Baltic Fates

Mavrik Vulfson

If you check out www.latviansonline.com they've got a section on Latvian related books published in the English language. After listing some histories, a thriller set in Riga and one or two poets this rather limited selection is padded out, somewhat bizarrely, with Kathy Reichs's book "Deja Dead". The novel is based in Montreal, as is the author. Even allowing for the fact that Reichs is of Latvian ancestry it's rather a desperate addition.

So, there wasn't a lot of local literature for me to check out in the English language bookstore here. One book I did pick up was Mavrik Vulfson's Baltic Fates. Part pamphlet and part book (only 141 pages in huge type) it's a rather idiosyncratic history by the elderly Latvian politician of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939. This was the pact whose secret protocol assigned Latvia to the Soviet "sphere" and ended Latvian independence for the next fifty years.

I say idiosyncratic because it's a meandering history, leaving huge holes in the story where Vulfson doesn't have anything to add and dwelling in detail on the personal stories of the minor players still alive who Vulfson got access to, like Hans von Herwarth (a diplomat in the German embassy in Moscow). He devotes a large section of the book, near the end, to the July 1944 plotters in Germany.

I found it a confusing book and it sheds little light on Latvian history. But Vulfson is clearly a towering figure here and the people he's writing about were mostly courageous beyond my imagining so who am I to crticise?