joined by other state-controlled entities like that of the Academy of Sciences, Zinātne). In addition to being subject to censorship and other restrictions (something that began during Ulmanis' dictatorship), publishing became a vehicle for Russification -- by 1964, 37,5% of the books published in Latvia were in Russian, and half of the titles published in Latvian were translations from Russian.

I remember a prominent diaspora Latvian (who hoped to be received as an elder statesman here) addressing the Writers' Union during the economic... transition I suppose it was, though trying to describe the early 1990s here to anyone who didn't experience them is like trying to explain a wilderness of pain in a parallel universe through which one stumbles in the dark. The would-be statesman basically said -- you're free, so what are you waiting for... write!

This is not the place to contemplate the legacy of the captive mind or the ravages of laissez-faire à l'orientale, though. Latvia had faced devastation before (though life was different in 1920, wasn't it, when academics from as far away as China returned to Rīga to build the University... this Christmas, as a sign of an opposite process, 17 worship services will be held in Latvian in Ireland, from Galway to Limerick).

In 1920, too, there were politicians who wanted to nip support for culture in the bud. They had to face Aspazija in the Constituent Assembly, though. Latvian publishing between the wars depended upon strong state support.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Latvian publishing slowly but steadily revived -- 1387 titles in 1991, 1509 in 1992, 1614 in 1993... of late, around 2500 Latvian titles are published each year. There was no drop after the crisis of 1998. Many of these books are irredeemable trash, to be sure. Then there are publishers like Neputns and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.

The Government's and the Saeima's decision (Parliament practically rubber-stamp by now, though the "Green Peasants" seem to be losing their enthusiasm for the coalition, the "moderate" "Russian party" eagerly angling to replace them) to try to squeeze blood out of a stone by increasing the VAT on books more than fourfold is criminal. It is spit in the face of those who brought this nation into being and those who keep it alive. It is a sadistic crime, as the cash the Government hopes to collect amounts to no more than a pittance, comparatively.

In an open letter to the President, the writer and publisher Inese Zandere writes that children (whose numbers in Latvia have at last begun to rise, if slowly) are being thrown out with the bathwater in which our Government is trying to wash itself. The photo above was taken outside Parliament Thursday morning (by Reinis Oliņš for Apollo, where there is a photo gallery... you can also see how dark it is here at this time of year... that's morning, really). Slogans included "Latvia wants to read in Latvian," "down with the dictatorship of those who do not read," and "a tax on books is a tax on the mind."

Among our neighbors -- VAT on books in Estonia is 5% (0% on approved textbooks -- yes, Latvia's new 21% rate will apply to textbooks also!). Finland -- 8%. Sweden -- 6%. Poland -- zero (it's zero in Britain and Ireland, too).

How dark it is. Gustavs Strenga suggests a simplified crisis plan -- why don't we just arrest those that can read (except those in the coalition and their supporters) and shoot them, or place them in internment camps... before dread March comes and they try to make trouble?

Ikars Kubliņš notes that little demonstrations like yesterday's mean nothing. The ruling clique sips coffee and enjoys the show from the Saeima windows. Kubliņš, like some others of late, is wondering aloud about our pain threshold -- looking at the Greeks or the Thais, it's impossible not to.

But that's another topic I will try to address in the coming days. For today, I simply want to emphasize what darkness emanates from this Saeima -- del no, per li denar, vi si fa ita. (Inferno XXI: 42 -- "No into Yes for money there is changed"). Since some in Government were so offended by being called a "gang," I would like to go further -- this coalition consists of shameless creatures who belong in Malebolge dragging us into eternal night. I say that in the name of everyone I have known who cared as much about books as they did about their crust.

You're free, so what are you waiting for? But we're not free -- and we won't be until we finally free ourselves, for real this time. Baby, bathwater -- cart, horse?

As Time Goes By

Rick: "If it's December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?" Sam: "What? My watch stopped." Flying to Stockholm from Rīga in 1993 was flying from one world to another, from the Wild East to -- civilization, overfed? Back then, the New York Times had dubbed the Latvian capital "the Casablanca of the North."

You arrive in Sweden before you leave, because of the time zone. If it's September '93 in Rīga, it's also '39; an Ulmanis becomes President on the strength of his surname in a country where the historical clock had stopped in 1940 (it didn't really stop, of course, except in some country of the mind). The early 1990s were a time of "fundamental things" for me -- of long summers in Semigallia, without plumbing, without electricity, without the Web (I had a huge manual typewriter that had doubtless served various organs of repression; Vonnegut, ever so popular here, wasn't fiction -- the twin lightning bolts of the SS a common character, shift).

My mother, visiting from Canada, brought her mother's list of the serial numbers of the typewriters they'd lost in the war ("That they are brown and soft, /And liable to melt as snow") -- grandmother ran a secretarial school in a building that by the 'Nineties held a pritons, a den of iniquity. "We lived in the street of parades" -- Bear Slayer's Street, the cobblestones come as ballast from Sweden, still there, the name restored (what names weren't restored -- Vadoņa, Aizsargu [the Great Leader and his Guard]). My repatriation to a country of the mind. Mother said that Latvijas Radio couldn't replicate the sound of the ice breaking in the Daugava until somebody realized that amplifying the sound of salt being rubbed against a table resembled it. "Alchemical broth." A kiss is just a kiss. For heat, you go to the forest. Fire rites. Fundamental things.

When I got here, no one had ever heard of Mark Rothko -- even the few surviving Jews were astounded by the lucrative fame of their son. Today the highest habitable point in town is the Rothko Bar (that tall hotel used to have a radiation readout rather than a clock above the door). I haven't been up there yet. Fama, in of itself ("no picture is made to endure nor to live with / but it is made to sell and sell quickly") -- you will be assimilated, as they say. A "Latvian artist" who never knew Latvia. Is the Pale a country of the mind, too? Desperately seeking some connection to the city of his birth, point to what might be ice floes -- surely his childhood memories meant something, the river's city (which turns its back upon the river, really, the levee hiding the flow). After a winter here ("null winters do sear such and more") the breaking of the ice begins to mean something. Under the lucre, actual riches -- a Matisse for every pot, and then. Nowadays almost no one remembers Vīdzirkste. His crossing paths with the erstwhile Marcus Rothkowitz in New York is as likely as Lenin and Rainis meeting up at the Cabaret Voltaire. Swiss artists all, no?

Back in '93, as a short-lived international secretary of the Writers' Union, I was in Sweden for the opening of the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators on Gotland. Fifteen years later, that Centre has a filius philosophorum -- the House of Language in Ventspils. What time is it in Gothenburg? I have no watch (the last one I had was stolen in a Warsaw train station while I slept), and if you try to call me, my phone is either turned off or I find myself outside of the zone (I'm transferring the number from the Castle to myself). Keeping time, time, time /In a sort of Runic rhyme... Ventspils -- Andra, Ieva, Iveta -- organized the focus on Latvia at the Göteborg Book Fair, and look how far we've come!

My first worry was -- pop, wir sind modern, aber nicht verwestlicht? I hadn't been out of the country for years. The more "Western" Latvia gets, the harder it is to perceive the difference between a functional society and this gorgeously dysfunctional one. But look how far we've come! I spent two summers in Sweden as a child, at Ladvik, and my little nationalist soul was severely disturbed by the fact that most Swedes had never heard of Lettland. On a clear day you can see across the water, but the Iron Curtain came between.

I had a terrific time -- I saw people I haven't seen in more than three decades (Gods, I's old), like Juris Rozītis. To place what exile was, read Juris' thesis. The photo above (by Ilmārs Znotiņš) is of the Latvian pavilion at the fair, which attracted over a hundred thousand visitors and more than a thousand journalists (it is, by any measure, one of the largest cultural events in Northern Europe). One of the highlights was an exhibition of books in Latvian published in Sweden after the war. I have many of them, from Papa (here an echo of an obscure poem by Uldis -- never mind). How we misunderestimate the exodus?

Existentially, we are no better off, Gunilla Forsén said when I asked her how it was to live in what was, comparatively, at least, Paradise -- back then, in the 'Nineties. One doesn't understand what Paradise is until one talks to students. What was the difference between eking out an existence here and the sort of opportunity every Swede has? How much of that comes down to national wealth, quite simply?

What of it comes down to rights, rights we were almost always denied? Lars Peter Fredén, the first Western diplomat to be stationed in Latvia, even before the occupation was brought to an end, spoke at Gothenburg of realizing how Swedes are barely acquainted with tragedy. When the Estonia sank, more died a tragic death than had since the 1700s -- can one ever bridge that gap, Latvians losing perhaps a third of the population in the First World War and a similar swathe in the Second?

Johan Öberg, who moderated one of the panels I was on, brought up a fun fact -- Rīga was once the largest city in Sweden. In Latvian, we still use the phrase "like in the Swedish era" -- when we're doing well, it's kā zviedru laikos. One can parse the hard reality -- it wasn't necessarily as pretty as we paint it -- but one need only look at schooling to realize why the phrase persists; among the concrete attempts to extend peasants' rights, Swedish rule meant bulding schools, and forcing the Baltic barons to provide the means for universal education. When the Russians came, these reforms were rolled back.

Here we are, here we are. 2008. How does the Swedish right to cross private property actually work in Latvia? Me live by lake, me build wall -- and fuck you. Swedes still read -- do we?

The Latvian pavilion was a cardboard reflection of the new National Library, finally being built.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the first translation of Russian literature I ever read. Skipping lunch, I hoarded my allowance to acquire the rest of Solzhenitsyn's oeuvre in English, at a dismal chain bookstore in an aging suburban shopping mall. The bearded, long-haired clerk, a Trot stranded among the Harlequins, tried to disabuse me of my anti-Communist convictions. Aleksandr Isayevich's disdain for materialism was what most attracted me in adolescence. Looking back -- and one can't do that, unfortunately, without choking on the anachronistic vagaries of his Slavophilia, touched upon in the New York Times obituary -- I know I'll have to go back and reread him. The older English translation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita captured me back then, too, and again later, in the much finer Latvian translation by the poet Ojārs Vācietis... but rereading it not so long ago, I was struck by how many levels in that novel opened only upon living here, or after catching the merest fading shadow of the collapsed imperium. To be transported to "Matryona's House" from middle class American suburbia by literary magic was wondrous. It must read so very differently in a hovel in the hamlet of Slutišķi, called "Latvia's Siberia" because used as a Siberian backdrop in a soap opera... or in any nearby backwater, filtered through the dark, dense foliage of the stories here, innumerable individual histoires, lives direct or overheard, the tangible sense of tragedy hovering over abandoned farmsteads and unmarked graves, the trenches of the First World War still visible in the forest -- the place colored by the reading, the reading to be colored by place. To listen to those who suffered is often to hear

Gradually it became clear to me that the line separating good from evil runs not between states, not between classes, and not between parties -- it runs through the heart of each and every one of us, and through all human hearts. This line is not stationary. It shifts and moves with the passing of the years. Even in hearts enveloped in evil, it maintains a small bridgehead of good. And even the most virtuous heart harbors an uprooted corner of evil.

R.I.P., Aleksandr Isayevich.

The photograph of Solzhenitsyn as an inmate is from a biographical sketch at Vēsture sauc.