The full name of this book is Baltic Souls: remarkable life stories from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. I came across it while browsing online and was quite taken with the photo on the cover and the description on the back. It was first published in 2010 in Dutch and was published in 2024 for the first time in English.
The author, Jan Brokken, is an award-winning Dutch writer who was inspired by a boat trip he took along the Estonian coast. He then spent 11 years, from 1999 to 2010 researching the incredible life stories of 15 men and women from the Baltic nations in the 20th century. He was especially fascinated by the large number of globally influential artists, musicians and writers who originated from this small region of Europe.
Some of the more well-known personalities he writes about are Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, Latvian painter Mark Rothko and the philosopher Hannah Arendt, born in what was then Königsberg (and now Russian Kaliningrad). I knew of these names but not much about their early lives and their connection with their birth-countries in the Baltics. Each story was simultaneously fascinating and heart-breaking.
Brokken brings these stories to life through beautiful prose (and a great translation by David Doherty) and interesting photographs while interweaving his own experiences travelling through these countries searching for information, meeting people along the way and cultivating a greater appreciation of the struggles of 20th century life in the Baltics. I was especially drawn to three of the stories in particular.
Jānis Roze
The first is story #2 in the book called “The Bookseller of Riga: Jānis Roze and sons”. Over the years I have come across the Latvian online bookstore called Jānis Roze and have even thought of ordering through them. This story is the history behind this most famous of Latvian bookstores in Riga. It was not only the story of the Roze family, but the author’s own journey to Riga to find descendants of the family and dig up long lost memories. The story starts in late 19th century Tsarist Russia, follows the effects of the 1905 Revolution and through both world wars to the survival of the bookstore through the Soviet Era.
It was interesting to note that the head office is on Miera Street, the street the Zekants/Rozenvalds family lived on during the inter-war period. Brokken meets there with the grandson of Jānis Roze, who was still running the bookstore. The reader gets a deeper look at the challenges facing bookstores under Communism and the challenges of keeping the store family-run.
Explore this bookstore online: Jānis Roze Bookstore & Publishing House
The Eisensteins
Story #3 was another that I found myself reading and re-reading: “The Architect’s Shoes: Eisenstein vs. Eisenstein”. It is the inspiring and tragic story of two generations of influential artists: architect Mikhail Eisenstein and his son, legendary filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. I wrote a little about Mikhail Eisenstein in my post about Miera Street. He was responsible for many of the now iconic Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) buildings in Riga. His son Sergei was one of the most beloved and influential filmmakers of the early 20th century, responsible for such films as Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky.
Mikhail, born of mixed Jewish and Swedish parents, married a woman from an extremely wealthy Russian Orthodox family in 1897 and it was in that year that he converted permanently to the Orthodox Christian faith. Sergei was the couple’s only child and the dysfunctional relationship between father and son was intense. Mikhail seemed like a very self-important work-a-cholic who never had time for his son or his wife.
When Sergei was 11 years old, his mother abandoned him and he was raised by hired help. At the age of 17, already jaded and full of rage against the world, Sergei left Latvia for Russia to become an architect like his father. That didn’t work out and instead he became a filmmaker. Each segment of his life story was utterly fascinating and very sad. Yet each man had a profound effect on the world that is still felt today.
Lotti
The third story that really stood out was #13: “Exiled from Mõisamaa: the fate of Anna-Liselotte von Wrangel”. This story is not about a very famous person, but was inspired by the family history of one of the author’s old classmates. It follows the life of Lotti, who was 13 when her parents and two brothers had to flee Estonia in 1939.
Lotti’s father was born in St. Petersburg, with ancestors of Baltic German origin who settled in Russia. He ended up in Estonia and married an Estonian woman whose distant ancestors were Swedish. He considered himself Estonian. But when 1939 came, even though he had no personal connection with Germany and had never even been there, he was considered a ‘German’. The family was considered Baltic German and if they did not heed Hitler’s call to repatriate, they might very well be at the mercy of the Soviets – and that was unthinkable. They had little choice but to leave.
The story is poignantly written as the family faces heartbreak, separation and death as they keep moving west one step ahead of the Soviets. Lotti’s brothers both join up to fight, and Lotti joins thousands of other refugees just trying to survive. Lotti and her family end up in western Germany where she falls in love with a Dutch man after the war. She emigrated with him to the Netherlands where she lived the rest of her life. But she never felt like she belonged.
There were parts of this story where I couldn’t stop sobbing, from pure sadness, extreme tenderness and utter disbelief.
Who am I?
Reading the final stories in the book, it became clear as a bell what one of the main themes of this book really was:
Who are you?
What defines you?
A passport?
A religion?
A language?
A birthplace?
A political ideology?
Or something else?
How does one define oneself? Lotti’s father grew up in Russia. Lotti spent her first 13 years as an Estonian. In 1939, her family is labelled ‘German’. She attended high school in Poland, was a refugee in Germany and then settled in the Netherlands. What did she consider her ‘native’ language? Her native culture? Is it possible for some people to have neither of these things?
Each of these stories, that span many decades right up to the present day, ask this same question. Can a Jew also be a Latvian? Is a Baltic German a German first or a Baltic citizen first? Where was the line between being Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian and being Russian prior to WWI? What if your father is of one religion and your mother another? What if you grew up with one language but were forced to abandon it and speak a different one? What if you weren’t forced, but chose it? Does that make a difference?
The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz was born into a Lithuanian Jewish family. But then he moved to France, eventually becoming a French citizen. Fleeing Nazi persecution, he came to the United States where he spent most of the rest of his life, although he died in Italy. How did he identify?
Was the painter Mark Rothko Latvian because he was born in Daugavpils? Was he Jewish even though he was raised non-religious? Was he Russian since he was born while Latvia was part of the Tsarist Empire? Was he American since that is where he spent most of his life? How did he identify?
Was Sergei Eisenstein Jewish, even though his father converted to Russian Orthodoxy upon marriage? Was he Russian since his mother was of Russian aristocracy and he spent part of his youth in St. Petersberg? Was he German since his father was of German descent? Was he Latvian as that was his place of birth?
This also brings to the forefront the age-old problem that even if you choose to identify one way, you cannot control how others will label you. In his adult life Sergei Eisenstein identified as being Soviet and atheist. But if you look him up online, he is predominately labelled as having been a German Jew. Lotti’s father identified as being Estonian but was forced into the label of German. And both Mark Rothko and Hannah Arendt were non-religious but have always been labelled Jewish.
The Baltic region, where so many cultures, languages and religions have tried to coexist, and where the land has gone back and forth between conquering powers more times than can be counted, has had more than its fair share of these almost impossible questions to answer. Most of the people written about in this book obviously had a very hard time answering these questions. A crisis of identity and having lived through the horrors of conflict after conflict clouded their lives. Suicide, despair, depression, mental illness and loneliness plagued many of them.
This book is one of the most thought-provoking I have read addressing these complicated issues of identity, geography and history, while at the same time allowing the reader into the interesting and private lives of 15 extraordinary families.
