Modris Eksteins was barely 1 year-old in the late summer of 1944 when he was trapped with his parents and his small sister between the Russian and German front lines. As they planned to escape to Sweden, they tried to find fishermen in Estonia, who would ferry them over, but found none. They finally arrived in Kuressaare and at the end of September they were lucky to board one of the last ships sailing to Danzig, Germany, where they arrived on Oct. 3 1944. After WW II was over they settled in a D.P. camp in Lübeck where they remained until the parents were granted entry into Canada in 1949.
They first settled in in Winnipeg but pretty soon the family moved to Toronto where young Modris received elementary and secondary education at Upper Canada College, upon graduation it was on to University of Toronto. The young man was lucky enough to clear the rigid Rhodes Scholars Examinations and finished his studies at Oxford, England.
After that he taught at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. He is the author of “The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of Modern Age” and “The Limits of Reason: The German Press and the Collapse of Weimar Democracy”.
He calls his 1999 book “Walking since Daybreak” a story of Eastern Europe, but actually it is a parallel story of his family and three small Baltic States. That seems to be the book that he had to write as he felt like young Hamlet at the time, crying “times are out of Joint, oh, cursed Spite” and promised put to right if he only could.
It is a very uncommon book divided into 8 chapters further divided with numerous subtitles dealing with diverse subjects. Over the ages the Baltic nations have seen many masters and occupants passing through their homesteads. Through the centuries they have seen the conquering Teutonic Knights, later on the Danes, Poles, Swedes and finally the Russians. The only benevolent ones were the Swedes. Gustaf Adolf II established the University of Tartu 1632 and a Gymnasium in Tallinn as well as a Law court in Tartu where even the peasants could apply for admission. That era is still remembered as “the good old Swedish times”.
The chapter titled “The girl with the flaxen hair” traces the fate of the author’s great-great-grandmother Grieta (born 1834) who was a peasant girl employed as a Baltic baron's chambermaid. She became pregnant and he forced to marry her to a local peasant boy. The baron provided a dowry for her but the young bridegroom ran away and the Baron organized another marriage, her letting her keep the homestead. Those kinds of things were rather common place in Estland and Kurland at the time. So the Eksteins family saga began without any feud and shoot-outs.
The subtitles of the chapters concern the pecularities of the era. The roots of independence started to grow during the Revolution of 1905 and after the October Revolution of 1917 the three saplings arose from the Baltic turf: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk provided the Germans with “go-ahead rights” in the Baltic States. In September 1917 the Germans took Riga and were in Tallinn by late February. Estonian independence was declared at the 11th hour on Feb. 24 1918 with the so-called Temporary Government forced underground. At the very end of the same year the first attack against the Baltic States began. With the help of the Finns the Estonians cleared the Reds from their lands and held out to the very end of the War. The Latvians had to fight the Bolshveviks and the Germans at the same time while Lithuanians had trouble with the Poles.
As mentioned, this is a parallel story, in many ways a fragmented narrative. It juxtaposes the forced travels and travails of the Eksteins family, the doubts and the confusions of the “inchorence of the age.” The author does so with clarity and brevity, without excess words.
The 20th century was a particularly wicked one. Modris Eksteins tries to explain his point of view. “...The understanding of human behaviour in the past has always been the raison d'etre of history... Our century, however, has not been kind to conceptualizers and empire builders... After the horrors spawned by ideological rigidity in our century, the notion of a variety of histories, as opposed to a single history, is to be celebrated.” The author notes that blame and praise are nearly impossible to assign.
Eksteins’ parallel narrative, part history, part autobiography, entwining the tragic story of the Baltic nations before during and after WW II with personal stories of the Eksteins family is a groundbreaking work. He writes to find a wider audience for a complex life history. Just reciting the mere numbers of human beings who died in the conflicts brought on by the evils of the 20th century, while staggering, is not enough.
Life went on after 1945, there were new beginnings for the Eksteins family, thousands of other Balts flung far from home. But nothing could overcome the fissure that the War left behind. Eksteins’ tale of a wicked century does much more than merely investigate disintegration and loss. In his quest for meaning he finds the essence of hope and in doing so gives an honest, personal, and very readable initimate dimension to the cataclysm of WW II and its effects on the Baltic people.
(Walking since daybreak is available at the Tartu College Estonian Studies lending library. )