The summer writing workshop at Humber is occupying almost every moment of this week, and for details of what’s going on there, see my posts at the Newsroom at Humber, starting this week.

On the home front, I am going through Janice’s edits slowly, but should be able to finish them pretty quickly once the workshop finishes. As soon as I do, I’ll hand in my corrected novel manuscript, pick up my research material for the next novel from the library, and  after that, I’ll be in electricity-free places in the north, and therefore out of computer contact and this blog will lie fallow until the end of August.

But before I sign off for the summer, I wanted to make a quick mention of another article that talks about the narratives in conflict in Eastern Europe.  This is Timothy Snyder’s article in the New York Review of books, one that talks about the fraught resistance movements in Poland at the end of the war.

The significant sentences are the following:

… For the Home Army (The Polish nationalist resistance army) the Soviet advance meant the arrival of a dubious ally against the Germans as well as an impending threat to Polish independence. For Jews it meant life. This basic difference in perspectives, a result of the Holocaust, was difficult to overcome ….

Considering that some of the Lithuanians fought against both the Home Army and the Soviets, the situation is even more complicated in Lithuania and more complicated yet again in Ukraine.

History can wait a little longer for further analysis –  at the end of this week I’ll be gone fishing.