Simon Schama, the British historian and art critic, says that the graves of many generations of soldiers and partisans can be found under the ferns in the Lithuanian woodlands.

My novel deals with Lithuanian partisans in anti-Soviet resistance in the forties and fifties, but there were other partisans too, notably Jewish partisans who fought the Nazis and their local helpers during the German occupation.

One such partisan was Sara Ginaite – Rubinson, who found herself in the Kaunas ghetto but managed to escape into the forest. She lived there for years and helped in the seizure of Vilnius from the retreating Germans.

This remarkable woman ended up in Toronto, where she taught for some years at York University.

Jewish partisans, Soviet partisans, Polish partisans – all of them fought there at one time or another, making the country a field of conflicting loyalties and battles. Picking apart the threads of these loyalties is fraught unto this day – and intensely political.

I won’t even go into the details, but the best thing one can do is inform oneself about all who fought there and why, and this excellent memoir is one that should be included on any list.

Of the nine spies smuggled into the Lithuanian Soviet Union by the British, and the eight dropped in by the Americans in the late forties and early fifties, none returned.

Some were turned and became double agents, some were executed or shot in battle, and some were imprisoned.

The most curious of them all was Anicetas Dukavicius, the last man sent into Lithuania by the British in 1953. Having spent almost two decades in prison, he lived to see Lithuanian independence in 1991.

Dukavicius then reportedly presented himself to the British and claimed that they had promised him ten pounds a week while on the job, and he now wanted to collect payment for almost forty years of employment.

Sadly, I don’t know if he received the money.

This story and others like it are part of a wonderful DVD television series called the Secret Files of the Twentieth Century in English subtitles, or Slaptieji XXa Archyvai in Lithuanian.

So much remains unknown about this part of the world, but historians have also revealed a great deal that makes for excellent cold war material. This is popular history at its best.

In the first series, there are shows about the Soviet kidnapping of East European dignitaries out of postwar Berlin and a detailed study of the most infamous murder of Jews in Lithuania, the Lietukio Garazas massacre, among other shows.

In the second series, one show tells the story of the Lithuanian partisan leader whom Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s successor, had flown to Moscow in 1953 in order to see if they could come to some sort of arrangement. But things ended badly for both of them. J. Zemaitis was executed in Moscow, and so was Beria. Still, one can’t help wondering how history would have turned out if these two men had survived and prevailed.

A compelling description of Britain’s attempts to run agents in the Baltics after WW2 is told in Tom Bower’s 1989 book, The Red Web.

Working with agents in Sweden, the UK sent in boat after boat of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians to land on the beach of Palanga and make their way inland to determine Soviet military capabilities for the feared and anticipated sweep across the Western Europe.

For their part, the men going in had some of their own ideas. On the one hand, Lithuanian partisans were getting help from no one else, so they took what they could from the Brits as a way back into the countries that were still fighting a failing rearguard battle against the Soviets years after the war ended in the west.

On the other hand, some of those going back in were Soviet agents. Indeed, the whole operation as compromised from the very beginning.

Some of British spies were turned and some were killed, and at least one lived long enough to see independence (I’ll talk a bit more about him next week, when I review the television series, Slaptieji XX a. Archyvai).

Shortly after the British attempts, the Americans got into the act. Although these landings were not compromised from inside, they were no more successful than the British ones.

Bower’s book, fascinating in itself, was one of the building blocks in the late Liutas Mockunas’s book, Pavarges Herojus (The Exhausted Hero).

That book was a valuable source to me in the personality of Jonas Deksnys, initially a hero of the Lithuanian resistance, but a man whose end was worthy of chapter in the work of John Le Carré.

Since Le Carré had not written about him, I did.

Fragments from the Writing Life – New Novel Manuscript – Version Eight

This week I received my second round of edits from Janice Zawerbny, my editor at Thomas Allen, the house that is bringing out my novel, Underground, a year from now.

We sat side by side at my dining room table (she lives not far way, so it’s easier than our meeting at the office downtown) and I looked as she flipped through the pages of the manuscript and made suggestions and comments. We are really down to line work at this point, the kind of technical detail I love to fuss over.

For example, at one point she suggested the word “scared” to lose a repetition of “afraid”, but I can’t use that word in a novel set in Europe in the late forties. It sounds too American and too young to me. I proposed another solution that took me to a thesaurus first and eventually to rewriting the sentence altogether.

A good editor is a building inspector who crawls into the sub-basement of your novel and shines a beam of light on the supporting walls to make sure they are sound. She knocks on the beams to check for evidence of weakness. Sitting beside her as we pored over the manuscript, I followed her into the attic (third person omniscient, a rather “high” voice that isn’t used much any more) and examined the front porch (the prologue) and then we had a discussion about the back deck (the epilogue – most writing texts recommend avoiding both front and back end pieces like this, but she gave them her stamp of approval).

I’m now reading aloud through the manuscript, following her notes and finding new phrases that can be removed.

When in doubt, I trim. I want the reader to walk through the structure unimpeded, to find the movement so unresisting as to find the end of the house a natural conclusion, an inevitable reality. It’s amazing how many snags I find while reading this way, ones that might slow that progress.

I am going through the manuscript for the eighth time, and there will be at least two more trips through it before we finish it off by summer and I can get started my next novel.

The world of literature is sometimes themes and stories, but often simply craft like this, the phrasing that builds the details that make the sentences and go on to construct a house of fiction.