Saturday, March 17, 2018


Children Must Not Know or Remember
By © Anton Vendamencsh, 2017

Chapter 11/ In The Wake Of Overt Violence 4

After grandfather and Emilia married (1922), the next major event in family affairs occured in 1926, when Emilia adopted her sister’s son as her own.

There are a number of reasons why Emilia did this: a) Emilia and grandfather have no issue*; b) Emilia evidently determines to break her verbal agreement with grandfather to share in their business venture 50-50; c) as Publisher of the newspaper Emilia decides to exercise the power (legal) of the written word over the verbal, and claim the newspaper as her own; d) a dramatic and irreversible ‘coming-out’ results from the plastic surgery that remakes not only Emilia’s face, but personality**. From 1926 until 1932 the pendulum appears to swing back in favor of grandfather, who in 1932 retires and installs my father as editor-in-chief. Emilia makes no overt countermove until after the death of grandfather in 1939. She then dismisses my father as editor-in-chief. However, she is forced to reinstate him, when it becomes apparent that there is no one who can do the job as well as he and keep the newspaper profitable***.

*Did they or did they not have sexual contact? While the question today may seem ridiculous, the fact that they had no children of their own, may confirm the rumor that Emilia had contracted syphilis from her first husband. Also, in those days sex had not yet become the obsession of cityfolk it has become today, but many practiced the commandments (self-discipline and self-denial) that were observed by the people of the countryside. The put down of self-gratification by globalization-preaching churches had its reasons and the seeding of the idea that if one did not practice heterosexual sex one would lose one’s mind was not altogether a rabbit out of thin air.

**The ‘business woman’ who comes out from behind the ‘nice girl’ image is often a woman abused in early life.  Dire conditions of poverty in the city often force a young woman to take to whoring as means of survival. This brings her in touch with the worst life has to offer, which harden her emotional life, sometimes to the point of insensitivity.

***Father’s success as editot-in-chief is due not only to his understanding of what the Latvijan public wants from a newspaper, but also due to his from bottom-up familiarity with the publishing process (which his father made him learn upon his return from the Ukraine) and experience as a military officer in General Denikin’s White army.

Upon his retirement, grandfather purchased an estate in Kandava, western Latvija, which property he wishes to develop as an experimental farm. His interest in agriculture is a throwback to his childhood in Taurene (see EC648), when following the death of his father, his mother is recorded to have stood in a wagon of cow manure and distributed its good to the field, right and left.

Curiously (or perhaps not), grandfather’s first wife, my grandmother, relocates to nearby town of Tukums, which is a mere 24 km or 15 mi away from her ex-husband’s estate. There were rumors that grandfather wished to remarry her, but that she refused to take him back. Why? Perhaps grandmother was all too aware of the material losses that such a move would entail.

From 1936 on there commence a series of events, all of which, in one way or another, diminished the influence of Herrnhuters (such as remained) in general and grandfather in particular. When in 1935 (his 75th birthday) and thereafter grandfather is asked why he refuses to leave the nation a legacy such as money for scholarships, a hospital, or some other institution, he makes no response. Nobody guesses that the reason is that he is not the oligarch the public has been led to believe. No one has the audacity to guess: that for reasons of their own, grandfather and Emilia, have perpetrated a myth that both are millionaires. Having committed themselves to a myth, neither can—for the scandal that would cause—back out of it.

In 1937 there occurs an event outside the family purview, nevertheless one to which the origins of the family are closely tied.

I  At the age of 38, the last of Herrnhuters who wishes to continue the Moravian Church as a church independent of the Lutheran Church, Karlis Ozolinsh, dies unexpectedly. His death is accepted without comment, even though it is sudden and unexpected, and may be murder instigated as a result of an effort to once and for all discontinue the Moravian Church in Latvija. On second thought, given what has become a tradition of  fictionalization of Latvijan history, the death of Ozolinsh helps rewrite and silence the events of Latvijan history into something like permanent fiction. The death is among the last of nails into the coffin of the founders of the Latvijan nation. The next to last nail occurs in 1948 with the official liquidation of the church in Latvija by the post war Soviet Latvijan regime. The last nail is driven with the arrival of the so-called ‘renewed’ State of Latvija after the 1991. Thereafter the Lutheran Church of Latvija, failing leadership, writes the last ignominious chapter in its efforts to liquidate competition. Arguing that it needs resources in order to continue, it sells the last of the Herrnhuter properties in Riga. It is interesting that the property is located but a stones thrown from the former offices of the Latest News (JZ). The sale finalizes the secularization of the Christian Church in Latvija, and liquidates all memories of the Christian foundations of the Nation.

Because the Soviets and the Reich have already made their deal partitioning Europe and the elites of Latvija know it, no one has time to do an in-depth investigation of the death of Ozolish. When the last Herrnhuter property in Riga is sold in post-Soviet times, Christianity itself is too short of influence, not to say dead, to evoke publicē interest

II  In 1937, aged 77, grandfather approached his son-in-law, my Godfather, a judge of the Latvijan Supreme Court, for an opinion of the consequences if he were to divorce Emilia. The reason for asking for a divorce, he tells his daughter is: ”She (Emilia) has become insufferable”*. The legal advice he receives is harsh news: a divorce is likely to result in significant material losses for himself and his heirs. As a result, grandfather decides to suffer his estranged wife and fate. A 1937 photo ( here ) of some of the family projects the happy image; front row, children, from left: unknown, myself, my cousin, my sister, unknown; adults in first row, from left, my father, Emilia, grandfather. Emilia’s mother, my aunt; second row, from left, behind my father, my godfather, the judge referred to above, Emilia’s sister, my uncle, my aunt, identity uncertain.

*It is about this time that Emilia begins to be referred to as ”Latvija’s first lady”. This is because she accompanies (and finances?) prezident  K. Ulmanis at dinners and other events. Grandfather, suffering from depression, becomes increasingly obese, and suffers from clogged arteries. In 1939 one of his legs turns gangrenous and is amputated. Grandfather does not recover, and dies in June, without seeing his alternate home in Jurmala finished. Today a You Tube advertisement tries to sell the house. The seller, an heir of Emilia, does not hesitate to rewrite history and leave grandfather out of it.

III  During Emilia’s birthday party in 1939 (September 10), which is attended by high society friends and acquaintances, there appears a gypsy fortune teller. No one appears to know whence she comes or who she is. After the gypsy lays her cards, she tells Emilia that the cards tell that she will die of starvation.

Some sources claim the fortune teller to have been a well known Latvijan fortune teller of the time (Finks). But there is no proof of this. Neither is there proof of my version of the story. However, it must not be forgotten that by 1939 most upper class Latvians knew that independence was over and hard times lay ahead. Hitler had invaded Poland nine day before Emilia’s birthday. Rumors of an imminent invasion by Russians were in the air—the Baltic Germans were leaving Latvija en masse. Emilia had reached deep into Hitler’s government hierarchy, and her brother-in-law, an Austrian actor, had even approached Himler in an attempt to gain her refuge in Germany. Her plea was rejected. Equally rejected was my father, when he approached Emilia and asked her for funds to leave Latvija, but she refused him. This story is told by one of the editors (R. Ozols) of the newspaper. Following the death of grandfather in June, his two surviving daughters—never ones to accept Emilia as part of the family—prepared to sue Emilia for getting more than 50% of the family’s wealth. Such a 50-50 split had been proposed in the Last Testament. Given the fact that their mother, my paternal grandmother, had suddenly taken ill and could soon die, it is possible that her daughters—uninvited to Emilia’s birthday party—hired a gypsy fortune teller to spoil Emilia’s birthday with an upsetting prognostication.

It is a possibility that grandmother’s illness was not accidental, but was due to murder by poison. The reasons for killing grandmother were many.

In the event that grandmother’s daughters got to sue Emilia (and with the husband of one of them a judge on the Supreme Court, why would they not?), grandmother would make a convincing court witness, as to Emilia’s role in the break up of her family and Emilia’s true social status at the beginning of the 20th century. There were rumors that Emilia had contracted syphilis from her actor husband. Syphillis was rumoted to be the reason why she could not bear children. With inter-family relations at the breaking point—Emilia may have refused father’s request of funds to leave, in an effort to persuade him to persuade his sisters to drop the law suit against her. Failing that, grandmother became Emilia’s next logical target. Not only had the Soviets occupied the country de facto already, the family was at the brink of a no holds barred violent existential crisis of its own. The first victim of the crisis was to be grandmother*, with Red Riding Hood playing the role of wolf. While there is no photographic proof of this, untold history (and there is more than enough of it) is always more real than fiction**.

*Though they were divorced, grandfather continued to support his first wife and children throughout his life with generous, but secretive, support. The secret was maintained many years in a disciplined fashion. The move of grandmother to be near her former husband is a reality. So is th fact, that I never got to know my grandmother, because my father kept his children from her in order not to jeopardize his job as editor of the newspaper. Money was delivered to grandmother by secret couriers; as one editor of The Latest News, Roland Ozols, reports in his book ”The Last of the Mohicans” (Avots, 1992).

**A Post-Soviet Latvijan writer (L. Muktupavele), did her best to concoct a biographical fantasy-channeling, which she called ”Emilija”. Modestly successful among an audience that had no idea what Latvija had been like before the Soviet occupation (or that the Soviet occupation was, in fact, but a belated takeover of Latvija by Latvijans themselves), the author’s illiteracy with regard to the past, whether macro or micro (Muktupavele failed to interview any members of the surviving family of the day), remains an illustration of the contempt for history by the post-Soviet Latvijan generation.


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