Latvia: Enchantment and the Weight of History

Whenever the pine recalls the olden days, a few tears still push their way through the pine’s bark in the shape of the drops of resin      Latvian folktale

 

Latvia: familiar and strange

We understand new places by comparing them to where we’ve been. Latvia reminded me of the US upper Midwest: a feeling, as I passed through forests and fields on the bus and visited small towns on the banks of waterways. I looked at museum photos of log-filled streams next to sawmills, and saw Little Falls, Minnesota. The tree hugger in me felt at home in Latvian forests. Partial to the willow from childhood, I was excited to find my weepy friends. They are more silvery in Latvia.  Aspen, birch, linden, and pine also enchanted me as we walked wooded paths by the Venta River. Half of Latvia is still wooded. Kuldiga homes are wood-heated. It is no wonder that forests are central to Latvian lives, and local folklore features trees as characters.  

July was the perfect time to visit, for long days and cool temperatures. The forests were lush due to incessant rains. I become obsessed with capturing the verdant rainbow on my phone camera, moving from plant life to doors, shutters, and people dressed in green. The climate, not well-suited for wheat or corn, is great for potatoes and rye. We feasted on Latvian black rye bread, sold at the farmer’s market. Baked over three days with sourdough and soaked seeds, it was so flavorful that we ate it without toppings. We also took full advantage of midsummer’s local bounty: strawberries, cherries, red currants, gooseberries, raspberries, blueberries, wild mushrooms, sprigs of fresh basil, parsley, and large bunches of dill–the spice of choice in Latvia. The farmers offered 20 pounds of potatoes for five euros. Making ends meet can not be easy with those margins. The rains only added to a farm crisis created by corporate powers who want to transform Latvia’s diverse agricultural economy into agribusiness. Latvian farmers are where their Minnesota counterparts were in the early 1980s, when family farms lost the battle against voracious mega producers.

Lativa and the weight of history

The land reminded me of Minnesota, but Latvia’s geopolitical history was more akin to  Bosnia, Montenegro, and Albania. It is part of a chain of Eastern European countries repeatedly occupied by neighboring powers, most recently the Nazis and the Soviets. Given this history, it is understandable that the Russia/Ukraine war is viewed in Latvia as an internal threat, leading to an increase in xenophobia, racism, and militarism. Those paying the highest price are the Russian-Latvians, who are at least 26% of the population.  It is public policy to racialize Russians. The Soviets had suppressed the Latvian language and culture, making Russian the language of instruction. Now the Latvians are doing the same thing, outlawing Russian study in schools — though it is the primary language of 37% of the population. Russian Latvians face barriers to citizenship and the economic and political rights that come with it.

There is also a recent rise in militarism. As of 2024, high school sophomores and juniors are required to take a military preparedness course. The rhetoric justifying these changes is racist.  Defense Minister speaks of Russian imperialism as if it is a unique cultural phenomenon—not comparable, for example, to Western European or US imperialism. He uses terms like “natural” and “in their DNA”  to argue that Latvia’s eastern neighbor will always be a threat.  Recently, the government issued a warning about Russian spies posing as campers and hikers. “Look for people with mismatched clothing and insufficient hygiene.” After reading this warning, we saw Russian spies everywhere, including in the mirror.

I have no way of knowing if the policies and practices that racialize Russians have been absorbed by ordinary non-Russian Latvians. There are indications that it has not. I was mistaken for Russian several times in Kuldiga.  I was always treated respectfully. A Russian travel videographer visiting in 2023 was as enamored with Kuldiga as we were. He was fascinated by the cats. We were fascinated by the storks. We both fell in love with old buildings, cobbled streets, and river views. Like us, he just wandered, returning to places that look different each time, transformed by sun and shadow, noticing something new: a garden, a doorknob, a barn, a church spire.

We discovered that efforts to suppress the Russian language are not working when we spent three days in a Russian-dominated community outside of Riga. The street signs were all in Latvian, but the language on the street was Russian. The sweet man in his 60s, whom we rented from, spoke only Russian. His grandchild translated for us. Books in the apartment were in Russian, including translated volumes of Vanity Fair and Don Quijote. The coffee shop down the street had a free library with only Russian books. When we went shopping,  I was glad I knew how to say spasibo. 

Enchanting  Kuldiga

I was dismayed to read that Latvia’s contribution to the 2025 International Architecture Exhibition in Venice is an exhibit on its border security infrastructure.  Lativa is a treasure trove of architectural beauty inspired by nature.  We stayed in the stunning historical core of Kuldiga, where 17th to 19th-century buildings have been restructured and repurposed in ways that retain their aesthetic and enhance their function.

Kuldiga became a UNESCO World Heritage site two years ago. They sponsor a three-day free music festival in July with venues all over town. We danced like you do when you know nobody. It seemed to be a great success, but attendance was lower than in past years, and so were profits for local shopkeepers and festival vendors. I found it hard to understand, but apparently, war fears are keeping German tourists away.

Music is just one of many reasons to visit Kuldiga. Tour guides plan your one-day visit for you, but I’d recommend a long stay if you are seeking serenity. During my green period, I began to notice benches.  I realized there were more public benches than in any other municipality I had ever seen. Many were painted green, but others were red or mod blue with spirals. Some were unpainted. They were made of cement, iron, wood, and plastic. Some were carved in animal shapes. There were benches encircling a square, benches on sidewalks, parks filled with benches, and benches filled with people. I began to collect benches with my camera, amazed at the volume and variety.  It seemed that every historical period for the last couple of centuries had contributed benches to enhance the Kuldiga commons.

I loved unwrapping Kuldiga’s historical layers: Buildings that go back to the early 17th century.  The long brick 19th-century bridge—an engineering feat whose beauty, was enhanced by water and light.

The 1905 park celebrated a working-class anarchist revolution against both the Russian tsar and German landowners. Livia Resevska’s one-woman Sculpture Park—22 works created between 1951-1987— is reminiscent of the Gustav Vigeland Park in Oslo, Norway. 

A tower that was part of a needle factory is now a museum. You can take the winding staircase to the top, learning about child labor in the 19th-century, as you climb.  The statue of Lenin came down in 1990, but his head and other accoutrements of the Soviet period are in the Kuldiga museum, not celebrated or vilified, but noted. I could not stop photographing the silhouettes of the town’s massive Orthodox, Lutheran, and Catholic Churches. 

There was a synagogue too. 

Traveling to Latvia in 2025 as an internationalist Jew. 

My first trip to Europe was with my father in 1982. I was 24. Dad was 49. We were on a roots trip, returning to the hometown in Germany —now Poland — that his family was forced to leave in 1939. We did what many Holocaust refugees and their offspring do: visit former Jewish ghettos, concentration camps, cemeteries, memorials, and museums, looking for roots, connection, and answers to how we keep the Never Again promise. Forty years later, I am again visiting Jewish cemeteries and museums. I found them in Morocco, Albania,  Brussels, Sweden, Turkey, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Latvia.

There is a sharp divide between those Jews for whom Never Again refers exclusively to Jews and those who, like myself, take an internationalist view. Never Again for Anyone. In the 1980s, my dad and I talked about how our tax dollars were supporting a regime in El Salvador committing Nazi-like atrocities. Today, my Never Again focus is on the genocide carried out by Israel against Palestinians.  Thankfully, it is also the focus of Ebreji Par Mieru Palestina, a Latvian Jewish group in Riga. 

 Before 1941, 25% of the population of Kuldiga was Jewish. They lived in brick apartments surrounding the Synagogue. In 1941, when the Nazi’s invaded Latvia, some survived by fleeing to the Soviet Union, some had already been sent to Siberia before the Nazi invasion, some managed to flee elsewhere, and a few found refuge in farmers’ homes.  An estimated 80% of the population perished in Nazi concentration camps. Most survivors migrated to Israel in the 1950s or the 1990s. Today, the Kuldiga synagogue has been refurbished, brightly painted, and repurposed as a beautiful pubic library. There are no Stars of David or other Jewish symbols, no stained glass or other indications that the building was once a place of worship and the center of life for a large minority community.  In the back of the main floor of the library is a small exhibit, a few photographs that provide clues about Jewish life in Kuldiga before 1941. Nobody tends the remnants of a Jewish cemetery. 

In Riga, there is the Geto un Latvijas Holokausta Muzejs, located in the pre-1941 Jewish neighborhood. In addition to local experiences, it told larger holocaust stories, including an exhibit about the St. Louis, the infamous refugee ship from Nazi Germany that was not allowed to disembark in Havana, Cuba. Three months earlier, my dad, sisters, and mother landed in Cuba.  My Aunt Maja was there at the harbor with a crowd waiting to welcome the St Louis. She described people on the boat, so close she could almost touch their hands, and faces of delight turning to fright. The exhibit had photographs of those hopeful and horrified faces.  

Latvians who are not Jewish refer to Jewish Latvians as Jews in Latvia–not Latvians.  I saw this non-inclusion of Jews elsewhere in Europe. It has driven home to me European culpability in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Israel is carrying it out, and the United States is funding the carnage, but Europe is also responsible for elevating the Zionist idea. We all need a home. If you are not part of the “we” where you live, you will feel you need a homeland of your own. What a global tragedy to see Israel otherize – and annihilate the Palestinians, the way Europeans for centuries and Nazi’s for a decade did to European Jews.

Latvian Roma have had similar experiences.  And now the Russian Latvians are being treated as Russians, not Latvians.

Traveling to Latvia as a US citizen in the era of Trump. 

If we are awake, we see local places in their global context, and vice versa. While we were in Latvia, I often thought about what was happening in the United States, where xenophobic policies were reaching fascist proportions. The Trump administration opened a concentration camp in the Florida Keys. Masked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers harassed, arrested, detained, and deported people for looking Brown, not speaking English, or opposing US foreign policy. People were accosted while going to work, shop, or worship. Even schools were not off limits. Green-card holders going to their regularly scheduled immigration check-ins, students speaking out on Palestine, and tourists visiting the US were detained, incarcerated, and deported. While the context in Latvia was more understandable, given the country’s history with Russia and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was still disturbing to see these nativist trends in this beautiful land. Curtailing the rights of an ethnic group is racism, no matter the context.  

There is a fine line between celebrating culture and embracing ethnic purity. In the US, the current nativism is absurd and immoral at its very core, since the nation was created on stolen land and through indigenous genocide. Latvia was usually the one being invaded, but not always. A new statue erected in 2013 in Kuldiga marks Latvians’ small but significant contribution to the conquest of Senegal and Tobago, and the rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade, which they should acknowledge and repair, rather than claiming with pride.

Latvian culture is beautiful, not pure: It is a fusion of traditions including those of the Roma, Jews, Germans, Swedes, Finns, Poles, Russians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and more.

As I finish this essay, I am listening to pundits talk about Trump and Putin’s August 15th summit in Alaska concerning the Russia/Ukraine war. Most agree that Trump conceded to Putin. Latvian President Edgars Rinkēvičs, however, bent over backwards to show support for Ukraine without criticizing Trump. This pretzel diplomacy makes sense if your goals are to grow your military, strengthen your position in NATO, and your bargaining position with the US, while satisfying your population’s desire to stand in solidarity with Ukraine. 

I can’t measure the danger of a future Russian invasion of Latvia. I know the costs of militarizing your economy are steep. The tragedy is greater when you stand on a legacy of nonviolent militancy as exemplified by your singing revolution, when tens of thousands of Latvians joined Estonians and Lithuanians in mass singing protests for independence.  

Racism, xenophobia, militarism, genocide, and conquest are legacies from the dead generations that belong in the Never Again bin. Worship of trees? Singing in a new world order? Those are traditions to embrace. 

 

 

This essay about a one-month visit to Latvia in July 2025 is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.