In weeding my files, I came across my father’s short memoir. Since it was written in quite readable English and actually edited into a book (by my mother?), it was easy to turn it into a publication.

I put it on amazon because the other “family memoirs” have found a readership beyond family.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0990586286/   A RELUCTANT CITIZEN

There was a big surprise in the memoir. The man I grew up with was silent and reticent. He was bothered by the noise of children. He barely said “Hello” in the morning and wanted to be alone, in the woods, if he could.

The man in the memoir is a completely different version of my father. He is outgoing, ambitious, assertive, engaged in the community and in politics. He is an eager and idealistic teacher, at all levels including the first grades. He is caring of others, adaptable, even goodnatured and resilient. He sings, he dances with exuberance, he hikes, swims before work in the morning.

Much of his charm was invisible to me (although my mother assured me she knew a different person). Now I appreciate even more the toll of the war on both of us. And, I appreciate how well he recalled those early years, writing in his sixth language.

If you are retired, drop a little picture of yourself on paper for the future family who may never get to hang out with you long enough to get to know the inner person. If you’re young, keep a diary to share later.
 
Recently, Sheryl Sandberg wrote about her family’s recovery from the early death of her husband. They made videos recalling good memories that they could revisit when it felt like his presence was fading. See her book, Option B.  These "recordings" helped them mourn him and kept him alive in their hearts.

MY BOAT IS SO SMALL is up for nomination to get published by Kindle Press.

The window is April 21 through May 21, 2017.

If you nominate, and they end up publishing the novel, you will get a free copy of the ebook.

HELP!! Give me a boost! Tell your children you supported a writer, and they can be one, but it is hard to get published. Take part in a new trend in publishing (crowd-sourced review).

Here's the place to NOMINATE:
https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/10GJ9H8B1HRC7

This is simplistic: in the olde days, a patron decided an artist was “worthy,” and supported him/her financially. “Keep up the good work.”

In the last century, social marketing found that surveys of consumers would be a way to reduce the risks around a new product. They SURVEYED, and had FOCUS GROUPS, looking for a winner. It was costly.

In publishing, a VERY SMART EDITOR was the filter: he or she “bet the farm” on an author. Some were great at predicting success in the marketplace.

Now, we have CROWD-SOURCING. I am a big fan of the TV show THE VOICE. After their judges (“editors”) screen singers, they turn the competition over to THE PUBLIC. We get to vote for our favorites, and they are advanced to the finals. At a certain point, the judges’ picks are filtered by THE MASSES, in picking a winner. It is feasible to test the goods with the ultimate consumer, en masse.

Literary agents are telling us that they are bombarded by thousands of manuscripts a year and “they have to fall in love” to pick a winner which is still a speculation that they can sell the mss to a publisher, using their contacts. Everybody needs to make money. This means a HUGE “slush pile” – the mss that are queued up to be rejected. No love, sorry.

The Kindle Scout program is about crowd-sourcing the review of new novels. If someone is a winner, the cost of publishing a book is low, because they mainly do ebooks (=no inventory, dirt cheap reproduction).

My new novel – MY BOAT IS SO SMALL – is up for a Kindle Scout Campaign. YOU – YOU -- YOU can vote for this book to make the finals and get a publishing contract with Kindle Press.

JOIN ME IN THIS FUN! NOMINATE my book! If they publish it, you’ll get a free copy!! You are part of the team, making decisions about “winners.”

Please make my book a winner, at least here…   Thanks!
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Link for nominating my book: https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/10GJ9H8B1HRC7
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The Crimson Blight by Ona Eirosiut Algminiene, translated by Leo Algminas. 2014.

Crimson Blight fictionalizes a short period in Lithuania’s history, between 1940 and 1941 when Russians occupied the country. It belongs to the genre of personal accounts of a horrible time during WWII. As a novel, it has a lot of weaknesses. As a fictionalization of memories or a diary, it offers something interesting: what was the daily experience of seeing the Russians come in and take over. The perspective is a land-owner’s in a small Lithuanian town.

Be warned it is also in the category of atrocity stories. A few things I learned here: Common Russian soldiers were mad to discover all Lithuanians lived better than they did, no matter what class; they were victims of Stalin’s forced conscription; and that might explain some of their anger and brutality.

The narrator’s experience of a level of brutality that shakes your faith in God and humanity explains why many Lithuanians who stayed through the German occupation that followed could not bear to live with Russians again—they fled and they would not go back to Russian occupiers after the war. Jews were not inside the Lithuanian social circles (in this story); they helped the Russian occupiers run the place; and this family of Lithuanians did not identify with them nor sympathize with them. Nor did they hate Jews.

Finally, I learned that it is very hard to figure out when you’ve had enough abuse and you are ready to run for your life. Clinging to routine, tradition, faith, work, and family is normal, especially when the devil starts living in your house.
 
A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile by Agate Nesaule. 1997.

The author is a professor of literature in America who captures as a memoir her journey from living as a child in Latvia during the invasions of the Soviets and the Germans, fleeing the country and living in a DP camp, and then immigrating to the U.S. There is a therapeutic theme as the author draws on her early traumatic experiences to explain difficulties she had in relationships later in life. It is a story of perseverance in spite of awful early experiences, and insights gained over decades that followed. People who shared similar experiences will find it especially meaningful.
 
Forest of the Gods by Balys Sruoga, translated by Aušrinė Byla. 2005.

Balys Sruoga was a literary intellectual in Lithuania and a professor at Vilnius University. German occupiers sent him to the Stutthof concentration camp in 1943. Like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Forest of the Gods is written as fiction that tries to present an experience of war, in this case, the concentration camp, as a microcosm of civilization and its absurdities. Sruoga died in 1947, soon after the war. His manuscript (in Lithuanian) was banned, then finally published in 1957. It is a shocking and gripping story of the ordeal of victims of the Nazi invasion.

Fading Echoes From the Baltic Shores by Edward R. Janusz. 2012.

Janusz’s story is told as a memoir left by his mother, of which twenty pages were true and more filled in by him. Alongside the personal story of finding a war arrive on your property, forcing decisions about who/what to trust and what to do to save the life of your family, Janusz also fills in substantial researched history, especially his favored military history. The juxtaposition of highly personal events and the course of World War II as affecting Lithuania are powerful. The book is not perfect and could have been edited and cut for a few things, but it is highly readable, fascinating, and meaningful to émigrés from that era.
 
We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust by Ellen Cassedy. 2012.

The story of Ellen Cassedy’s journey to Lithuania to learn Yiddish and uncover family history is a wonderful and personal story written as a memoir. She meets with a whole spectrum of people, for example, some of the few Jews remaining in Lithuania, and Lithuanians who wanted to “witness” something to her (a Jew) before they died. Like a mystery writer, she uncovers tiny pieces of evidence and puts them together. Like an anthropologist, she captures deep values and prejudices.
Most important and most interesting to me were the moral ambiguities. Did Lithuanians help and even independently carry out genocide for the Nazis? Did Jews who served as police in the ghettos collaborate or protect lives when they delivered up hundreds of ghetto occupants at a time knowing they were being sent to be shot in the forest? Why didn’t Jews fight back? Did Lithuanians help them survive? Who suffered the most, Jews or thousands of Lithuanians deported to Siberia by the Soviets (a question debated in Lithuania)? She captures views from every perspective, whether we like them or not.
If you are Jewish or Jewish-Lithuanian-American, this is an fascinating adventure into horrible events and the views of every-day people possibly including your family. If you are interested in the Holocaust, it is painfully detailed.
Her narrative is told as the experience of a visitor in Vilnius, like a diary. It shows that she is an accomplished journalist. The book filled in many blanks for me. I am glad to see it won many awards.

Many of us immigrated to the U.S. as young children in the wave following World War II. Our parents had to find work, learn English, seek food and housing. Many were too tired or traumatized to sit back and tell tales about the homeland. In fact, they might have been abnormally silent. I’ve met many contemporaries who wish they knew what happened and sought to learn from others what happened.
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Now sixty-plus years later, more books are appearing to explain those times. The authors include scholars who’ve taken a long time to pull the research together and retirees who are using their leisure to fill in the history. Here are a few books that brought my mind some rest.
 
DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945-1951 by Mark Wyman. 1989 and 1998 editions.

Displaced persons, also known as refugees, are a constant in human history. As long as there is conflict and war, there are people who flee for safety and find it far away in a foreign country. In September 1945 there were 1.8 million displaced in Europe still waiting for a place to go. The politics of their resettlement continued for years after. Among them, 200,000 Baltic people knew that Russians had killed and deported about 130,000 of their kind in 1941 and would resume the persecution, so they refused to return. “Some 75 percent of the university, high school and grade school teachers had fled Lithuania,… as well as 80 percent of the doctors and … writers, painters, musicians, artists, etc.” (p. 119)

Wyman describes the “continent in ruins” right after the war, with up to twenty million bewildered people on the move. There were soldiers returning home; POWs, concentration and labor camp internees; civilians escaping intolerable places or expelled due to political antipathy. Most returned to their former homes. The Allied Forces were busy sorting them out and herding them into organized camps.
His riveting narrative describes the history around the DP camps in detail. Stories of individuals bring the experience to life. A chapter on repatriation explains the politics and logistics addressing stateless people who would not go home. He describes the special problems of orphaned children and surviving Jews. The camps became multi-lingual and -cultural communities, struggling to hang onto national identity, to school children, and to apply for asylum, in a limbo that lasted years after the war.
The hair-raising story must not be forgotten. In 2015, over a million refugees from the Middle East entered Europe, and there were 1.3 million active claims for asylum.
Those of us within a generation of the WWII DP experience know that security and prosperity was found by many DPs from this era. What we might not know is exactly how our parents coped at the time, and what lingered in their lives, good and bad.
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