Author: Antanas Sileika

Vilnius Book Fair 2018

~ Antanas Sileika

The Translation of my memoir, The Barefoot Bingo Caller, has just been published in Lithuania and I will be presenting it at the February 2018 Vilnius Book Fair, 

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If you happen to be there and have the language, come out and see me interviewed on stage by  Lithuanian television (LRT) on Friday, February 23 at 7 PM. Jolanta Kryževičiene has been interviewing me for years and she knows my work well, so I am looking forward to this talk. The interview will also run subsequently on television as will a couple of other interviews I will do both on TV and radio.

 

 

Fall 2017

~ Antanas Sileika

I appeared on a TV Ontario panel discussing Nick Mount’s excellent new history of Canadian  Literature of the sixties and seventies.

October 21 – 5 PM – Lakeside Terrace, Harbourfront, Toronto  – Ontario Lit Up

October 22 – 2 PM – Harbourfront, International Festival of Authors, with Drew Haydon Taylor

October 28 – 4 PM Harbourfront, International Festival of Authors, with Kyo MacLear

November 7, Toronto, Writers’ Trust Gala

November 14, Assembly Hall, Toronto – interviewing John Irving

 

 

 

Two New Books on the Baltics

~ Antanas Sileika

Siberian Exile – Blood, War, and Granddaughter’s Reckoning

Julija Sukys –

University of Nebraska Press

 

Toronto-born Julija Sukys is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Missouri. Her excellent biography of Ona Simaite, Epistolophilia, was discussed in an earlier post. Here she is out rather quickly with another affecting book of nonfiction. This one has to do with her grandmother’s years in the gulag as well as her grandfather’s complicity in The Holocaust.

For much of her adult life, Sukys had wanted to write about her grandmother Ona, who was deported in the first wave of deportations in Soviet Lithuania in 1941. Ona was taken by chance, in place of her husband, who happened not be home at the time, and luckily enough for her, none of her three children were there either.

Husband Anthony was in hiding at the time, and once the Soviets returned in 1944, he fled with the children to the UK and eventually to Canada. Poor Ona spent twenty years in the gulag and another five years in Lithuania while trying to get permission to rejoin her family of adult children.

Not surprisingly, after Ona did manage to make it to Canada, there were difficulties for her and her husband and children because they had been apart so long and their life experiences had been so different.

The shock that befell Sukys lay in the story of her grandfather, a narrative which she had been unaware of and was not intending to tell. Sukys was profoundly traumatized by her grandfather’s guilt, so much so that she seems to take on responsibility for his crimes in the belief that every crime must be paid for in some fashion, even if it is not by the person who committed it.

The story of Ona and her quarter century of struggle were supposed to be the main part of Sukys’s book, and they are described with detail and intelligence here, but their impact on Sukys the author is lesser, although there are some dramatic moments in Ona’s life and a remarkable coincidence of discovery in a Kent State archive that helped to illuminate her story.

Sukys’s book is thus very much about the author as well as about her grandmother and grandfather. She is astonished and appalled as she looks at another version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and finds it much closer to home than she imagined.

 

AMONG THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
A Tale of Exile and Homecoming on the War Roads of Europe
By Inara Verzemnieks

A graduate of the nonfiction writing program at Iowa, and Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, Verzemnieks’s memoir also addresses her grandparents, Latvians who raised her in America when her mother and father were unable to do so.

Hers is very much an immersive biography of her grandparents, and indeed a biography of Latvia in the twentieth century.

After the deaths of the grandparents, Verzemnieks returns repeatedly to Latvia to live and work in the home of her maternal great aunt, and during these stays she takes on histories both big and small.

She writes about her grandfather, who was an economist until drafted into the Wermacht where he lost an eye fighting the Soviets. How guilty is that man for the crimes of the Holocaust? She considers her great aunt, who suffered terribly as a deportee in Siberia, working twice as hard as anyone else because she had to support two family members there who were incapable of working at all. She witnesses life in the countryside of Latvia amid the ruin of what the twentieth century wrought on that place

Verzemnieks’s prose is frequently philosophical and lyrical and is remarkable for its ability to encompass so much of the story of Latvia, and by extension, although she never makes that claim, of Lithuania and Estonia as well.

Like Sukys, Verzemnieks is very much in the centre of this story, even more so than Sukys by virtue of the time spent on the ground there. Her sensibility is slightly melancholy and wistful, and entirely appropriate for the places and the lives she is describing.

First Review in with a Star

~ Antanas Sileika

It was a fun book launch, more like a wedding, many said, with a jazz trio and food and liquor and almost three hundred people. We sold a record number of books (213) and had a quick bingo game, won by my Humber replacement, the incoming David Bezmozgis, who tok home a mickey of Crown Royal Whiskey.

And now the first review comes in from Quill and Quire, Canada’s publishing industry journal, and it contains the much-coveted star. I have pasted in a photo that is a bit hard to read, but I’ll put in a link later if one shows up.

No Ambiguity

~ Antanas Sileika

 

 

Retired General Richard Shirreff’s novel title spells it out clearly enough: War With Russia, and anyone looking for literary value should look somewhere else, but the qualities of the novel that make it compelling are Shirreff’s pedigree and an adventure story set in an all-too plausible future.

 

Sherriff is a retired former second in command of NATO in Europe, so the threat he is warning us about is believable given the knowledge he has. In a world filled with tragic immigration stories in the Mediterranean and war in Iraq and Syria, the Russian threat has been flying somewhat low on the radar. Shirreff believes NATO is underprepared for a real threat of invasion of the Baltics, and to judge by the rearming of the Sweden’s island of Gotland and the placement of Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, he is not misguided in raising the alarm.

 

As to the novel itself it is an action-filled imaginative version of what that war might look like. It has classic heroes and dastardly but clever villains, as well as mind-numbing technical details about warplanes, missiles, and communications systems. This may sound like faint praise, but the drive of an action story should not be underestimated. Despite the novel’s flaws, I could not put it down.

 

So how real is the Russian threat? I attended lectures at the Munk International Centre last summer just before the NATO summit in Poland. Canada’s ambassador to NATO as well as the former American ambassador to Ukraine were both convinced NATO has to rise its strength in order to meet a real Russian danger.

 

Given the American president-elect’s recent coolness toward NATO, it remains to be seen whether that will happen. The novel describes a situation that comes perilously close to nuclear war, and that’s a potential problem that should hold everyone’s attention.

 

 

 

Fall 2016 Appearances

~ Antanas Sileika

On September 25, The Word on The Street festival is being held at Harbourfront in Toronto and Kim Moritsugu and I will be hosting a day of talks by writers with new books as well as publishing industry professionals.

On September 29, I’ll be running a creative writing talk and introducing new and established writers from the west end of Toronto at The Assembly Hall. The event is free.

During the last week of October, The Humber School for Writers will hold a workshop inside IFOA, and on Wednesday, October 26, I will host a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the school along with prominent alumni and writing teachers.

As for November and December, I’ll proof the Galleys of my forthcoming memoir, The Barefoot Bing Caller, due out in May, and polish up a novel called Provisionally Yours, a project I have been working on for years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tim Judah on Ukraine

~ Antanas Sileika

Judah

 

I have followed Tim Judah in the New York review of Books because he is a reporter who gets right down on the ground and speaks to ordinary people of various persuasions all across the vast geography of Ukraine.

Most of the intellectuals with whom I have contact in Canada have little knowledge and less interest in central and eastern Europe, and I find it useful to read writers such as Judah, Snyder, Satter and others because they give sharp insights into this complicated and unfortunate part of the world.

Ukraine remains a complicated place for westerners, who assume that nationality relies on language, but in this part of the world an ardent Ukrainian might speak Russian. The concerns of Bulgarians, Gaugaz  (Turkic speakers) Bulgarians and others in Bessarabia, to say nothing of Crimean Tatars, all remain opaque on this side of the Atlantic.

The book is excellent in describing the failed hopes, the geopolitical fantasies, and complete corruption  in a place that was unable to reform itself before falling under attack. The much-maligned Azov battalion  consisted of Ukrainian extremists much despised in the west, and yet their volunteers were the ones who defended Mariupol from Russian-backed separatists because the regular army was in disarray. Their actions don’t justify their beliefs, of course, but people looking for simple heroes and simple villains in this region will be disappointed.

Judah generally supports the Ukrainian national idea, and he is contemptuous of the lies coming out of Russia, but he does not deny that people living in Donetsk and other regions, the few who remain, would welcome any government that might improve their lives.

Judah gives a view from the street of people who never expected war to come, and were horrified when it did. Indeed, his experience in the former Yugoslavia taught him that the complacency of every life or the exhilaration of fresh, revolutionary ideas, might give way all too quickly to the horrors of war.

Fearful Symmetry

~ Antanas Sileika

 

Satter

How is the new Russia like the old Soviet Union? Control is centralized, as David Satter points out in his study of the country under Yeltsin and Putin, The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep.

 

And the title is accurate.

 

The book lays out how power no longer resides in the party, but rather in an interlocking system of corrupt government and oligarchs with complete penetration of the society right down to street level. Media, judiciary, police, and commerce are all under the thumb of Vladimir Putin and his cronies.

 

This message has been coming out for some time now, but Satter’s systematic demonstration is unsettling to say the least, especially at a time when the west is concerned primarily with the Middle East and now Europe ever since Brexit.

 

One of the happiest people on the subject of Britexit must be Vladimir Putin, because Europe has been weakened by the loss of a major contributor.

 

Paradoxically, this comes at a time when NATO is finally coming around to seeing the Russian threat. Angela Merkel, no warmonger, has said Russia is no longer an ally but a competitor. At this writing, four NATO battalions will be placed in Poland and the Baltics after a July 2016 NATO conference in Poland. Canada is considering participation, while three of the other four are to come from the USA, Britain, and Germany. But will Britain’s commitment to NATO slacken after the withdrawal from the EU? President Obama says we should not worry about it, and yet we should.

 

David Satter’s concerns with Russia are echoed in Arkady Ostrovsky’s The Invention of Russia, which is equally damming of the régime if not quite so bone-chilling.

 

I have skin in the game because I am in the Baltics often, doing research for my novels, and I have family living there. But coverage of this part of the world is slight in North America. At my regular poker game, attended by intellectuals of various stripes, I am considered an alarmist about Russia.

 

Maybe it’s because the more I know, the worse I sleep.

Summer 2016

~ Antanas Sileika

ECW Logo

My memoir, The Barefoot Bingo Caller, has been more or less put to bed for ECW Press. It will appear in May of 2017. The Lithuanian translation, from Versus Aureus, will appear in the spring of 2017 as well.

I have rewritten my novel, Provisionally Yours, with the help of a good editor and will see his response to it at the end of the summer. This is the espionage novel inspired by the life of Jonas Budrys, the chief of Lithuanian counterintelligence from 1921-1923. His own memoir, Lietuvos Kontrazvalgyba, is an excellent and fast-paced book for those who have the  language.

This gives me time to work on my The Rhyming Assassin, my book about Kostas Kubilinskas, the Dr. Seuss of Lithuania, who murdered a man in order to be permitted to publish children’s books.

I’ll be in Lithuania in August to do research for this book, as well as to speak on my writing at the opening of my wife, Snaige’s, big art show at the Moncys Gallery in Palanga, Lithuania, on August 6.

The summer is a great break from working on the Canadian Writers’ Summit this past June, and preparing for the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Humber School for Writers on October 26 inside the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront. I’ll have time to get some more words down on the page.

The Resurrection of Buying on Time

~ Antanas Sileika

 

CR Photo

I was pleased ands surprised to see Buying on Time, a collection of short stories I had published in 1997, make the long list for the Canada Reads competition sponsored by CBC radio.

 

I recently came back from Lithuania, where the translation of the book has been short-listed for the Book of the Year competition. That is a people’s choice competition in the final round, so whichever book gets the most votes will win. Anyone who would care to vote for my book is welcome to press the button “įrašyti”, which means “enter” at this link.

 

In the meantime, I am working on editorial notes for my memoir, which will come out in 2017.

 

 

 

 

Gravitas Versus Comedy

~ Antanas Sileika

Comedy and Tragedy

What isn’t tragic seems funny to me, and sometimes comedy and tragedy are so closely entwined that it’s hard to distinguish one from the other.

One of my earliest collections of Stories, Buying on Time, was comic and nominated for a humour award.  After that, I wrote what was essentially tragedy in Woman in Bronze and Underground.

Now I am returning to comedy with a new book to be published by ECW Press in 2016 or 2017, and its working title is The Barefoot Bingo Caller.

Guess what mood that might be in.

As a writer on Eastern Europe and the WWII and postwar,  I am all gravitas, as many of the posts in this blog can attest. But when I write about my childhood and life in Canada, I veer toward comedy.

Some people I know find this confusing. After killing 47 people in Underground, I needed some relief.  Comedy is my refuge from the darkness of history.

And when one reads before an audience, it’s so much easier to tell when comedy succeeds. When I read from my heavier work, I’m never sure if the audience has appreciated my gravitas, or if I have inflicted some combination of mental anguish and gastric distress.

On Reading Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth

~ Antanas Sileika

Black Earth Cover

 

Timothy Snyder‘s new book on The Holocaust is garnering some grudging reviews, but as a non-specialist on The Holocaust, I found it illuminating.

One of his theses is that The Holocaust in the popular imagination is situated in Auschwitz, but he contends that that place gives an incomplete view since most of the Jews who died did so in the territory he has earlier called the “Bloodlands,”  the places where Nazi and Communist regimes overlapped. In those places, Jews were often from lower social strata and they left no memoirs – most of them took bullets and died without leaving records of their suffering.

Snyder states further that these people were first made stateless, and this act made them unprotected by the rights and laws of citizenship. The warning in the title consists of the thesis that this type of stripping of rights might be used again in the future.

My fascination with the book came with the capsule descriptions of prewar places like Lithuania, which I know, and like Hungary and others, which I do not. In every place where states were destroyed, the Jews fared worse than in places such as Holland, where the prewar state retained some control.

Snyder goes into great detail about the history of Poland in the period.

Further, he analyzes Hitler’s writing to understand his world view, and then shows how that vicious world view was imposed on conquered nations.

As I have written elsewhere, the story of the war and The Holocaust contain narratives in collision. The Soviets are heroes to some and murderous tyrants to others.

I was particularly surprised by Adam Gopnik’s review in the New Yorker, in which he stated that no historian believed the cliches about Eastern Europeans. That might  be true of historians, but it is not true of the population at large.

Most people I know do not read much history, and what they do know is largely based on Hollywood movies. Yet everyone seems to have an opinion. Snyder’s latest book, and there are now many others, is a welcome explanation, by no means definitive,  of a tragedy for those whose knowledge of the war is limited to Inglourious Bastards and Saving Private Ryan, and their knowledge of The Holocaust limited to Schindler’s List.

But I despair of many learning anything better. When it comes to this book, several people I know, intellectuals all, have questioned its thesis, but none of them seems to have read it.

Here is a link to a very good recent interview with Timothy Snyder on the TVO.

 

 

Fall, 2015

~ Antanas Sileika

Grandson on Back

 

I’ve recently signed a contract for a book of stories to appear with ECW Press in the fall of 2016 or the spring of 2017.

I spent the summer in Lithuania, working in KGB archives in the morning and helping to babysit my grandson some evenings. I also gave two talks at the Santara conference in Alanta, Lithuania. Here is an English translation of one of the talks I gave at the Santara conference on the subject of recent books in English with a Baltic theme.

I’ll be at the Assembly Hall in Toronto with Plum Johnson in October and Lawrence Hill in December.

In the last week in October, I’ll be running the Humber School for Writers workshop inside the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.

After that, for two weeks in November, I will be in Kaunas and Vilnius, Lithuania, giving a total of seven university lectures on the translations of my books into Lithuanian.

I recently published an Essay called “Fault Lines”  in The Literary Review of Canada. In that essay, I address the controversial proposed Monument to the Victims of Communism in Ottawa.

And among all these activities, I am picking apples and cooking them, building a shed and enjoying the fact that my wife, Snaige, sold out her last art show.