As I finish checking the line edit and proofing of my novel, Underground, which comes out with Thomas Allen in the spring of 2011, the subject of East European partisans continues to come up in various media.

We are seeing a profound transformation of understanding about that part of the world as historians continue to come up with new material and writers come up with new interpretations of what we already know.

I have written before of narratives in collision wherein the term “genocide” is used in novel ways and moral equivalency is drawn between Fascist and Communist regimes. As well, the holocaust looms large over this part of the world.

The latest article I have seen to address the issue is by Barry Rubin, in a piece called Unfinished Business and Unexploited Opportunities: Central and Eastern Europe, Jews and the Jewish State.

A somewhat simplistic summary of the article is that Eastern Europeans should be permitted to explore their suffering under Communism as long as it is not used to mask anti-Semitism. Indeed, Jews suffered massively under Communism too.

From my perspective, this article signalled that narratives need not be in collision. There could be parallel narratives of Eastern Europe.

However, Rubin’s article did cause some controversy. A rebuttal came out in the Jerusalem Post, claiming that Eastern Europeans use their narratives to mask their crimes (again – a simplistic summary – readers should go to the article itself.) I was troubled by the article’s claims of a “hidden agenda”. One can ascribe any agenda one wishes to if it is going to be hidden. Indeed, “hidden agendas” smack of conspiracy theory.

In contrast, I have just returned from a Santara conference in Chicago in which I talked about the historical sources of my novel, and while the reception there as very positive, at least one of the members in the audience took offence that I would explore the many partisan narratives (including those of Jewish partisans) rather than stress the heroism of those anti-Soviets who suffered in the bunkers after the war until they were annihilated.

Oh my.

This continues to be a raw topic – next week, more on the subject and links to other blogs and books.

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.

It’s as quiet this windy afternoon as a Sunday of my childhood, when Toronto used to close down tightly for the Sabbath. It’s all silent streets because everybody seems to have left my part of town for the countryside for the long weekend, but there’s a flutter of the odd Canadian flag; we never used to hang out the flag. We left that to the more patriotic Americans, but more and more flags have been going up in recent years, especially since our deployment in Afghanistan.

Mentally, I’m still somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, a little stunned with jet lag after the hectic couple of weeks in Lithuania.

There were no objections to my novel at all, just enthusiastic endorsement – it was almost too good to be true. Around 250 people were in the audience for the presentation of the novel, a mixture of academics and artistic types. The publisher brought along 60 copies and sold out totally – the people were asking for more. Leonidas Donskis’s questions were brilliant – I knew I was in good hands. My own publisher was enthusiastic and another publisher who had declined the translation came over to express his regret at the error.

I also managed to do a lot of research toward my next novel, set in Kaunas, and was helped by Vilma Akmenyte and Arunas Antanaitis, who walked me around the town and gave me the historical context for the novel, which will be set between 1921- 1923. We were lucky to see a new show at the former presidential palace museum in the company of the former president of Lithuania, Valdas Adamkus and his wife. He happened to be at the conference I atended later as well.

VDU, the university in Kaunas asked me to go over in 2010/2011 in order to teach creative writing for a week – I’m ambivalent because my skills are so closely tied to the English language.

Now I’m back here and just going into my novel, Underground, for one more pass after a third set of editing notes from Janice Zawerbny. Janice is great to work with. We can be very intense on the text, but when we take a break, the conversation on literature branches out into many directions, any one of which might be worth a glass or two of cognac and a cup of coffee.

Just this afternoon, I worked hard on the first chapter and found at least a dozen places to make improvements in phrasing. These tiny touch-ups function, I hope, to reduce the friction, taking the reader forward effortlessly, employing what Tim O’Brien called “forward tilt”.

My own summer writing workshop starts in a week at the Humber School for Writers, so I don’t think I’ll get very far in rewrites before then.

While I was in Lithuania, I read Timothy Snyder’s excellent review  (in the New York Review of Books) of new volumes on Poland and the Holocaust – the review is called “Jews, Poles & Nazis: the Terrible History.”

There is much in the article that is germane to Lithuania.  My son sent me new articles about the holocaust in the Baltics, and the brilliant Lithuania poet, Tomas Venclova, addressed the issue at the conference I attended.

More on this subject in my next entry.

I’ll be at the launch of the Lithuanian translation of Woman in Bronze at a conference in Lithuania in the second half of June.

The event takes place in Alanta, a small town in a scenic Moletai region, a place of hills and lakes and forests. The site is a community college beside an old estate, now a museum. The estate has a rebuilt stately home and a fine park with a pond and swans, and I felt like a character in a Chekhov play when I walked around the place the last time I was there in 2007. See the manor house below:

Funny, none of us thinks about being a serf in those days, as most people were. When one bought an estate, one bought the villages and towns and serfs who lived in them. The whole system wasn’t much more than a modified form of slavery, really, that existed until 1861.

I’m curious to see the reception to this novel in Lithuania because the country was used as a contrast against the Jazz era and the rise of modernity. Therefore, in my novel, Lithuania was depicted as season-bound and backward.

Furthermore, the land I depicted was based on my reading and stories I had heard, so there are bound to be some inaccuracies in there.

I will try to explain that the Lithuania in the novel is an idea more than a place, but we’ll see how that goes over.

Luckily, the whole event is being run by Lonidas Donskis, interviewer, intellectual, and all-around genius in whose hands I feel utterly safe.

While I’m there, I’ll do a little research for my next new novel, the one that I’ll work on once the final details of Underground, which comes out in Spring of 2011, will be worked out.

This projected new new novel, untitled so far, will be set in the twenties. I’m interested in the establishment of a social/moral order after empires collapse, or, as we know, the failure to establish civil societies in the twenties and thirties in Europe.

The idea sounds a bit grand, but I’ll use a man I have mentioned in these posts before, Jonas Budrys, as my central character. He ran Lithuanian counter-intelligence in the twenties, and then helped seize the city of Memel / Klaipeda for Lithuania. He’s a fascinating historical character and I hope to build him into a compelling fictional one as well.

For purpose of research, I will walk the streets of Kaunas for a few days to get a sense of the world Budrys moved through.

Since I seem unable to get MobileMe working off the old laptop I’m taking to Lithuania, I won’t post here for a couple of weeks, but when I do, I’ll update on what happened there, as well as progress on Underground.

I’ll talk to you again around the beginning of July.

The Genocide Museum in Vilnius is a grim memorial housed in the former KGB headquarters on Gedimino Prospektas in Vilnius.  The names of many of the people murdered inside are etched on the stones on the outside of the building, as pictured below.

This museum houses brilliant and comprehensive displays of the incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union in 1939 and the system of incarceration, torture, murder, and deportation that was used from that period right into the fifties. Some of the partisans I write about in my novel, Underground, were housed here for interrogation, torture, and execution.

So why is this place controversial?

It has been attacked because of its name. Can one appropriate this term, “genocide”  for what the Soviets did in Lithuania? Those who oppose the name say that the Soviets never intended to exterminate the Lithuanians, so their activities were not properly “genocide”. Furthermore, those who have issues with Lithuania claim it is a cover to mask Lithuanian crimes in the holocaust.

However, some Lithuanians point to Latvia, which barely has a Latvian ethnic majority now to demonstratee that the Soviets did indeed plan to exterminate or at least overwhelm and incorporate the Baltic States.  They add that everyone knows about the holocaust now, but very few people know about what happened under Soviet terror.

I can’t say I am comfortable with the name of the museum myself, but I will say this:

When I worked in an SLS writing seminar in Vilnius in the summer of 2009, virtually none of the fifty-odd students knew the story being told in the Genocide museum.  They did know the about the holocaust in Lithuania and learned more by visiting the chilling sites in places such as Paneriai on the outskirts of Vilnius and the Ninth Fort just outside Kaunas, just two of the major sites where tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered by Nazis and Lithuanian collaborators.

The narrative being told in the Genocide museum is not the story of the holocaust, but it is critical to our understanding of Europe and WW2, which we view, naturally enough, through a Western lenses, and which we imagined ended in May of 1945 with the surrender of Germany.

But in the East, The Soviets were considered invaders too, and fighting went on against them for several years, intense at first, but continuing sporadically into the fifties.

But why should one narrative usurp another? Why do we have narratives in collision?

Perhaps because the Jews suffered under the Nazis and their collaborators, and the Lithuanians suffered under the Soviets and their collaborators.

Not as much, I should add. No one tried to wipe the Lithuanians off the map as they tried to do to the Jews.

I use the word “collaborators” above advisedly, applying it to both groups, usage which might be as controversial as the name of the museum.

These issues keep coming up again and again as I follow current developments in our understanding of the war in the East. I don’t think the narratives need to collide. The horror was complex, and worse for some than for others.

I think all the stories need to be told.

As for the museum, I think it’s great, but I do wish it was called something else.

The Melancholy Town of Merkine intrigued me from the very first time I visited it back in 1989, when I arrived at dusk one winter’s night to interview a priest who had worked for the KGB. I felt as if I had stepped back in time, parked on a grassy knoll by an ancient church in a small town with wooden houses and picket fences and dogs that barked on the sandy streets.

Ghosts are somewhat common in Lithuania, and I felt their presence even then, although I didn’t yet know the hill town where the Merkys and Nemunas rivers meet had been inhabited for twelve thousand years. Instead of knowledge, I had intuition, and the sense of the place stayed with me as I mythologized the memory of the town and called it “Merdine” in my novel, Woman in Bronze. That was a kind of joke, for “merdeti” in Lithuanian means “to stagnate” and the word bears a close relationship to the French word, “merde”.

I didn’t have a chance to visit the town again until eighteen years later, in 2007, when I went there to retrace the footsteps of the partisans who had seized the town for a day in 1945.

But before that, I read up on the place and discovered it had once been an important city, with four posts marking its perimeter. Of these four brick posts, two remain, and they are deep in the fields, showing how dramatically the town has shrunk since the middle ages. It has suffered terribly from the burning of its caste by the Teutonic knights in the fourteenth century, by the Russians in the Northern Wars, and more recently during WW 2 when most of the town was burned down and the Jews were annihilated. In the past, Merkine had many more times the current population of fifteen hundred.

The mound where the old hill castle stood has a spectacular view over the loop in the Nemunas, and a strange little stream runs down from the top of the hill.

My old friends, Jonas Jurasas and Ausra Sluckaite-Jurasas have a summer house nearby, and I sat there on their back porch as the sun set in the summer of 2009. Fishermen were on the banks in the evening mist, the odd splash the sound of their occasional success. Down beneath me in the garden was a big anchor form the period when this had been a major shipping route.

Beside us that night, as we drank rather a lot of Trejos Devynerios, a bitter liquor, were a pair of Lithuanian TV producers who had done a twelve-part series on the major Lithuanian artist of the early twentieth century, Ciurlionis. One of them was the wonderful TV producer, Liudvika Pociūniene, whose father is a prominent sculptor (I sat in their orchard under an apple tree, talking about art a couple of days later). Jonas Jurasas had produced an opera in Traku Castle earlier that year.

The conversation was compelling because this is a place where culture still matters, but the melancholy of the place underscored everything. Jonas and his wife had been expelled form the USSR in the seventies because of a bloody production of Macbeth that was seen as an attack on the regime. Liudvikas’s late husband had been an investigator for the Lithuanian government who died under mysterious circumstances in Byelorussia.

And of course, the town had once been full of Jews, now all dead, perhaps a few survivors’ children alive somewhere far away.

The next day, Jonas and Ausra took me to a small lake in the middle of the forest where we swam out, and even pushed around a tiny island the size of a dinner table – a floating island.

The small lake, not much more than a pond, is called “Bedugne” in Lithuanian, “Bottomless” in English.

There are depths to be plumbed in this place. I know I’ll have to go back.

What drives a man or woman into the Underground? Roger D Petersen, Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT, studied the motivations and social support for resistance in his 2001 book, Resistance and Rebellion.

He tried to understand why, in his words, “… ordinary men and women, in the face of enormous risks, resist and sometimes violently rebel against powerful regimes.”

He studied the village of Svainikai in southern Lithuania, and pulled apart the strands of social support for the young men who had gone into the forests to fight the Soviets.

As Petersen tells it, much of the motivation was the chekist (KGB) massacre of villagers, particularly in Klepociai, where twenty-one of thirty-two houses were burned and twelve people killed on December 23, 1944. The inhabitants of other villages did not know who would be next.

A wave of chekist shootings, burnings, and interrogations under torture drove many young people into the forest, initially to hide and eventually, in many cases, to take up active resistance.

This study is particularly useful because it puts paid to the notion of anti-Soviet resistance as pro-fascist.

Why did the chekists perpetrate the massacre in the first place? The answer is not certain, but it may have been due to local resistance against Soviet partisans who demanded support. Thus the farmers, tied to their land, were in the unenviable position of having to choose between two armies and two types of partisans. One wonders why a farmer would ever support the Soviets, whose plan called for the expropriation of the farmers’ land.

Petersen’s book caused a prolonged shudder in me. Who can understand why one generation or another, in one geographical position or another, must be faced with a series of impossible choices? Here, in our safe haven, it’s easy to judge the players of the past, to take the moral high ground. But we’re lucky not to have face the same sorts of dilemmas.

I sat in a bunker in 2008 with one of the last surviving partisans from the South of Lithuania, Juozas Jakavonis, as he told me the story of how he missed the battle of Merkine and survived.

In 1945, he found an open prayer book floating in the river near Merkine and brought it to his superior, Adolfas Ramanauskas. The prayer book belonged to three partisans who had been ambushed and killed, and Ramanauskas wanted to strike back at the Chekists and their supporters to avenge the three dead partisans. Ramanauskas launched the famous battle of Merkine, in which the partisans seized the city and held it for a day, suffering high losses from a machine gun nest placed in the church steeple (see my second entry in the archive – The Machine Gun Nest – January 23, 2010).

But Juozas Jakavonis, code-named Tigras, was not one of them. For breaking a minor rule, he was punished by not being permitted to take part in the attack.

Jakavonis had great luck. He was captured when jumping out of a farmhouse window, but because he had no uniform or arms at the time, and because he had no other incriminating documents, he was sentenced to only fifteen years in the gulag. While there, he met his future wife, Zose.

While the gulag was potentially fatal, he would have been much worse off had he stayed behind. By 1948, when Ramanauskas wrote up his memoir of the attack on the town of Merkine, all partisans whose names he remembered were dead.

In my novel, Jakavonis’s discovery is transferred to a wandering cobbler. The actual battle of Merkine is depicted in an early chapter of the novel.

Jakavonis was a bright a cheery man when I met him in 2008, standing in front of his yellow farmhouse with his wife and granddaughter. His wife complained that their cow produced too much milk for a pair of pensioners, even if she gave away a lot of cheese and butter. She drew the water for our tea from a well with a wooden lid and Jakavonis and I went down to the reconstructed bunker where Ramanauskas and other legendary partisans had once spent months.

Even a simulated bunker like the one we sat in, with a roof slightly above ground, felt damp and stank of mold. The rusty oil lamp and typewriter were relics of the postwar era.

Jakavonis knew the stories of marginal players in the postwar partisan story, in particular a pair of drunken forgers, a husband and wife team who made it into my novel. Jakavonis suspected them of being spies.

First we talked about the partisans, and then inside the house, over homemade bread, cheese, and butter as well as many drinks, he told stories of the German occupation, of a wounded German soldier who walked back to Germany after the Soviet victory, of various partisan forays.

Writers are taught to be suspicious of happy endings. Jakavonis seemed too perfect, an old man honoured at last, living in a peaceful land with more milk from his cow than his wife knew what to do with.

But for every Jakavonis, there were hundreds if not thousands of others whose ends were not so happy, even if they did manage to survive. The names of around eighty of his comrades in arms are etched in the stone of the partisan memorial just outside the town.

Rachel Margolis, according to writer Dovid Katz, is the most tragic survivor of the holocaust. Her crime, he writes, is surviving the holocaust in Lithuania as a partisan with the Soviets. Apparently, she is now accused of war crimes by the Lithuanian government.

To read the full article, go to the link here.

I don’t know any of the details of her story, but Dovid Katz, whom I know from working together in the SLS writing program in Vilnius last summer, says her case is one of obfuscation by Lithuania, where the holocaust is not denied, but a parallel or equivalency is drawn between Soviet and Nazi crimes.

This is an uneasy subject for me, to say the least. I mentioned it in the post I wrote on Februry 14  about the documentary film, The Soviet Story. It is uneasy because the Nazis and their local collaborators perpetrated the holocaust. What Jews survived, a tiny number did so only because of the Soviet resistance and Soviet victory over the Nazis.

But the Soviets in turn killed or deported many tens of thousands after the war.

On the one hand, any attempt to minimize the holocaust is terrible. On the other hand, other victims want their sufferings to be known too. Does the one cancel out the other? I don’t think so.

A friend of mine, The Canadian writer David Bezmozgis, and I got into a discussion about this issue. I said to him that people need to know everything. In Polish terms, one must know about Auschwitz and one must know about Katyn. In my experience, hardly anyone knows about Katyn, which is just one of the more prominent stories of crimes under the Soviets.

But to imagine that we’re all going to get along and understand each other’s sufferings is a vain hope. I guess my own take on this is never to minimize what happened to others, so no holocaust obfuscation can be permitted. On the other hand, hardly anyone I know has any idea of the partisan war in Eastern Europe after 1944, and hardly anyone knows much more than the faint outlines of the sufferings of people there after the war. That’s the story I want to tell.

But I want to keep listening to the story of others, in this case the story of the holocaust in Lithuania, which remains painful, but which must be probed again and again to work out the details of the crimes, the depth of the sufferings, while never imagining that understanding will be enough and that some sort of “closure” must happen.

How many people does it take to write a book? At my count, 43.

Maybe the high number has something to do with writing historical fiction, because I found myself relying repeatedly on the kindness of strangers.

For example, when I walked into a partisan museum in Marijampole in 2008, I found Justinas Sajauskas studying the Luksa partisan memoir, a classic of the genre. When I asked him why there were no photos of the partisan code-named Lakstingala, the man who survived the ambush that killed Luksa in1951, Sajauskas reached into a drawer, pulled out a stack of photos, and offered me one to take home.

Then he did much better. In 1944, a female partisan code-named Pusele invited a group of communists to come to her engagement party. Then, she and her “fiancé”, code-named Mazvydas, shot dead all the guests and escaped into the underground. Both eventually died in firefights with chekist troops.

This historical scene is re-imagined in the first chapter of my forthcoming novel, and much of the atmosphere of that chapter exists thanks to Sajauskas, who walked me out into the town to the house near the train station where the events occurred. We discussed details such as the route the partisans took to get to a sled to whisk them away to safety.

Sajauskas is only one of the 43. In future posts, I’ll mention what some of the others did.

It’s remarkable to me how much people will help you if you just ask.

Below are a couple of photos of the house where the killings took place on the second floor.

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.

Jonas Budrys (AKA Jonas Polovinskas) worked for the Czarist Secret police, the Okhrana, became chief of counter-intelligence in Vladivostok for the Whites, and in 1921, took over counter-intelligence for the newly formed Lithuanian state.

He is seated, second from right in the rather poor photograph above.

I was restless while waiting for my next round of edits from my publisher, Thomas Allen, so I polished an essay, looked at some short stories I had been working on, and finally needed to launch into a major project or die of ennui.

Jonas Budrys’s story is an eraser of ennui par excellence.

His memoirs read like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle meets John le Carré. The new and impoverished weak state is under threat from Polish, Communist, German, and internal enemies, but Budrys is there to uncover secret plots while giving tips in the craft of espionage.

In 1923, Budrys became head of a secret army that seized the city of Klaipeda (also known as Memel to Germans) from the occupying French, became its first governor, and then returned to Lithuania to work in criminal cases before being assigned as consul to the USA in 1935.

He spent the rest of his life there, and had a son, Algis Budrys, who went on to be an important science fiction writer in America in the fifties.

Biographies don’t get much better than those two. Father and son are the inspiration for my next novel, of which I have written a total of five pages so far. I have pulled out dozens of books on the period and have been cruising web sites that cover that time, and I am eager to press on.

Instead, I’ll likely go back to rewrites on my next round of edit on Tuesday, but at least I’ll have something to look forward to after that. Life without another project on the horizon is just too dull.

In 1932, my uncle strangled his lover and put her body into a drainage well, intending to dissolve it later with acid from a laboratory where he and others were hoping to make a bomb to assassinate the Lithuanian strongman president, Antanas Smetona.

These are the kinds of intersections one finds when looking into the history of a small country, where the personal and the public lie very close to one another. I might never have stumbled on the murder story if historian Bernardas Gailius had not been writing about the politics and crimes of the period.

Not to say that everyone has a skeleton quite like this in the closet.

My murderous uncle is balanced by the uncle I am named after, a man who saved at least three Jewish children during the Nazi period. And my mother was the director of a teacher’s college where one of her employees eventually became one of Lithuania’s most prominent postwar partisans, Adolfas Ramanauskas, Vanagas.

But enough of the counterbalancing “good” relatives. Let’s return to my uncle Pranas, whom I never met and who died suddenly in Chicago in 1950.

My late mother barely knew him either, but remembered him as a silver-tongued storyteller, the must-have at any party, a scholar who taught German. We know as well that he was a volunteer in the Lithuanian war of independence, and one of the soldiers who helped seize the city of Klaipeda from the French in 1923.

Curiously, he was found guilty of the crime of murder but received only three years in prison because of “extenuating circumstances”. One wonders what those might have been, but the archives where the answer lies are crumbling with mold and so we only have newspaper stories to go by.

My godmother, who is still alive and who met him a few times in the forties, says that he was being followed around the country by an unbalanced woman who took every opportunity to lay false charges against him with the police, or embarrass him before his employers. Apparently, he finally broke under the strain and killed her in a moment of enraged passion.

This is the Fatal Attraction version of the story, the tale of a man pushed beyond his limits, and this version has some credence because of the short sentence he received.

On the other hand, part of the sentence was also that he support the child he had with the murder victim, a boy named Pranas as well.

If the victim had a child with him, one can see why she might have become unbalanced – the father of her child refused to marry her and make her a respectable woman. In a conservative society, her status must have been low, and as a single mother, she must have had trouble making ends meet, so she may have been chasing after him for support.

Where does the truth lie in this case? I can’t know for sure, so I just keep digging around in the country, a kind of archeologist puzzling over the moral artifacts.

My uncle Pranas has nothing to do with my forthcoming novel, although he might have something to do with the one after that. His story is just another one that I have stumbled across in my research, and it’s another  reason why I cannot leave history and the historical novel alone.

Some of the other cases in Gailius’s book are quite compelling true crime stories. There’s the one about the country’s postmaster, who kept forged postage stamps in a warehouse in order to sell the real ones for personal profit; the story of Stepas Rickus, who spent a summer drinking, thieving, and murdering, only to disappear without a trace; the story of the diplomatic mission to Moscow which financed its expenses by selling saccharine on the black market.

How does it feel to have a murderous relative? Not that great, but if I’m going to be serious about looking into history for my literary material, I have to accept the complexity of the stories I find. And since I’m a writer, I have no intention of keeping them secret, any more than I would keep secret anything anyone said to me.

Ponary Diary is a chronicle of the relentless shooting, primarily of Jews, in pits in a forest outside Vilnius in the years 1941 – 1943 as witnessed by a Pole who lived nearby. The executioners were overseen by Germans, but the actual shooters were usually Lithuanians.

Kazimierz Sakowicz was a journalist living in reduced circumstances, a man who moved to the outskirts of Vilnius where he began to record in great detail the goings on outside his front door.

These included the regular arrival of truckloads of prisoners, many of whom were beaten and then stripped and shot and dumped into the pits. But the dumping soon became too hard, so the victims were forced to step down into the pits and arrange themselves neatly before they were shot.

The grotesqueries are many: A local dog and ravens feast on the imperfectly buried remains; wounded victims awaken and crawl out of the pits, but are usually caught; eventually, lye is poured on the bodies to make the wounded move so they can be identified and killed before they climb out; some victims are taken aside and told they will be saved if they betray hiding places of others – then the betrayers are killed; one speculator in used clothing kills a woman of about the same size as a potential customer in order get a dress, and then cannot understand the qualms of the buyer.

Sakowicz himself did not survive the war, but was murdered under mysterious circumstances while riding his bicycle on a nearby road.

As I have mentioned in some of my other posts, the level of suffering in the East was very great, and many groups suffered in different ways. Anyone who wants his suffering to be known should know of the suffering of others. Thus anyone writing bout the hardships of the Lithuanians must also look squarely into the face of the holocaust in Lithuania and take accept responsibility where it is due.

But this sort of reading is very hard –  my dreams were full of it for two nights. Reading this chronicle of systematic murder was as relentlessly boring as observing any industrial process, and all the more monstrous for that.

The controversy about the Lithuanian postwar partisans does not end so much as undergo perpetual regeneration, with one, admittedly small, school claiming that they were simply fascist bandits who terrorized the countryside for a decade after the second world war.

The standard accusations have an uncanny similarity, claiming that the two most famous partisan leaders, Juozas Luksa and Adolfas Ramanauskas were criminals.

In an effort to hunt down the sources of these accusations, I managed to get my hands on a very rare Soviet publication of 1960, called Vanagai is Anapus.

This text depicts Juozas Luksa as the son of a wife-beating bourgeois, himself a petit bourgeois, an agent of the Nazi Abwehr during the first Soviet occupation and a vicious murderer. He is also the unwitting tool of drunken priests who are amused that he does not see through the lies of the Vatican.

Adolfas Ramanauskas, a partisan leader who managed to last until 1956 when he was betrayed, tortured, and executed, is depicted as a coward who clung to his wife’s skirts.

For all foolishness of Vanagai is Anapus, it does have certain drive, like a very good potboiler. It is also fascinating to see the heroism of to men turned into banditry.

If one were simply a literary critic, one could do an analysis of how different camps depict different historical characters.  But the effect this text, Vanagai is Anapus, continues to echo into the present beyond literary discussions. If you look at on-line commentaries that address the history of the partisans, the attacks usually refer back to this text as support for their argument. I have even heard that an official of the UK wondered out loud if Juozas Luksa wasn’t merely a fascist bandit. He gave no source for this claim, but presented it as a little-known fact – in other words, the power of a good potboiler is not to be underestimated. On the other hand, it’s remarkable, as if someone were to use the Da Vinci Code as a reference on the history of France.

I was scanning Quill and Quire, the Canadian publishing trade magazine, when I came across an article by Russell Smith poking fun at the Canadian historical novel. He has never much liked it and he was making fun of it again in the months leading up to the publication of his new unhistorical novel.

But he’s not the only one who professes distaste for it. I was in interview with Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer recently, and she raised objections to the historical novel too. So has Phil Marchand, formerly a Toronto Star literary reviewer and now a National Post reviewer. The Quill seems to pick up this theme from time to time. Others accuse the form of being crotchety or romantic, among other failings.

I find this whole issue odd. Why object to any form at all? In the old days, we held detective fiction in low regard and the same was true of science fiction. But nobody puts down David Mitchell for writing science fiction, and nobody seems to object to the works of Giles Blunt, John le Carré, or Peter Robinson, among others.

Interestingly, the attacks on the historical novel rarely list examples. I’d love to see who the objectors object to, but I never see a list. I suspect the objection is really to a kind of romance of the past, but I can’t say for sure because I can’t pin down the detractors.

I was at a talk a the Goethe Institute a couple of years ago and I asked the German audience if they thought it was foolish to read and to write historical novels. They looked at me like I was a fool. So would any European. They are aware they are still living history while we seem blithely unaware of it. We are like speakers who weren’t aware that they were speaking prose.

Barry Unsworth on Iphigenia and Agamemnon in The Songs of Kings; Umberto Eco on monasteries in The Name of the Rose; Rachel Kushner on Batista’s Cuba in Telex from Cuba; Mark Helprin on WW 1 in A Soldier of the Great War; Annabel Lyon on Aristotle in The Golden Mean; Roddy Doyle on street toughs in A Star Called Henry; Wayne Johnston on Joey Smallwood in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Finally, even Tolstoy’s War and Peace was written many, many decades after the fact.

What is the unifying defect of the historical novels I have listed above? I can’t see one. I wish the detractors would explain their position better.

The past is fascinating to behold because we always know more than the players did when they were living in their present. The same is pretty much true of novels, where we tend to know more than the characters in the books.

Also, the past keeps opening up in new ways. It turns out we knew less than we thought we did. Historians are still digging through Soviet archives to find out what happened under Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. – a good historical novelist seizes on a little-known historical truth and illuminates it in fiction.

Admittedly, to show the injustices of the past is banal, unless the injustices are new or unfamiliar. But anything poorly done is boring – sex and drinking are dull too if they are used to dress up a novel.

One can write well on any subject, in any manner, in any mode. The reverse is also true. To judge books by their categories is a form of Stalinism; first we go after the bourgeois, and then we enlarge the list to include kulaks, and then we move on to everyone else. To go back further, attacking historical novels is a form of Jacobinism. The danger of making these kinds of attacks is that one risks becoming Robespierre. But you’d need to know a little history to know what happened to him.

Paralyzed from the neck down, English Historian Tony Judt is nevertheless writing a series of memory vignettes in The New York Review of Books. The most recent one, in the February 25 issue, includes a section about his experiences in France and Germany during the 1968 “revolutions”, which he now refers to as sadly parochial.

The West, he says, was playing at revolution while in the East, cataclysmic events were unraveling in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Yet Judt, “… a well-educated student of history of East European Jewish provenance…” believed, along with many others, that Czechoslovakia’s Dubcek was just another reformist turncoat. In short, the real revolution was trying to happen in the East.

How sad that Judt should be suffering from ALS and how fine that he manages to keep writing.

He first came to my notice with the magnificent and sweeping Postwar. That history, along with Norman Davies’s Europe, finally brought the history of Eastern Europe out of the shadows.

He writes in that book that it was understandably tempting to tell the story of Europe’s unexpected recovery after 1945 in a self-congratulatory, even lyrical key. He admits that there is a kernel of truth to this. Americans, Canadians, and the Brits did fight a good fight. But Judt point out that this is only half the story. So did the Poles, and in many ways, theirs was a more desperate fight under much worse odds with far more mixed results.

The benign peace of Western Europe was mirrored by the peace of the prison yard enforced by the tank in Eastern Europe.

And Eastern Europe is not faraway place. In Judt’s words, the history of the two halves of post-war Europe cannot be told in isolation.

Everything that Judt says seems to be self-evident now, but it wasn’t always so. At a recent dinner party, I heard how we really have to be grateful for Stalin for what he did for us. While there is an element of truth in that statement, it makes me feel very “un-Canadian”. For who is “us”? Canada? Maybe so. But if enslaving millions was the price to be paid for peace, the cost has never been properly counted.

Historical grievances are boring, so I don’t want to continue in this vein. What I’m interested in is the stories that have come out of that dark, dark place.