Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War Ii, and the Heart of Our Century - Hardcover

Eksteins, Modris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395937477 ISBN 13: 9780395937471

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1999

Synopsis

Based on personal experiences the author offers this history of the Baltic nations describing their brief independence after World War I, their devastation during World War II, and their annexation into the Soviet Union

About this title

Review:

For thousands of years, the windswept plains of the eastern Baltic attracted migrant tribes from all over Eurasia. These peoples lived together, sometimes uneasily, sometimes at peace, forging the multiethnic cultures of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. The last two centuries have brought one army after another to the Baltic, led by Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas, Hitler's generals, and Stalin's field marshals. In the wake of World War II, the multiethnic cultures of the Baltic splintered, and millions of citizens, including Canadian historian Modris Eksteins, born in Latvia in 1943, were sent into flight.

Eksteins's narrative, haunted by ghosts and unconventional in structure, embraces many stories. At one level, he offers a requiem for the Baltic past. At another, he composes a personal history of his family, driven so far from its homeland. At yet another, he ponders the nature of history itself in a tale that "must reflect the loss of authority, of history as ideal and of the author-historian as agent of that ideal. What we are left with is the intimacy not of truth but of experience." The terrible experience of war and conflagration propels his beautifully rendered, eyes-wide-open narrative. During his childhood, Eksteins concludes, "for regret and tears there was no time, no point." Half a century later, he is able to mourn the loss of the old Baltic world--and readers of contemporary history will find much to think about as he does. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

Modris Ekstein is a professor of history at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0395937477
• ISBN 13: 9780395937471
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288