Latvian Heritage

Anna Brigadere

(1861-1933)

“Only he who feels responsibility can be both servant and ruler.”

Raised by Latvian parents who were World War II immigrants from Soviet-occupied Latvia, I was born in the United States, but thought of myself first and foremost as Latvian. Latvian, after all, was my first language, the only language spoken in my childhood home. But how to learn an entire culture, the essence of what it means to be Latvian, living in what my parents termed as exile?

Books. By age three, I read Latvian with ease. A phonetic language, learning the sound associated with any letter in the Latvian alphabet was a one-time lesson. Learn the rules of the language and it is your tool of communication, your lens on the Latvian culture. As I grew older, books were my key to understanding life and finding my own reflection and identity in it.

I don’t recall how the works of Anna Brigadere first came into my hands. Did someone give them to me? I think probably not. I remember creeping around the bookshelves in our home—the rooms were lined with them. Books were a part of the family and deserved a room of their own, although there were too many to contain in one room. The living room had bookshelves; the family room downstairs was filled with books, too. I would spend hours poking through the shelves, and if I pulled books loose and took them down, I often found more books tucked in back, like secret treasure. And, apparently, I found Annele among the books. Another little Latvian girl, much like me …

Annele is a diminutive form of Anna, and what I found was one of Anna Brigadere’s best known works, Trilogija, or the trilogy of three autobiographical novels about the growing up years of Annele. And I was mesmerized. Here was my key to the Latvian culture, indeed, the entire life sense of this tiny Baltic nation was compacted neatly right into the title of the first of three novels: Dievs, daba, darbs, or, God, Nature, Work. The second novel was titled, Skarbos vejos, or, In the Biting Wind, and the third, Akmenu sprosta, or, Trapped in Stone. The three novels took me on a journey through Annele’s life, beginning as a small girl on up into adulthood. Although the books were published in 1927, I nonetheless found them relevant.

Never mind that little Annele lived in the Latvian countryside, half a planet away from me. Never mind that she lived in a world half a century before mine. I found in this little girl an echo of myself, and through her, I discovered what it meant to be Latvian.

Anna Brigadere, through her alter ego child self, provided me my value system. A young girl—and later a woman—must live with integrity and honor, with respect toward a higher power, greater than self; with a deep respect for nature; and with an understanding that one’s chosen work is not just a means toward a paycheck, but one’s expression of honoring both self and others by being a productive member of society. Work should be a labor of love.

Brigadere’s books taught lessons without being didactic. These were timeless lessons, as I found out yet again when asked to teach a Latvian literature seminar just one summer ago. It was time to rediscover my childhood friend. In rereading her books, I found them as vital as ever, untouched by the passage of time, or changing of fashion, or shifting of world politics. In fact, I found her message even more relevant today. When asked at the seminar why one should read such “old books” in a contemporary world, I could only point out—here were the lessons we were calling “new age.” Truth does not change with time; it only solidifies. We live in a society where honor has too often been forgotten, while chasing shallow and temporary pleasures; where too many consider the self more important than community; and where work has become a means to compete with the Joneses, a daily grind that one does with utmost reluctance. Brigadere wrote about self-realization, however, and for her, work was the more contemporary Joseph Campbell’s “following one’s bliss.” She was an environmentalist long before most understood that nature is a living thing that sustains us, and when treated with disregard, She will rebel and spit us out. Brigadere wrote with an instinctive understanding of human psychology, one that modern day child-rearing manuals are now rediscovering, a kind of Super Nanny of her day (Brigadere worked many years as a governess). A child wants to be acknowledged, to feel useful, with a hunger for knowledge that must be fed, and a need for structure.

Brigadere was known for many other works besides her trilogy, although the value system she held dear found its way into all, in whatever genre. She became well known for her plays, many written for children, with the play, Spriditis, first performed in 1903 and later translated into English, German, Russian, Finnish and Estonian, her best known. It is a story about a little boy who longs to go off into the big, wide world and find a better life … only to grow up and realize all he ever needed and wanted was right at home. Brigadere was also a prolific poet, publishing several books of poetry. Her collections of short stories often addressed women’s issues.

Brigadere was much loved among her readers, but she remained a somewhat solitary figure throughout her life. She had a longstanding close friendship with her publisher, but never married. A nature museum has been established in the village of Tervete in southern Latvia, where she was born and spent the last decade of her life, writing. Carved wooden figures of her best known characters line paths through woods and fields that inspired her work. To wander there is to go back in time, yet find oneself solidly rooted in a sustainable future.

Astride Ivaska

(1926 - )

As with most of us, and, I suspect, in most any language, my first introduction to Latvian poetry was metered and rhymed, tightly reined in, an orderly clomping and marching of verses that moved like soldiers across the page. In Latvian school, which we children of the émigré community attended on Saturdays while our enviable American peers watched cartoons on television, or played ball in the park, or simply slept in, we instead learned to recite classic Latvian poetry. Our teachers drilled the metered lines into our brains, ta-TUM-ta-tum, ta-TUM-ta-da-dum, and we would memorize sometimes pages of these lyrical poems. It was a practice not only in learning literary form, but in rote memorization, and not the least in self-discipline. Many of the poems were testament to the war experience, with lines about the blood spilled in war, the love of one’s country, and the sacrifice made for freedom which we had nonetheless lost.

In those dusky rooms of the school on Saturday mornings, none of us felt particularly free. Super heroes in animated form with capes sweeping the breeze behind them on a television screen seemed much more enticing. But we memorized, and we discussed, and we recited. Poem after poem after poem.

Years later, I had a delayed appreciation for that kind of literary discipline. It was, after all, a world of super heroes. Only the heroes in those poems that spoke of the experience of loving one’s home and losing it, or dying for it, did not bounce back up from the ground for the next cartoon installment. Theirs was the mortal blood that nourished the soil to grow new seed and new life for future generations.

Some of that life took hold outside of Soviet-occupied Latvia. While we children of refugees were learning the old classics, a new generation of poetry was taking shape. It, too, spoke of the love of country, of freedom, and the hunger to survive. Such was the poetry of Astride Hartmane Ivaska, born in the capital city of Riga in 1926, a young woman when the Soviet army marched across the Latvian border. She was of the same generation as my parents and her experience was similar. When I had reached the age that she had been during World War II, I discovered Ivaska’s poetry, and it was nothing like what I had learned in school … and yet it was.

I received a book of Ivaska’s poetry as a gift, and I paged through it with growing wonderment. This was no army of words. There was no orderly marching here. These words danced and swam across the page, they whispered, they sang, they hummed, they wept. A line might stand alone, like a lost muse, only to recover itself in a droplet of syllables further down the page. Sometimes they rhymed, but mostly these words echoed and played off each other. And while this poet, too, wrote of heroes, and blood that was shed, and the ache of losing one’s childhood home to wonder if one would ever be allowed to see it again… it was in a manner that spoke more directly to my own heart. This was the poetry of exile. It contained the longing of a life thrown upon an unknown shore, even as it spoke of new love found, and renewed joy in living.

No pelniem
un no izdedziem
lidz dziesmai
esam celusies.
Un tomer dziedot
pelnu garsa
mute neizzud
ne mums, ne tiem,

kas saklausa mus taluma.

From the ashes
and from the burnt debris
to song
we have risen.
The taste of ashes
does not leave the mouth
not for us, nor for them

who listen to us from a distance.

(From “Memais laiks,” Gaisma Ievainoja by Astride Ivaska, Daugava, 1982)

I was struck, as one is, who falls in love at first read. In reading whatever I could find about Ivaska, I learned that she had lost her father during the war. He had been a general in the Latvian army during WWII, and no more had been heard from or about him after he had been captured by the Soviets. (In later years, I learned Ivaska had learned of her father’s fate only after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Latvia regained her freedom. He had been taken to Moscow in 1941, where he was executed.)

Ivaska wrote often about her father, and her connection with him, what she referred to as her “only mirror” in an essay of her memories, now a broken mirror. He had a kind of mythic form to her, as most fathers do to their daughters. She recalls his quiet strength, and he seems to take on the stance of all lost Latvian soldiers: a man who fights perhaps a hopeless battle, yet with utmost courage and devotion to the cause of what is right. He is a soldier in an army that is the David against the Goliath of the Red Army. Only this battle is not to be won.

As most Latvian refugees, Ivaska (then Hartmane) escaped to camps for “displaced persons” in Germany, where they awaited visas to whatever free land would take them. As did most of her peers, she continued her disrupted education in Germany, while she waited, studying languages. In 1949, she married Estonian poet, Ivar Ivask, and later that year immigrated to the United States, first to Minnesota, then taking up residence in Norman, Oklahoma in 1967, where she taught Russian, German and French at the University of Oklahoma. Ivaska remained there until the death of her husband, then answered an old call to cross the ocean once again to live in Europe—for a time in Ireland, then returning again to the place of her birth, Riga, Latvia, where she lives today.

And wherever this poet went, I followed her steps through her poetry and her poetic prose. That first book I had read of her work, Solis Silos (“A Step in the Woods,” 1973), was a step that had led me to try my own hand at Latvian poetry. Shortly after, I had the privilege of meeting Ivaska at a workshop for writing Latvian poetry, and when, by end of seminar, I shyly handed her some of my work, she astounded me by taking me, then the ripe age of 17, seriously. The workshop was over, but Ivaska took my manuscript home with her to Oklahoma, sending it back to me a few weeks later with careful and honest notes in the margins. Discard this, rework that, and the golden glimmer on a page here and there of praise. The note with the manuscript encouraged me to submit my manuscript to a Latvian publisher called Celinieks in Ann Arbor, Michigan—with her recommendation. My first book of Latvian poetry, Mala Kausa (“In an Earthen Mug”) was accepted for publication when I was 19 years old. My lifelong love affair with poetry, in any language, took root in those days, and I have Ivaska to thank.

Mara Zalite

(1952 - )

Words splash at my feet,
the voice of my blood talks, whispers and
fills the chambers.
Glittering river.
Here, I am.

~ from the poem, “Language,” by M. Zalite

What we are denied, we often learn to treasure most. Of those basics that a human being needs to live life well, surely language—the ability to communicate freely—is one of the building blocks upon which nearly all else in civilization is built. Language is our means of self-expression but also our vehicle of connection with the rest of humanity.

Mara Zalite (zah-lee-teh) is a child of the Soviet Union, born in 1952, in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, but returning to Latvia with her family at age four to grow up in the then Soviet-occupied Baltic nation. Among the many losses of freedom in Latvia at that time was the loss of free speech. Indeed, even just the use of the Latvian language was discouraged, if not made into a punishable offense, substituting instead the language of Mother Russia. And still, Latvian literature flourished, as various art forms often do in suppressed areas. Art has always proven to be a survival mechanism, if not a tool for revolution. Language, the word that is more powerful than even the sword, carries great energy and life force, and no one understood this better than those standing at the Soviet helm. Zalite, having lived in a time when language was denied as well as in a time when language in all its varied facets flourishes again, has a strong appreciation for her native tongue that emerges repeatedly in her various literary art forms. It is the voice of her blood, she writes, it is her identity. It is, one senses, the carrier of her personal battle cry.

Zalite writes in varied genres and forms: poetry, prose (essays), drama, lyrics, even rock opera. In whatever genre, Latvian folklore has a consistent presence in her work, not only tying her to the roots of Latvian language, but also to Latvian history—the identity of her people. Toward the final years of Soviet occupation in her country, she was known to weave protest into her work in a cry for Latvian independence—which indeed came to fruition in 1991, as the Soviet Union fell at last. Her play, “Pilna Maras istabina,” or “Full Mara’s Room,” staged in 1983, was her groundbreaking work that got her the attention from critics, readers and viewers, that would push her literary career forward. This and many other Zalite’s works have central female figures, adding a second and parallel voice for women’s independence in an independent country. The play addresses the masculine energy which has brutalized the earth and its nations, and renews a cry for the return of the ancient Mother (earth and nature), the mother of all mothers, to take her place again.

Zalite has also published many books of poetry, collections of essays, song lyrics and scripts for musicals. Her work has been translated into German, Russian, English, Estonian, Swedish, and other languages, yet as one who has the privilege and pleasure of reading her work in its original Latvian, to my ear and sensibilities, her work sings best on its own instrument.

One of Zalite’s better known essays, appearing in “Unfinished Thoughts,” is titled “The Cross and the Sword.” In it, she brings up some of those themes and concepts that those who have been long oppressed hold perhaps in higher esteem than those who have long known only freedom. Not only a deeper appreciation of one’s own native language, but the soil that nourishes it—one’s own free land. Delving into ancient Latvian history, dating back to the 13^th century, when Latvia was known as Livonia (an area that today also covers parts of Estonia), Zalite traces the appearance of various symbols and their ties to the masculine and feminine in what we think of today as Latvian folklore. In the feminine group falls the concept of homeland. The masculine centers on power and aggression, expanding borders and too often expressing itself in battle and rape and a violence of power over another, but she recalls, too, the nurturing of the mother figure, and what greater mother than one’s land, or homeland. Zalite’s appreciation for her own rediscovered culture is poignant, but as modern times of a shrinking globe urge, she also considers Mother Earth, and that we must show gratitude and care for the mother that has birthed us all. In this mix of escalating mothers, from one’s own corner of the earth, to the earth itself, Zalite urges an appreciation for the diverse cultures of every homeland, for a greater array of self-expression is a wealth to be preserved and cherished. To be a global citizen is not to forget or abandon one’s homeland, but to bring it, rich and full with its unique tapestry of people, to the global arena. More perspectives, more solutions; more diversity, more treasure, benefiting all.

Zalite’s unique voice, its mix of the ancient and the contemporary; the oppressed and the free; the feminine in balance with the masculine; brings the Latvian literary tradition to the global doorstep in a way that perhaps few others can who have not traveled her unique path in life.

A graduate of the University of Latvia, the country’s most prestigious institute of higher education, with a degree in philology, Zalite has worked on various editorial boards and in the Writers’ Union of Latvia. She has been the managing editor of one of the country’s most esteemed literary periodicals, “Karogs,” or “Banner.” She is the president of the Latvian Authors’ Association.