About this episode
Paul interviews writer, scholar, and archival expert Julija Šukys, author of Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning. Part way through this project, Šukys received documents that pointed to her grandfather’s possible complicity in Holocaust-era war crimes. Their conversation traces this major discovery and how it changed her work-in-progress. They also discuss the need to find the right form for your book, the allure of archival research, and the power of short, sharp essay-like books.
Discussed On This Episode
Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson
Dear Memory, by Victoria Chang
Ongoingness by Sarah Manguso
Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde
Buy the Book
Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning is available from University of Nebraska Press | Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble | Amazon
Credits
This episode was edited and produced by Chérie Newman at Magpie Audio Productions. Theme music is "The Stone Mansion" by BlueDot Productions.
Transcript
[OPENING QUOTE - Julija Šukys] What I've cultivated is a sense of...just a sense of distance, like, a sense of that his life was not my life. That it's not my job necessarily to defend my ancestors. That my job is to tell the truth as a writer and as a researcher.
HOST INTRO (Paul Zakrzewski) Welcome to "The Book I Had to Write." This is the podcast where I talk to authors about their most compelling stories and why these journeys matter to anyone who wants to publish. I'm Paul Zakrzewski. I'm a book coach, podcaster, and essayist. I was really excited to talk to today's guest, Julija Sukys. We share some similar backgrounds. Both of us were raised in Southern Ontario, she in a Lithuanian family, me in a Jewish one. These were not part of the dominant culture of Canada when we grew up. And we've been touched by Holocaust stories, though in different ways.
Julija has written three books. She's inspired to research what she calls "minor lives from curious places." She draws on a ton of extensive archival research as well as interviews and travel to write about these subjects. And she's focused mainly on women's lives and on the legacy of violence across generations and borders. In her latest book, "Siberian Exile," she had planned to tell the story of her grandmother's deportation from Lithuania during World War II, but things took a big turn when she discovered documents that pointed to her grandfather's possible complicity in the killing of Jews during the Holocaust. If you're curious about what it takes to follow a story for several years, or to engage in deep research, I think you're gonna get a lot out of this interview.
Paul Zakrzewski: Julija, welcome.
Julija Šukys: Thank you, Paul. Thank you so much for having me.
Paul Zakrzewski: So I feel like you and I have known each other for several years now, and I feel a lot of affinities with your story. For one thing, you and I grew up very close to each other, it turns out, me in Oakville, Ontario, you in Mississauga. For people who may not know that part of Canada, what's it like?
Julija Šukys: Yeah. So, I mean, the main, I guess, the defining feature of the place that we grew up was the lake, was the lake shore. And I spent hours and hours... I lived walking distance from Lake Ontario. At that part of the lake, it's this, sort of, rocky shore with round gray, sort of, oval flat stones, and there's this, sort of, really iconic clack-clack as you walk on the beach, driftwood. And it was a, sort of, strangely, it was, sort of, a complicated landscape out there. On the one hand, it was incredibly beautiful, ravines and marshes and wetlands and beautiful forests, but also refineries. There was a big refinery, sort of, in between where I grew up and where you grew up that punctuated the landscape. Weeping Willows. Yeah, it was an incredibly beautiful place to grow up. Sort of isolated, difficult for a child, difficult with public transport. But yeah, defining landscape feature was certainly the lake and those clacking stones on the beach.
Paul Zakrzewski: I had forgotten about those, and you're totally bringing back a lot of memories actually. You also...and I didn't know this as well until I read your book, but you grew up in this, kind of, greater Toronto emigrant community, Lithuanian community. What was that like growing up?
Julija Šukys: Yeah, I grew up...and as many, many of my childhood friends did, it wasn't specific to me, but we, my generation of Lithuanian kids, we grew up with a really, sort of, split sense of identity. I really felt like I had my Lithuanian life, which took place in Lithuanian, which was, sort of, overwhelmingly my weekends were Lithuanian. So I started to go to Lithuanian Saturday school, language school, as a very young child, even before I started English school.
So I learned how to read in Lithuanian before I learned how to read in English weirdly because I started Lithuanian school a year early, because I insisted that I wanted to go to my parents. So Saturdays were Saturday school, Sundays were Lithuanian church. Later as a teenager I joined the Lithuanian dance troupe, there were youth groups, there were camps. Summer camps were spent in Lithuanian, usually in the U.S., in a girl's camp in Vermont that I went to from the time I was 5 to the age of 15.
So that was really special, and it was this really immersive, very tight-knit community at home. The language of our home was Lithuanian. We weren't actually allowed...my brother and I would get in trouble for speaking English at home, sort of, thing. And I had very close friends. My best friend growing up used to go to Latvian school on Saturday mornings. So it didn't feel strange. There were a lot of kids who were living this kind of life that I was. There were kids who were speaking, you know, Vietnamese at home, or Portuguese at home, or Latvian, or even German at home. So that didn't feel strange in that sense, in that community, because it was quite common.
Paul Zakrzewski: So when you went to first conceive of this book, "Siberian Exile," your intention was to write about your grandmother, Ona. I wanna just talk about her for a bit before we go to your grandfather. She was deported to Siberia during World War II, and was there, I think 17 years. So for people who may not be familiar with your book, what are the, kind of, the basic outlines of her story?
Julija Šukys: So the story starts in Kaunas, which is the second city of Lithuania. Vilnius is now the capital city. This takes place in Kovno or Kaunas. And my grandmother was the mother of three children. Her husband was an activist, was a nationalist, was a patriot, had been a member of the nascent Lithuanian army in 1919 as a very young man when Lithuania was under Bolshevik occupation in 1941. And there were rumors that were circulating at the time that men were being targeted, that certain kinds of men were being targeted. So the kinds of men that were being targeted would be, sort of, intellectual leaders, would be military types, police officers, anyone, sort of, with some kind of even modest leadership role.
And my grandfather caught wind of the fact that he was most likely on a list for deportation. So the family decided to take action, and they sent the kids out. My family is from a borderland area, from the Prussian-Lithuanian borderland area. And there was a, sort of, no man's land, where you needed special permission to go, except for children didn't need it. So the children were sent out to the family farm with the grandparents for safety. My grandfather went into hiding, went underground. And my grandmother was alone at home at this tiny little apartment on the outskirts of Kaunas when the soldiers came to arrest her. And the soldiers came, they were Red Army soldiers, and they were...they really came to arrest my grandfather, she was home alone, and so she was taken alone. She was loaded onto a cattle cart and shipped east to Siberia, where she spent 17 years.
Paul Zakrzewski: And documentary evidence plays a big role in this book, actually, in all your writing. And in this case, you had these letters from your grandmother. Tell me a bit about what these letters conveyed and maybe what you think they may have left out.
Julija Šukys: Yeah, the letters were, I guess, in large part, the letters were, sort of, the catalyst for the book. I write in the book that this was a story that I carried with me since childhood. And I'd always, sort of, imagined I would write about it, but I kind of lacked...I mean, even at a young age, I, sort of, understood that I didn't know nearly enough to write anything of any substance about it. So, I was in my 20s, we had a series of deaths in the family that happened very quickly. My aunt, who was also my godmother, died very prematurely of cancer in her 60s. And shortly after her death, my uncle, her husband, I was visiting him and we were having a meal, and he, sort of, reached...he went over to the buffet in the dining room, and he pulled out this package of letters, and he said, "I think you should have these."
And what they were was, it was the whole collection of the family letters, of my grandmother's letters from Siberia. So the letters tell about, you know, they're very much about the environment. They're about the snow, they're about friends, they're about animals. My grandmother had a lot of animal, a lot. She had animals that she kept in her home, right? She had roosters and chickens that nested by the stove at night when it was cold during winter. She had a beloved cow called Agneshka, who was a milk cow. She had pigs that she kept and would slaughter once in a while. So there was one called Buldes [SP], who she, you know, who was often named in the letters.
And so she lived right beside this kulkhas, this dairy farm, this collective dairy farm, and her job was to raise calves, and she was very good at it. She was very... And sometimes they would tend sheep. So it was, her life that she described in Siberia was very much about her relationship to the animals, it was a world of women, which is something I write about in the book, because there were very few men in this village. And the absence of men is something that is really...that's a theme in the book because the men, sort of, disappear. Every generation of men, the men disappear for different reasons, sometimes they die. And Stalin, you know, Stalin purged all the men at one point in the '30s. And then in the '40s, they're dying in the war, or they're dying in the mines. Now they're dying of alcoholism in Siberia. So it's still a village of women. It's almost entirely women even now.
Paul Zakrzewski: But there's also a lot that's missing or unspoken in the letters, right?
Julija Šukys: So we don't have anything in the letters about life under Stalin. And there's nothing about...there's nothing really about the politics. We know that there was widespread starvation, for example, in the '40s all over Russia, and that's not something at all my grandmother wrote about. She also didn't write anything about the politics, as I say. And so one of the questions that I had was, I knew the story that I had inherited. I had a pretty good, sort of, you know, narrative that had come down through the family about why she was deported and how that story all happened. I was curious to know why they thought they were deporting her. Like, that was really one of my big questions was, "Well, what did they think they were doing when they arrested this woman alone?"
Like, my grandmother had an eighth-grade education. She was not an activist, she was not a political person, she was not an intellectual. She's incredibly smart and a great writer, it turns out, and a great storyteller, but she wasn't a subversive person by any stretch of the imagination. So that was really one of my questions. And that was when I was looking, because I'm an archival researcher by... I mean, this is, so Siberian Exile is my third book, and I've developed a methodology. And one of my methods is to look for everything I possibly can in every kind of archive and collection I can possibly find. So I write stories about minor lives from curious places, right? So, I write about Algerians, I write about Lithuanians, I write... And then, this time, I decided to write about my grandparents, my grandmother to start with.
Paul Zakrzewski: The direction of your book completely changed when, in 2012, on a whim, you wrote to an archive in Lithuania for your grandfather's KGB file. So first, what is a KGB file? And just give us a sense of what your grandfather's file actually looked like.
Julija Šukys: So I had a conversation with another Torontonian Lithuanian writer who, you know, said...who, sort of, we had a conversation in passing one day about our work and she asked me if I'd managed to get access to it, to my family's KGB file. And I said I had tried back in the 1990s, but I hadn't been successful. And it turned out that I had gone about it the whole wrong way, and it was very early days. Like, it still was at a time when the processes weren't quite in place for someone like me to access those documents. Anyway, it turned out that I could now access what are called...so it's an archive called the...it's the Special Archives of Lithuania.
I received a whole bunch of documents. I received about 400 pages or something like that, and some of those documents were KGB files. It turned out there was a KGB file, there was a secret police file on my grandfather called a search file. And when somebody was accused, was suspected of being a war criminal, there were commissions, there were investigators who would go out to villages and talk to people. There were agents, international agents, you know, who surveilled people's movements and documented where people lived and that sort of thing.
So there is a search file on my grandfather that contains his photographs, that has interviews with his sister, that contains addresses, some correct, some incorrect, of where he lived after the war. And the search file, sure enough, you know, it ends and is closed on the date of his death. But essentially, what I discovered from that KGB file was that my grandfather hadn't been involved with really underground, illegal, fascist organizations, and he was a very minor cog in a larger machine.
Paul Zakrzewski: And in the file, you also, kind of, make more of a shocking discovery. What was that?
Julija Šukys: Yeah. So that all, sort of, precedes the deportation. So after the deportation, that's when things really shift and that's when, you know, the...I don't know how I put it in the book, but, you know, that's when everything changes essentially in our fate as a family, and in my fate, sort of, in terms of my understanding of who I am and where I came from. So my grandmother was deported in June, 1941. The Bolsheviks...the deportations end because, basically because the Germans return. That's what ends the mass deportations from Lithuania to Siberia.
So the Bolsheviks leave and the Nazi regime comes in, and immediately, the killings of Jews begin. And this stage in Lithuania, it's called the "Holocaust by Bullets," and people are being killed in pits and forests. We're not even talking about ghettos yet. So, in a very small amount of time, very short period of time, sort of, shocking numbers of people are killed in the forests and they're just, they're simply shot. At this time, my grandfather...so my grandfather is out of work, and he goes back to the borderland region to try and figure out what to do. And he takes a job as a police chief in the border town called Kudirkos Naumiestis.
Now I call it...in the book I call it New Town. Every town in Lithuania has several versions of its name, right? So it just gets translated to... So Naumiestis means new town, or nay shtot in Yiddish, neue Stadt in German. So I decided to take that neue Stadt part and simply call it New Town. So my grandfather arrives in New Town, and there are, by the time he becomes police chief, two massacres have already happened. One is of the communists, and was a small-ish event, and they were all Lithuanians who were killed, the second is the killing of the Jewish men.
And then the third massacre is the killing of the women and children, of the Jewish women and children of Kudirkos Naumiestis. And it's that massacre that he is police chief when that massacre happens, and he's accused of overseeing that massacre. So that is the big war crime revelation that I discovered when I requested these KGB files. And that's, kind of, the heart of the matter and that is the big, sort of, axis in the book that, you know, everything, sort of, revolves around. The questions of ethical responsibility, the questions of inheritance, the questions of what it means for me in terms of who do I think I am now that I have this new piece of information about my history.
Paul Zakrzewski: And I'm gonna leave it to people to read the book, to discover what level of culpability you end up deciding your grandfather bears. But I'm curious as to, kind of, what sense you feel like you've made at this point about your grandfather's actions? Where do you feel like you rest at this point?
Julija Šukys: I think I, sort of, landed in a place of ambivalence with him. The place where I feel like I really gained clarity was in terms of my own place in history and my own relationship to my past. What I took away from the project was a sense of release from my history in a way, in a strange way. So, by, kind of, assuming some sense of...or at least asking the questions about responsibility, I was able to, sort of, break from that history. And I guess what I came to, what I've cultivated is a sense of, just a sense of distance. Like, a sense of that his life was not my life. That it's not my job necessarily to defend my ancestors. That I can accept that my job is to tell the truth as a writer and as a researcher. What I'm trying to say is I landed in a place where I felt like, for the first time in my life, I was standing on my own feet, untethered to the past.
MUSIC BREAK
Paul Zakrzewski: I'm, kind of, curious to ask you about how the book evolved for you. I know your plan, when you set out, was to write a memoir, and I've read that that draft, kind of, stalled out for you. You write, "The answer to the draft was clearly not in the narrative, it had to be found in the form." Can you say more about that?
Julija Šukys: Yeah. At that time, I was really struggling to write the book straight as it were. I've always...I keep doing this every time I sit down to write a book, I try to write something, sort of, straight, and I'm not capable of it. What I mean is, like, writing a biography that has, you know...or a life story that has a, sort of, arc, and a beginning, a middle, an end, that has a kind of climax, like, a rise and fall. And it turned out, once I started to accept that the drama of the book for me, and that what was at stake in the book wasn't necessarily what happened, but it was about thinking through the stakes of what had happened, thinking through the meaning of what had happened, and thinking through the upshot, essentially, for me, of what had happened, the aftermath.
So really, the book is about, you know...the drama of the book is about my thinking through. I also learned, in writing both this book and the book that came before it, I learned an important lesson about writing about violence and about really difficult situations and difficult history. This is my second book about the Holocaust, and where form comes in that I started to embrace shorter and shorter chapters in the book. That I started to be able to...for my own sanity, I started to write through one idea at a time. And so, as a result, it becomes this, like...it becomes, like, all...I don't even know how I would describe it, it's almost mosaic-like. Like, it's, sort of, these tiny, tiny little pieces that build one upon the other.
And the smallness of it was really important. This is a very... Siberian Exile is a very short book. And so the editing that I did for it, I ended up...I took a 50,000 or 55,000, like, a normal-sized manuscript, 55,000 words, even on the short side, right? And I whittled it down over the course of a few weeks, in the summer that I spent in a cabin, just, like, chiseling and chiseling and chiseling away at it. And so that cutting process, sort of...I just felt like that really until it brought things down to its essence, and until I felt like there was nothing extraneous there anymore. That it was boiled down to the essential characters, the essential actions, the essential research, and then in the essential thinking through of what was at stake. So it became this very hard, almost polished, sometimes quite sharp little thing.
Paul Zakrzewski: That's exactly...it's interesting, that's the reading experience. You boiled the manuscript down to, you write 30,000 words. And I know that you love this kind of short-form book. You talk about Maggie Nelson as the, kind of, progenitor, the classic progenitor of a lot of these, her book, "Bluets" or "Jane: A Murder." And you joke about holding your very own one-woman tiny essay book festival, which is a phrase I loved.
Julija Šukys: Yes.
Paul Zakrzewski: What's so compelling about the form?
Julija Šukys: So for me, brevity has become...it's such a virtue. Like, I love, I really do love small, hard little books. So I've just finished teaching, it's the end of the semester here, I teach at the University of Texas at Austin. I've just taught my first class there. It was on women's autobiographical writing, right? So totally my wheelhouse. And most of the books that I taught were of this type. So one, you know, I would add into this mix would be Victoria Chang's "Dear Memory," is another, like, small little book that I love. "Ongoingness" by Sarah Manuso is another one. Even...I taught Audre Lorde's "Cancer Journals" for the first time as well. And I would even include that.
So what do I love about them? I love that there's an urgency that is laid bare. I think that they communicate and require a kind of courage that's really palpable to me. There's a kind of fearlessness in that kind of writing. You don't... There's no hiding behind ornamentation. There's no hiding behind extraneous narrative. It's just, it's so brave to get it down to the absolute essential.
Paul Zakrzewski: And a lot of your writing does revolve around getting out in the world, specifically into archives. You've written, "This is the great secret of archives, they're riveting." What is so riveting about archives?
Julija Šukys: The thing about archives is there's an intimacy to them that is, for me, I think it's the intimacy that is so seductive. I was trained as a literary critic. You know, I went through graduate school, I have a degree in comparative literature. And you know, I cut my teeth like interpreting novels and reading all kinds of, you know, all kinds of published works and stuff. And that's one form of interpretation that's totally valid. But it's a whole other story when you're in the archive because it's unmediated and it's...well, it's not entirely unmediated, I shouldn't say that because archivists are mediators, right? There's a lot of gatekeeping and there's a lot of...you know. So, that's another question.
But it's less mediated, let's say, than a published book. And the possibilities are, sort of, open. There's something also for a person like me who is inherently interested in lives that are marginal, right? In the lives of people who lived in minor languages, for example, whose papers might only be accessible linguistically to, you know, 3 million people on Earth, for example. And you, sort of, start boiling it down. Like, when I was working on Ona Simaite, the book before Siberian Exile was on a Lithuanian librarian, and I came across her papers when I was still a graduate student.
And I came to these papers with this really curious set of skills. So I had...I was a researcher who could speak Lithuanian and French and some German, and those were three languages that were really essential, and even some Russian, right? So those four languages basically gave me access to most of the archive. And I had a really strong background in Holocaust history because I had been doing a lot of research for my dissertation. I had a knowledge of Lithuanian history. I had an understanding of Soviet history and of Soviet life and of exile life, of emigrant life, of Lithuanian emigrant life.
So there I was, sort of, sitting with this archive and looking at these papers that had languished, that was sat in these tiny little community archives for the most part, for like 50 years, 60 years, and nobody had really done anything with them. And I really felt, because I was there with my strange set of skills, and I really felt like she'd been waiting for me. So there's this sense of responsibility that then begins to build, that when you begin to see something extraordinary in the archive that's just lying there that nobody else...that's like your secret, it's like a secret that you carry with you.
That book took me 12 years to write, and it was a labor of love. And it changed my life, you know? And she changed my life. And it was a gift to her. There's a sense in which, you know, love can lead you in the archive. Like, it sounds sort of, I don't know, it sounds, sort of, stupid to say that. But there is a sense in which...there's a kind of meeting across time and across eras and across languages that can happen in the archives that's really extraordinary.
Paul Zakrzewski: What do you do to avoid going down too many rabbit holes? And I've heard that this can be an issue for archive research. Or maybe you encourage going down the rabbit holes.
Julija Šukys: The thing about archival research, archival research for me, the way that I do it, my principle is to try to read everything I possibly can, to follow absolutely every lead, and it's really slow work. I mean, the truth of the matter is that it's slow and it's tedious and it's difficult. This is not something that you can simply power your way through. I mean, there are ways of working in the archive where you can decide to tell a piece of a story to begin with, and that's, sort of, how I approach that. So the question of, like, how do I know if this is a project worth spending, let's say seven years on, right? The way that I test that is I write a grant application first. I outline the part, I say, "Here's what I found. Here's what I think I could do with it." And then if I get money to fund the project, that, to me, is a sign. I also often...
Paul Zakrzewski: It's like selling a book and getting...
Julija Šukys: Yes. Selling a book, right? Which I'm not very good at, but I'm much better at grant writing than I am, because I'm actually essentially an academic in some way. But the other thing that I do, that I encourage my students to do, my graduate students to do, is I write the book in microcosm. And what I mean by that is I write a single essay where I work out what the stakes of the bigger project are. So for each of my books, there's that, like, one essay that, kind of, stands for the, like, where I'm working through, where I'm trying to figure out what the question is. Like, what is my question with this project? What is the essence? What is the driving force? What is the energy? What's at stake? And if I can figure it out in a small form, let's say 30 pages, or how many words that is, say 7,000 words, 6,000 words, if I can work through it and figure it out in microcosm, then I feel more confident to embark on something bigger.
Paul Zakrzewski: So I just wanted to switch gears with you and ask you about your new project. I know you're working on a book about gun culture and college campuses.
Julija Šukys: So this is a book that I started when I was teaching at the University of Missouri, living in, you know, a red state, in a gun state. I now live in Texas, which is, sort of, the quintessential gun state. So as a Canadian living in gun country, I had a lot of questions and I was really troubled by life in the U.S. in these red states. And there were series of events that, kind of, inspired starting this project.
One was, there was a shooting at Umpqua College, which is in Roseburg, Oregon, and it was a writing classroom, in 2015. And I was really struck by this because it was exactly the sort of class that I could be teaching. And one of the students walked in with a gun and killed the professor first and killed about, I don't know, half the class. And I found that really stunning and sobering. And on top of, sort of, the incident itself, I was also flabbergasted, I was absolutely floored by how quickly it came and went into American memory. Nobody remembered it even a week later.
Paul Zakrzewski: And my sense is that the book has changed quite a bit since you started working on it.
Julija Šukys: So the book has evolved. The book is, sort of, a meditation of thinking through the inherent violence of university culture, the inherent, sort of, cruelty, the academic cruelty, the administrative cruelty of universities. And then how that then explodes into literal violence on campuses. I follow six campus shootings, two in Canada, four in the United States, and it's an archival study. I mean, it's about archives. It's about the archives of violence to a large extent.
And it tracks how memory and narrative and the curation of memory happen in academic institutions over...how many decades? Well, the book starts in 1966 and it ends in 2015, so over that time period. And the question is, what do we save? What do we remember and how? What do administration silence? What role does fundraising and recruitment play in the question of memory? And what is the relationship between faculty, students, and administration in the wake of such a terrible event on campus? And how do things really look once all the journalists are gone, once the service dogs are gone, and once things ostensibly are supposed to return to normal?
Paul Zakrzewski: Well, Julija, thank you so much for making the time to talk with me today.
Julija Šukys: Thank you so much for having me. And I hope that you have great success with this new-ish, not entirely new endeavor, but it's a great project, Paul.
HOST OUTRO (Paul Zakrzewski): You've been listening to my interview with author and scholar, Julija Sukys. I'm Paul Zakrzewski. If you enjoyed the show, then I hope you'll subscribe to it. I'm always grateful for reviews and for sharing the show with friends. To read a full transcript of this and every episode, sign up at thebookihadtowrite.com/subscribe. And if you're working on your own book you have to write or you wanna get started, maybe I can help. I love supporting experienced authors with expert advice and focus coaching. I help writers craft book drafts, agent pitches, book proposals, and more. Find out more about me and my coaching at thebookihadtowrite.com/coaching. That's thebookihadtowrite.com/coaching. And thanks again for listening.
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