RETURN TO LATVIA

A writer uncovers the cruel reality of her family’s past.

Following her first memoir, Distant Fathers, Jarre (1925-2016), haunted by her ancestors, revisits the past to reveal “the sound of countless voices, voices of those who’ve been dead now for many years.” Born in Riga to a Jewish father and Protestant mother, Jarre left when she was 10, spirited away by her mother who feared that, as the outcome of a contentious divorce, her husband would be awarded custody of their two daughters. She took them to Italy, where they grew up in her parents’ home, with only a fading memory of “that man,” as they referred to their father. Jarre knew that he was dead, exterminated, in 1941, along with countless other Jews. After consigning him to only a few pages of her previous memoir, and after her mother’s death, Jarre felt impelled to discover who he really was, how he had lived, and how he died. Helped by her internet-savvy sons and many archivists, she was able to piece together a family history. In September 1999, she finally returned to Riga, stepping off a plane into the “alien city where my father was killed.” She writes that she felt no nostalgia about returning—instead, she felt like a tourist—yet at many points, she was overcome with tears as she retraced her father’s life, discovered the deep-seated antisemitism of her ancestors’ world, and, by reading histories and memoirs, learned in vivid detail the Jews’ horrific fate at the hands of Nazis and their Latvian neighbors. “The perverse game of numbers continues to play out in every official Latvian declaration on the Shoah, almost always solicited, very rarely spontaneous,” she writes. “There’s no need to exaggerate; the total of those exterminated should be revised.” Translated by Goldstein, Jarre’s painful recounting of her journey into the past reflects the onerous task she took on: “to finally untangle the cruel knot of my personal history.”

A harrowing, culturally rich memoir.