Recently I read Provisionally Yours by Antanas Sileika (Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2019). Provisionally Yours is a novel set in in Lithuania just after World War I. Actually, it’s a bit of a stretch to say it is set in Lithuania, as the country as such was still in a very “provisional” state at the time. Previously part of the Russian Empire, it benefitted from the post-war sentiment to let different ethnic groups form new nations. This was part of a general trend toward the idea of “self-determination,” when the Czarist, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires had all been destroyed.
.Sileika, a Canadian of Lithuanian descent, portrays
a world of ethno-castes. By that I mean ethnic groups arranged in a caste-like
hierarchy. Until very recently, the (Czarist) Russian Empire was Lithuania’s
overlord, but landowners tended to be Polish. Peasants were Lithuanian, and
Jews were urban businessmen and professionals. Now ethnic Lithuanians are in
charge and are trying to establish an ethnically-homogenous Lithuanian state. The
protagonist of the novel, Justas Adamonis, has just returned from service in
the Russian army, and is now charged with setting up a counter-intelligence service
in Lithuania.
I learned a lot from this novel about early 20th-century
Lithuania. It also made me think about the problems of new states more
generally. In an Afterword, Sileika informs the reader that he based the novel
on real political events that occurred in Lithuania at the time. One of
Adamonis’ assignments is to track down a ring of officials who are smuggling cocaine
into the new Soviet Union. This reminds me of the problem of narco-states in
the less developed world today. It also reminds me of the difficulties of
establishing--and paying—an efficient administrative class in an
ethnically-disparate society. At another point, an ethnically Russian general
who led the Lithuanian army in its war of independence is assassinated. There
are still many such cases, in which members of ethnic minorities who attempt to
serve the new “nation”-state are marginalized or even assassinated by the
ethnic group in power.
Jews don’t figure in Provisionally Yours; they
are just “there,” irrelevant to the formation of this new nation-state. Unfortunately,
they are very much “there” in historian David Nasaw’s The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War
(New York, Penguin Press, 2020).
One tends to think that the last million displaced
persons would have been almost entirely Jewish, but such was far from the case.
Most of the Jewish survivors were people who had fled from Poland to the Soviet
Union during the war. After the war, Stalin permitted them to return to Poland,
but they did so only to discover that there was still fierce anti-Semitism in
that country. Indeed, some Jews were given letters giving them three days to get
out, or else. The last pogrom occurred in the city of Kielce in 1946, after the
war’s end. About 200-250,000 Polish Jews who had survived the war in the Soviet
Union ended up in the American zone of occupation in Germany, awaiting
permission to migrate elsewhere.
Other members of the last million were refugees from
various countries taken over by the Soviet Union. Among these were “Balts,” people
from Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia who fled into Germany after the war and were
able to make their way to the American zone of occupation.
By this point, very few Jews were left in the Baltic
states. Indeed, many Balts co-operated with the Nazis in murdering their Jewish
co-nationals. Among the last million were known members of the Nazi Waffen-SS, identifiable
by the blood-type tattoos under their left armpits. Nevertheless, both Britain and the United
States considered Baltic men, often tall, blond, and blue-eyed, to be superior
immigrants. They were “clean” as opposed to the “dirty” Jewish survivors.
At one point
miners in the UK went on strike when they discovered that they were working
with immigrants against whom they’d so recently fought. British authorities
told the Baltic miners not to take their shirts off in the mines, so the
British miners would not notice their SS tattoos.
The Lutheran and Catholic establishments in the US
pressured their post-war government to admit Balts (Lutherans) and Poles and Ukrainians
(Catholics) in equal numbers to Jewish immigrants, if not more. And President
Truman pressured the British to open up then Palestine to Jewish immigration so
that the US would not have to admit the Jews.
If you are a reader who enjoys historical novels, I
highly recommend Provisionally Yours,
to give you a sense of a place about which, like me, you might not know
anything at all. And if you like reading
history, Nasaw is a Pulitzer-Prize winner who knows how to tell a compelling,
if discouraging, story.
