The Virtue of Small

When in Rīga, I attended a performance of Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro; Figaro Kāzas in Latvian) with the Latvian National Opera at the National Opera House. Roughly resembling Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre, it was built in the 1860s and is a gem of a house -- not too cavernous so that you don't have to be Birgit Nilsson to fill the place with sound, packed with three tiers, boxes, lots of gilt trim, a wonderful chandelier, and fine acoustics. My friend Svetlana, who is a classical music buff, is keeping me apprised of the goings-on in Latvia because I can't always read or figure out what's on the many performance posters hung around town. When I mentioned that I liked opera, she contacted me to say that she had acquired two tickets because she knows some of the singers, and maybe I would like to ask someone to go with me? I told her that she should join me, and so there we were. Here's the opera house itself.

Svetlana and I met at the Laima clock in front of the house. (Laima, as you now know if you've been reading this blog, is Latvia's chocolatier. Its clock on the street is a famous meeting place, much like the clock at the former Marshall Field's in Chicago.) We had dinner and then proceeded to get flowers for her friend Ilona Bagele, who sang the role of Marcellina, to be given to her at the curtain call. The theater thoughtfully provides vases filled with water at the coast check for flowers that are to be given to the musicians. I thought this was very smart and very Latvian.

As it turns out, Ilona lives in Daugavpils, teaches voice at Daugavpils University in the music program, and goes to Rīga, where she maintains a flat, to stay there as she needs to when she is cast in an opera. Because Svetlana knows Ilona -- they were neighbors once -- we got to go backstage and see her after the peformance. I did not expect this special treat, but Svetlana had arranged this because this is What is Done. There was the usual flurry of photo taking, so here we are! The first is me, Ilona, and Svetlana. The second is with Inga Šļubovska-Kancēviča, who sang the role of Susanna.

(If you're wondering about the palm trees, this production was set in a small Central American village, which worked beautifully. Count Almaviva was a sort of petty Central American dictator, all bluster in his military uniform, and Susanna and Figaro were the servants that any self-respecting Central American landed gentry would have had as a matter of course. The setting played up the complicated gender politics of the opera extremely well.) 

What struck me about the production is how very Latvian it was. I don't mean in the sense of the setting of the opera, but rather in how opera seems to be done here. Clearly Rīga is not New York's Metropolitan Opera; this is not a major house on the world scene (even if Mikhail Baryshnikov did in fact get his start here in the Latvian National Ballet). But this is why it works so very well. All of the cast was Latvian, and my guess is that they all know each other and have sung together in various works over the years. This might be why the ensemble singing in Figaro was so good, and in Mozart the ensemble pieces are everything. This system is also why Ilona can live and work in Daugavpils, three hours away, and sing regularly in the national opera house, as she has for the past ten years in a number of productions: Carmen, Rusalka, and a number of others. It's why one doesn't have to have an international career to have a career here. The opera house is three hours from any point in the country, basically, and while I'm sure that all the singers must teach and do other musical things to make a living, the fact that they can sing regularly in this house means that it's perfectly possible to be an opera singer here, no matter where one lives. It also means that productions have some cohesion because pulling singers and players together for a rehearsal is far easier than at the international opera house where the superstars are flown in for a few days, and then jet off to Madrid or St. Petersburg or Buenos Aires for another performance. The fact that the house itself is small means that one can have a smaller voice and still sing regularly in productions. The fact that it's easy to be known as a singer here means that it might be easier to get cast here. The fact that there must be some kind of underwriting for the house means that ticket prices are low (5 to 20 euros), which means people can actually go to the opera, and they do. The house was packed with everybody from 10-year-olds to devoted older couples to college students out on dates. (The repertoire of the house is impressive; there is a production of opera or dance nearly every night of the year, most of them in repertory. How the National Opera manages to pull this off is a mystery to me, but I'm glad it does it.) And the fact that everybody knows everybody means that an average Joe like me gets his photo taken with Susanna and Marcellina.

I have heard repeatedly from Latvians that "We are a small country," and it's usually given a self-deprecating spin. I'm skeptical that this is a bad thing, now having lived in Maine, a small state that doesn't figure much on the national American scene, for over a decade -- the same way Latvians feel that Latvia doesn't figure much on the European scene. But the Latvian National Opera shows just how to make enormous virtues out of being a small place. Big doesn't automatically mean excellent.

For the record, the production was lovely. The orchestra, led by Andris Veismanis, was nimble as quicksilver, as it needs to be for this opera. I would single out Figaro, as performed by Rihards Mačanovskis, for the excellence of his singing, but the entire cast was very good, and the ensemble work was exemplary. Now Svetlana and I are deciding what we will see next. Because, in a small place, it's so easy to do.

Riga

I spent a couple of days in Rīga this week meeting with some of the staff of the American Embassy. Rīga is the metropolis of the Baltic states, with a population somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000. Half of Latvia lives in metropolitan Rīga, and it shows: this is clearly the nerve center of the nation. The banks are here, the cultural institutions are here, the shopping is here, the best health care is here, and much of the gross national product is produced here. At about 100,000, Daugavpils is the second-largest city in Latvia, and there is a certain inferiority complex about playing second fiddle to the "real" city up the Daugava River.

I'll have more to say about Rīga in later posts, but for now it's worth just enjoying some photos from its Old Town. This is the oldest part of town, as the name implies, though the city itself is quite large. Rīga's deservedly famous Art Nouveau quarter is just north of this, but this compact area is a touristy delight, with medieval streets, old churches, and plenty of tourists snapping photos of everything, including yours truly.

I met with my friend Svetlana in Rīga ot attend an opera, which will write about in my next post. Svetlana took the photos here, actually, which explains why I am in so many of them. First, the view from my sixth-floor hotel room, overlooking the Lutheran Rīga Dome Cathedral. Second, Dome Square, which is fronted by several important institutions, the national broadcaster Latvijas Radio among them. The Cathedral has one of the largest organs in Europe, with some 4,000 pipes. I would love to hear some of my Detroit-area organist friends get a crack at playing. As you might expect, the Dome has concerts galore.

And on to the other buildings. This one, known as Cat House, is a charmer. Click on the photo and look at the top of the turret and you'll see how it gets its name.

The first photo here is the Small Guild (Mazā Ģilde), and opposite the Small Guild is the Great Guild, the home of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra. The second is just a typical streetscape. As charming as Old Town is, it is also bewildering in that it is very easy to lose all sense of direction. American cities may be boring in comparison with their general grid pattern, but at least you can find your way around easily. I kept losing my hotel, the same way one might lose a set of keys.

Old Town is very compact and filled with little hotels. I would guess that Rīgans might not spend a lot of time in Old Town -- why deal with all those tourists, and what do we need suvenīri for? A visitor finds it lovely, though I have to admit that I got lost walking to the Embassy, which is way out on the edge of town on the other side of the Daugava River -- generally, the side visitors don't bother with. Being in a real neighborhood filled with citizens just going about their everyday business was seriously enjoyable, and if I hadn't been worried about being late for my appointment, I would have snapped some photos. It looked more like Daugavpils: Russian-style wooden houses with fancy painted shutters, Art Nouveau apartment buildings, and the usual Soviet schlock that make Rīga not look all of a piece the way Old Town does, but more of a real city than a theme park pretending to be a city.

Finally, a very important building: this building houses the Saeima, or the Latvian Parliament.

Synagogue

On Friday, Dr. Anne Knowles of the University of Maine passed through Daugavpils. A researcher of cultural geography, she has a particular interest in Jewish life and the Holocaust in eastern Europe, and one of her former students is here as well as a Fulbright English teaching assistant, which is how we met. I made arrangements to visit Daugavpils' single synagogue, the "Kaddish" synagogue, asking Natālija Oševerova of the USA Information Center to join us so that we would have a translator.

A little background: Daugavpils has had a long and venerable Jewish history as it has changed hands among Germans (when it was known as Dinaburg), Poland, and Russia (when it was known as Dvinsk) over the last couple hundred years. In particular, when it was part of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, it was a center of Jewish scholarship and culture; a number of important rabbis came from Dvinsk, fully half the population of the city was Jewish, and there were forty synagogues in the city. As one might expect, the Holocaust devastated what by then was known as Daugavpils. The Jewish community now is very small, consisting of about 200 mostly Russian-speaking Latvian Jews who returned after the war. There is currently no rabbi at the synagogue, though there has been in the past. But the fact that there is a functioning synagogue at all is a testament to the dedication of this small community of Jews.

It's also testament to the children of Mark Rothko, the great American abstract expressionist painter, who was born in Dvinsk into a Jewish family. (The new art museum in Daugavpils, which is a stunner, is the Mark Rothko Art Center -- more on it later). The Rothkos emigrated to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century when Mark was only 10. He never returned, but after his death, his children donated original Rothkos to the new museum, as there was no way it could possibly afford to buy even a single Rothko on the current art market. And they gave the money to renovate the Kaddish Synagogue, for which we all should be very grateful. Here's the dedicatory plaque, in Hebrew, English, Latvian, and Russian. As you can see, the synagogue was built in 1850, and the renovation is pretty recent. 

I am surprised to admit that this was the first time that I had ever been in a synagogue. Our genial and knowledgeable guide, Iosif, is a member of the congregation, and he explained the basics of Jewish worship practices to us. Anne is Jewish, so I don't think she learned anything that she didn't know already. I knew a fair amount already as well, and I am not sure that I caught everything in translation, but it was so enjoyable to listen to Iosif informing us about a building and the worship practices that he clearly cares so deeply about. Here are some photos of the interior. It is a light, airy, and very lovely space. Perhaps some of my Jewish friends would be willing to comment on some of these photos; as I said, I missed some of the explanations, despite Natālija's superb skills as a translator.

And then there is Iosif himself, here in the small museum attached to the synagogue. This is located upstairs in the gallery where the women of the congregation would sit to observe the services in the sanctuary below. You can see behind him a map of Latvia that has numbers indicating the number of Jews in various Latvian cities. They are presently very low, though I am pleased to report that Rīga now has a Hebrew school, so we shall see what the future may hold for Latvian Judaism.

What struck me hard in visiting the museum is the great, immense silence about the Holocaust in Latvia. I was stunned to learn, for example, that the village on the other side of the Daugava River which is now part of Daugavpils proper was the site of the Jewish ghetto where Jews were forced to live when the Nazis stormed into the city. More shocking was the fact that there were mass exterminations somewhere in the vicinity of the city. There are chilling photographs in the museum of Jewish women, stripped naked and lined up, just before they were executed. Or that 1500 Jews were killed in the Daugavpils prison, the "white swan" as it's known here, a building I have passed a number of times. These are horrific facts, but what might be even more horrific is the fact that I never would have known them at all if it hadn't been for Iosif. The silence surrounding what happened to the Jews of Daugavpils is just that: complete silence.

This is clearly something to ponder. As the most Russian city in Latvia, I would bet that Daugavpils was also the most Jewish, but what you hear about what must have been the great Jewish history here is virtually nothing, other than the renovation of the Kaddish synagogue. Doubtless that the Holocaust is excruciatingly painful to talk about. But then so are any of the atrocities of the Second World War, and they are coming to light; dedicated people, in fact, are insisting that they come to light. The University just opened a traveling exhibit from Poland on the WWII Katyń forest massacre of 15,000 Polish officers, killed by the Soviets on Stalin's orders, who then blamed the Nazis and spent 60 years denying that the Soviet Union was in any way responsible. The truth only came to light when Gorbachev's policy of glasnost made the secret documents available and proved that the Soviets were guilty of the crime. This kind of revisionist history is happening all over Europe, but for these intensely local issues about the Holocaust and what it did, there seems to be an intentional, even willful silence.

And I think in part it's not about the pain that such atrocities must make real and public, as important as that is. I think the real issue here is about facing up to how individual people, villages, and cities were implicated, and how they too must bear the responsibility of allowing such a thing to happen. If Daugavpils established a ghetto, then the city must have been an accomplice to the extermination of many of its own, if even it did so tacitly. Surely some people must have known about 1500 people being killed in the White Swan. Jewish citizens were forced to walk in the street and not on the sidewalks -- photographs at the museum document this -- and Daugavpils citizens must have allowed it to happen. Of course, choosing between saving one's own life under the Nazis by turning one's eyes away and taking a stand for the Jews hardly constitutes an easy choice: it's a choice that almost becomes a non-choice. I wonder, with deep and profound discomfort, what I would have done had I been a Daugavpils citizen. But my gut feeling is that until this kind of silence is made audible -- until everybody is willing to confront that ugly part of the human experience that frankly implicates all of us in this history -- we can't talk fully about the Holocaust. We can't fully talk about anything.

Name Day

Years ago when I was a grad student, my fellow grad student Marcy and I would celebrate our birthdays together. Her birthday is October 7, and mine is October 9, so we would go out for lunch on October 8 and buy each other's lunch. It took us a few years to realize that if we actually celebrated our birthdays on the actual day of our births, we could take each other out -- me taking her out on the 7th and she taking me out on the 9th -- and get two lunches instead of just one.

It turns out that Latvians have been ahead of us for ages on this. I was having my weekly check-in meeting with the Dean of the humanities faculty, Dr. Maija Burima, and there was cake and flowers in the office. I have gotten used to this -- cake, coffee, flowers, and chocolates are ubiquitous in Latvia -- but I found out that the celebration was for one of the office staff's name day.

This is not a birthday. It is one's name day, and you will notice that every day of the year on a Latvian calendar has two to four Latvian names listed on that day. Other countries have name days like this, too, in particular Orthodox countries where the names are saints' days. That's what I originally thought they were in Latvia, too, and at one time they probably were. But if you look at some of the names, it seems pretty obvious that they are not saints. Saint Pārsla, anybody? Saint Banga? Saint Ilmārs? Yeah, I didn't think so either. I'm not exactly sure how one celebrates the day that honors the saint for which you were named. Having been raised Roman Catholic, I and all my siblings were named for saints. (My parents went traditional; I could have been Fabian, which would have been rather cool.) I know that Saint Robert Bellarmine's feast day is in November, but nothing special ever happened on that day, and I certainly didn't celebrate anything. Perhaps the Russian Orthodox Church takes these celebrations more seriously, though I don't know.

But Latvia does take this seriously. It turns out that a Latvian calendar lists about 1000 Latvian names, hitting all the major ones, and one day in the year (I'm not sure which one) is devoted to any Latvian names that have been missed and are not on the calendar. An official name commission regulates the names, adding new ones as they become popular and dropping others as they sort of disappear. By way of comparison, in the United States one would not find Gertrude or Rupert on the name day list, but one would find Ashley and Mason. So everybody gets a name day in the Latvian calendar year.

Why? To get presents. Mind you, name day presents are not supposed to be as fancy as birthday presents. Flowers and cake, that sort of thing, are standard gifts to give on someone's name day. But who cares? It's the fact that Latvia has seen fit to create another day of the year in which one is showered with presents, and that there an official commission whose sole purpose, apparently, is to make arrangements for this to happen. How can you not love a country that would do this?

So you now know that my birthday is October 9. My name day is January 14, so you have plenty of time to prepare. I am partial to Latvian honey cake (medus kūka). Just so you know.

My Neighborhood

I live on the edge of Old Town Daugavpils, right in the heart of the city. All of these sights are within five minutes of my flat here. It was a beautiful sunny day this afternoon, and the weather has been mild; I expect that spring arrives earlier in Latvia than it does in Maine.

Here is the building that I live in. My very own Kruschko (I am sure that this spelling is not correct, but the pronunciation would be.) The lower right hand window on the narrow end of the building is my flat's window that looks south. You can another Kruschko immediately behind this one, and in fact, we are behind another one. There are entire neighborhoods of these Soviet-era buildings, and many of them are looking their age. But the tall trees tend to soften the harshness of the drab exteriors, and in all fairness, the flats can be very cozy.

Nearby is a small vest-pocket park where the Russian Orthodox Aleksandr Nevsky Church once stood, if my sources are correct. It was torn down, I think in the '50s. A chapel remains, and it's busy with worshippers going in and out at all hours. This is the back view of the chapel from the park.

Across the street from the University is a streetscape of older buildings. I think that this one houses a lawyer's office (the sign in front reads "Advokat"). I'm smitten with the very Art Nouveau ironwork.

Finally, just a typical streetscape of wonderful nineteenth-century buildings, one after another. All that fancy brickwork! If you click on the photo to make it larger, you might see a small blue and white plaque on the building on the far left. I think that this means that this building is of historic importance. The plaque is issued by the Latvian government, maybe from the Ministry of Cool Old Buildings.

Of course, not all streets look like this; some buildings came down here and there and were replaced with newer ones that are not always sympathetic to what's around them. In particular, Soviet buildings don't fit in very well because they are often out of scale and severely plain Jane, having been put up fast and generally on the cheap. But plenty of older stuff did survive, and the residential neighborhoods are a funky mix of Soviet schlock and Russian-style wooden houses with carved working shutters painted in cheerful colors. And floral patterned sheer curtains are hung in all the windows, but if you've been reading this blog you already knew that.

Latvian Grammar Update!

This just in from my friend Svetlana, who is a native Russian speaker, fluent in Latvian, and very good in English. I have edited her comments slightly:

"Good afternoon, Robert! How are you? I have read your blog about languages today. Your comparison of the grammar of languages is very interesting. I decided to correct you a little in connection with the ending of the nouns.
 
"The Latvian language has seven cases, singular and plural forms, and two genders (feminine and masculine). Also there is common gender, but Latvian has very few such words.
 
"Taking into account the gender of nouns and case endings, they are divided into six declinations.
Nouns of the masculine gender relate to the first three declinations (7x3 = 21 – singular form). In the plural form, these nouns have the same endings for these three declinations. (7x1 = 7). Nouns of the feminine gender refer to the second three (4-6) declinations. They have different endings as in singular and plural. ( 7x6=42 )
 
"If we take reflexive nouns then to this number we can add 17 more endings. A total: there are 87 different possible endings. Plus, there are various exceptions. This is what I remember from the school course. Your colleagues linguists will enlighten you better than I will, of course."

So there you have it. I completely forgot about number, that is, singular and plural (and some languages have more numbers than that -- forms for nouns that are two in number, and different forms for nouns that are three or more) in addition to gender and case. So, if you thought that Latvian nouns would be hard to learn, it turns out that it's even worse than you thought. Which makes me gnash my teeth at native Latvian speakers who just produce the right forms constantly without even thinking about it -- or speakers like Svetlana and my students who do this kind of complex ending dance with two unrelated, inflected languages, and still manage it flawlessly and without giving it a bit of thought. Arrrrgggh! 

Languages 2

Latvian and Russian are further difficult to learn because they have so few cognates with English. Of course, recent borrowings back and forth are recognizable: you can figure out that borsč is "borscht" or tehnīka is some form of "technical." But it's the everyday words that completely stump you. Going into the supermarket was hugely instructive in this regard because you can see things in jars or on the product labels so that you can figure things out. Supermarkets are pretty much the same the world over, too -- breakfast cereals come in boxes, they are all grouped together, and if they are for small children, cute characters happily eating said cereal are illustrated on the boxes -- so you can get a lot of vocabulary very quickly. But there is no easy way to guess that olas are "eggs," or that piens is "milk" other than the fact that these items are located in what is clearly a refrigerated dairy case. Likewise, there are innumerable clothing stores all over Daugavpils, but apģerbi isn't a word that I can find any cognate for that hits close to "clothing," nor does apavi resemble "shoes." You figure these words out by going into the store and finding out what it being sold. Or you make up some kind of connection: you wear apavi to walk on the pavement.

Sometimes odd cognates do turn up, though. I've seen various forms of bernu, berniam, and so on, depending on the case (not that I could tell you what it is). The word means "child" or "children," and the first time I saw it it struck me that it must be related to the medieval Celtic word for child that is similar to it and that has survived in the Scottish dialect as bairn. I have to wonder if olas, "eggs," is somehow distantly related to ovulation, and I bet that it is. It's worth knowing that the Baltic language family, which consists of Latvian and Lithuanian, is among the oldest families in the Indo-European language family, which includes almost all modern European languages, not to mention the languages of Iran and some of the languages of ancient India. If there are cognates that Latvian has with English, it's a pretty safe bet that they are either very recent borrowings or very, very old borrowings.

Russian poses its own set of problems. Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet that consists of 33 letters, some of which are exactly like the letters of the Roman alphabet, though they are not always pronounced the same. Many of the letters have no relationship to Roman letters, or indeed the letters of any alphabet, though the relationship between Russian and Greek letters is sometimes visually clear. For example, here is my name is Cyrillic: Роберт Келлермен. (Many thanks to the nice Russian woman at the USA Info Center who helped me out with this!) I think it looks totally cool, like a secret Russian code, but trying to read a menu in a language that you can't speak followed by a language that you can't speak or read means that I often just point to a picture and hope that I like what I have just ordered. If you want to be adventurous diner, Latvia is not a bad place to be.

Not being able to read Russian means that I can't sound out words the way that I can in Latvian, which tends to be very regular and highly phonetic: words are pronounced pretty much exactly as they are spelled, and Latvian helps you out with a nice set of diacritical marks that indicate syllable accents, changes to consonant sounds, and so on. So my learning Russian here is pretty much going nowhere very slowly because I have enough work on my hands to learn the official language here, and that not even very well.

So there are a set of reasons that I will not come back with any serious fluency in either language spoken here. I expect that this is the case for many Fulbrighters unless they are in the country for the full academic year and are dealing with the language more fully than I am. After all, I am here precisely because I am a native speaker of English; this is what my colleagues and students want from me, so I speak English with them as much as possible. It is gratifying, if a little disconcerting, to be told by students how much they enjoy hearing my accent. It is in fact a standard, classic Midwestern accent, complete with flat vowels and occasionally odd Midwestern pronunciations. I like my accent a lot, actually; I have just never been told that is was a pleasure to listen to. And I still don't quite believe it.

Languages 1

This is going to be a series of posts about language and the complicated language politics of Latvia. I will spread it out over the next few days.

First, a little linguistic background. I realize now that I am not going to learn a lot of Latvian -- or, for that matter, Russian -- in my short stay here because the languages are just too complicated to really master without serious daily study, which I don't have time for with my teaching duties, and you would really need to study over a couple of years. That's just how it is.

The issue here is that both Latvian and Russian are heavily inflected languages, and English is not (though it used to be, as my history of the English language course is making clear to my students here and in the States). An inflection, for those of you who have not studied languages -- and I'll just insert a commercial here and say that everybody should study a second language -- is a change to a word to indicate a change in its grammatical function, usually a change in the root of the word or the addition of a prefix or suffix. For example, in English, we indicate the plural of a noun, a change in grammatical function, by adding an "s," with a few exceptions. That's an inflection. Adding a "d" or "ed" to the end of most verbs to indicate the past tense is also an inflection. So is changing the root vowel of the word, as in the irregular verb "swim swam swum."

In heavily inflected languages, inflections occur to mark all kinds of grammatical functions. For example, in English we can say I gave John a gift, meaning a I [the subject of the sentence] gave a gift [the direct object of the verb] to John [the indirect object of the verb, the object of the preposition to]. If we made John a direct object of the verb, as in I greeted John, the word John does not change its form, though its grammatical function in the sentence does. Likewise, we can inflect nouns to mark the possessive: John becomes John's as in John's gift,which is really a shorter way of saying the gift of John. In this second version of the possessive, we don't actually change the noun's form. It's just that, if we choose to, we can, as in the first version of the possessive, the one that we use normally. 

In Latvian and Russian and lots of other languages, those changes in grammatical form must be marked with endings on the noun -- a set of endings to indicate whether the word is the subject of a sentence, the object of the verb, the object of a preposition, a indicator of place (as in in the bedroom or on the table), and a possessive, as well as a couple of other functions. There are six or seven cases in Latvian, a case being the grammatical function of the noun and the set of endings that you add to indicate that function. (I keep hearing differences of opinion about how many cases Latvian has, so let's just go with seven for now. I'm not sure how many Russian has -- six, I think. Perhaps one of my Latvian acquaintances will clarify this for me.) But wait! There's more!

Latvian and Russian also have gender, as indeed most European languages do, English being an unusual exception. Gender can mean biological gender, though it typically doesn't. It simply means a classification system that all nouns fall into: they are either in one class or another, depending on the number of genders. Typically, in European languages there are two or three: male, female, and if there's a third, neuter. Both Latvian and Russian have three genders. Again, don't think of gender as something tied to biological gender; we could just as well say that nouns have color, and all nouns are either red, blue, or yellow. But for whatever reason, we classify nouns by using the term gender, and in many languages all nouns, including inanimate objects and abstractions, have gender. Drawing from French, the European language I know some about, there is nothing inherently masculine about a table, but it French le table is masculine. Nor is there anything inherently feminine about a chair, but in French it's la chaise. (The word the, in French le and la, is inflected, as you can see; it has a masculine and feminine form which must match, or agree, with the noun with which it is associated.)

Now, then, back to Latvian: seven cases and three genders for nouns. That means for any noun in the language, there are 21 different possible endings, depending on its gender and its case, that is, how it's functioning in the sentence. (Latvian's relative Lithuanian is even harder because I am told that it has twelve cases. Good Lord.) And remember that this is just a general overview for nouns: adjectives and verbs are all inflected too, and if you think nouns would be hard, just wait until you start to try to learn the verb forms. This long intro to very basic language structure is just the tip of the iceberg. (I'll talk about verbs later.) 

Does this mean that English is just an easier language to learn? Not at all. English has cases too, and speakers do all the same things that Latvian and Russian speakers do, but they just do it differently. For example, word order matters in English: subjects come before verbs and objects come after them. John greeted Mary does not mean the same thing as Mary greeted John; where the nouns come in the sentence determines how they are functioning. In Latvian and Russian, word order is far less important because the case endings do the work that word order does, so you can mess around with where you put words in Latvian and Russian, and as long as the case endings are correct, it doesn't matter so much.

Likewise, in English we make heavy use of prepositions to do the work of case endings. Think about the word to, for example: what does it mean to say I gave a gift to John? What exactly does to mean in this context? What does it mean in Let's toast to life? Put the pedal to the metal? It fits him to a tee? Get in the lean-to? To the point you're making? Take it to the limit? Up to date? To all the young men? In each example, to means something different, and this is just the surface of all the meanings of this one single preposition. (Its definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, as indeed is the case for all prepositions, runs for pages and pages and pages.) English speakers just learn all the shades of meaning for every preposition, use them flawlessly, and never, ever think about them. Latvian and Russian speakers just know what case to put on any noun, put them on flawlessly, and never, ever think about them as well.

Again, all this discussion is only about one single part of speech, the noun. I haven't even started on adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, and those are the just the basic parts of speech. So learning Latvian is a struggle for an English speaker unused to such a complicated inflectional structure. But you know what? Latvian and Russian are both inflected heavily, and the inflectional systems don't bear any relationship to each other, but my students go back and forth between the two constantly and with an ease that make my jaw drop. It's not that one can't learn a heavily inflected language any more than one can't learn a less inflected one like English. Because you know what? They have mastered that language as well. And they are all studying a fourth language at university. My gut sense is that Americans are at a huge disadvantage living in a place where they hear only one language all the time; easy or difficult, the more languages that you have to negotiate, the more you will negotiate them. My students here are superb linguists, even if they don't know it. But for them, it's just, well, everyday life.

 

Triviana Latviana

Latvia and, I expect, the Baltics in general are the world capitals of flower giving. International Women's Day was this week, and flower vendors were everywhere selling bouquets. Many of my women students showed up to class with flowers. This was not an isolated event. At the previous two concerts I attended, conductors, choreographers, and musicians were all presented with flowers at the end of the program. My colleagues have fresh flowers in our communal office weekly and sometimes more often. There are shops selling flowers (ziedi) all over Daugavpils. I find it hard to buy some basic kitchenware but easy to buy tulips. I don't know to what one should attribute this cultural preference for giving people flowers -- well, and chocolate too -- but it's an awfully nice preference.

I am compiling an extended list of what I call TINDs, or "This Is Not Done" -- those things that you do in your own country until you go to another country where those things are clearly incorrect, as in This Is Not Done (Here). For example, when you enter a building you only go in the door with the big green dot on it, not the one with the big red dot on it. This would seem to be self-explanatory, and it is if you know traffic signals, once you have realized that you are supposed to pay attention to the color of the dot on the door. Or more accurately, once you become aware that doors have dots on them that you otherwise would have never noticed because they don't have them at home, and then that you are supposed to pay attention to them. Oddly, the dots do not line up logically. That is to say, if there is a set of five double doors in a row at the entrance to a building, the green dot will be on the far right outside door, and the next green dot will be on the far left inside door, so you have to make a little jog to get in. Streamlining the doors would make more sense, but This Is Not Done. The door directly in front of the outside green dot door has a red dot on it. But you, like me, were probably not paying attention.

TIND #2 involves the busing of your tray full of dishes in a kafejnīca back to the counter to save the staff a trip to your table. Do not do this; This Is Not Done. The staff of the kafejnīca will take the tray with a mix of good cheer and general bafflement, but they also might say something like "Don't do this" in Russian. I'm not sure why not, but I can only assume that returning the tray to the counter destroys the finely calibrated balance of how the institution in general works, and too much busing of trays might throw the Earth out of its natural orbit and, perhaps, directly into the path of an asteroid.

I would say in general that stores in Latvia are staffed very completely, perhaps even too much so. I went to buy a flash drive and stopped by the local electronics store. It's not a particularly big store, or at least not big enough to warrant the eight salespeople on the floor. This system is terrific for customers: thorough, attentive service is the norm, and with that many people somebody can probably understand English well enough to figure out whatever I am saying in my poor Latvian and worse Russian. (Everybody appreciates my honest efforts, though, which is gratifying.)

I am guessing that home gardens are very, very popular in Latvia. The supermarkets have had their seeds for flowers and vegetables out since my arrival in mid-January, and every supermarket also has a good-sized section of gardening tools and paraphernalia. Because most people live in low-rise apartments, many have a "summer home," a sort of a local Russian dacha on the outskirts of town where they garden. My acquaintance Svetlana does, and for a small plot of land, it's extremely productive, complete with vegetable beds, flower beds, and an apple tree from which her husband makes juice from his own press. As it happens, this apple juice is delicious. Svetlana brought me a gallon of it.

I can now say "Good morning," good afternoon," "good evening," and "thank you" in both Latvian and Russian. I have found that these phrases in the local language are pretty much all you need to exist anywhere, as long as you are willing to point, gesticulate, and pantomime to make your needs known. Happily, I've been here long enough now that I am a known entity, an example of that exotic species Homo Americanus. Now people will try out their English with me if they have it, or even if they don't. So I have arrived at that sweet spot where I am living here, not simply passing through. I have a regular network of acquaintances, professionals, and shopkeepers, all of whom know me and know that I really like coffee, I seem to read books a lot, I am very grateful for any help proffered, and I apparently smile more often than is strictly necessary, which officially marks me as American, peculiar, or both. And they respond in kind. One very nice Russian kafejnīca lady, when she sees me come in, says in a very accented and carefully practiced English, "Hello! Glad to see you." I show my appreciation by leaving my tray on my table.

The local public library has a small collection of books in English, though the vast majority of the collection is of course in Latvian and Russian. The English books are clearly donated books because there is no guiding principle as to what the collection ought to be: Dave Barry, Virginia Woolf, John Grisham, and Jack London all share the shelves together. I'm grateful that there are any books in English, and when I first arrived I was so eager to be able to read anything that didn't require sounding out slowly (or harder, learning an entirely new alphabet and then sounding out slowly) that I just checked out and read classics that for some reason I had never read in my academic career. This is why I can now say that I have read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and I'm sort of surprised that it's taken me so long to get to it. It was very good -- better than the Judith Krantz one shelf over.

Folk Dancing

Yesterday afternoon, I went to Daugavpils' cultural center Vienības Nams (Unity House) to watch a performance of Latvian folk dance. I was joined by Svetlana, a Russian woman I met at the USA Information Center in town. She is studying English, and for a year's study has made remarkable progress. She also makes a mean apple cake which she brings to English classes, but that does not influence my assessment of her ability at all . . .

I'll have more to say about Unity House, but for now I'll discuss folk dance. Like folk music, folk dance has a really popular following in Latvia, both people watching it and people performing it. Like folk music, one of its appeals is that anybody can do it; the steps are not so difficult that it would be out the reach of someone with a moderate sense of rhythm. At the same time, the dancers yesterday had clearly practiced and done so for a while because they were impressive. As you might expect, the younger the dancer, the more energetic the kicks and the more complicated the fancy footwork. Even so, you could tell that these were not professionally trained dancers, though they were very polished. They reminded me of swing dancers in the United States, people who saw the folk dancing, thought it looked like a lot of fun (I sure did), and decided to join a troupe and learn how to do it. I may have to ask my acquaintance Uģis, who dances with a troupe, how I could learn some of the basics.

I was also impressed by the range of age groups onstage yesterday. Several troupes were made up of young kids, several of teenagers or young adults, and several of older dancers -- probably my age and up. Apparently folk dancing is an equal opportunity activity here. It reminded me a bit of the range of people that you see at a typical contra dance in Maine. Everybody can dance, so everybody does dance. And, as I have written in a previous post, the music is really infectious.

The troupes were joined by a troupe from Lithuania, or at least I think they came from there. They may have been local, but they were decked out in traditional Lithuanian costumes, and I could tell this by the ribbons they wore in the colors of the Lithuanian flag. (I can now identify the national flags of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Belarus.) There was a Russian troupe and a Polish troupe as well that I think were local, as Daugavpils has a large Russian population and a smaller but significant Polish population. And there was a group of women musicians, I think from Lithuania as well, who played folk instruments that looked and sounded like the central European cousin of a dulcimer.

Here's one of the troupes, and then there's a photo of the ubiquitous group shot at the end, sort of like a Scottish gathering of the clan:

I am totally taken with traditional Latvian dress. The women's skirts are full and twirl beautifully when a dancer spins, and the men's long jacket -- sort of a cross between a sportcoat and a tunic, with an intricately embroidered belt -- looks so practical that I can't imagine why it ever disappeared as an everyday garment in the first place. Furthermore, the great asset of this dress is that, regardless of the wearer's physical shape, everybody looks really good in it.

Next week: the Daugavpils Chamber Orchestra. There wasn't a lot going on when I arrived in Daugavpils, but now it's a feast of cool events.

Teaching, Week 4

I'm settling into the teaching here better than I was earlier. I am generally pronouncing my students' names correctly, I have a regular schedule, and I am leading a lot of discussions -- pretty much the same things I do on the other side of the Atlantic.

I have been working with a master's candidate, Elizabete, in two courses that only meet every other week, one in 20th-century American literature and one in 20th-century British literature. She is incredibly enjoyable because she's a master's candidate and has a lot of knowledge under her belt already. So instead of starting with the usual Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway, we're reading more challenging and, well, odder Orlando. Next on the agenda in the American course is Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, a play I don't know at all, so teaching here is giving me a bigger portfolio of texts that I've read, digested, and about which I have figured out something relatively intelligent to say. It's nice to only have a single student in a seminar, which really has become the English model of a tutorial, and I have never worked with a master's student before because my home institution doesn't have any graduate programs. And Eliza is an absolute delight -- smart as a whip and intensely curious about books that she hasn't read yet. When she told me that her favorite novel was Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man, I knew that we'd hit it off, if only because it's such an offbeat choice.

My other classes in which I am guest lecturing while my colleague Irina recovers, a survey of 20th-century American literature and a history of the English language course, are equally fun. I'm surprised at how dedicated the students who come to lectures are, given that I am not the most gifted of lecturers. (I don't think that I am terribly well organized, for example; I go off on tangents a lot, not always completely aware that I'm doing so.) Students are sort of expected to attend lectures, but many do not, and I'm not sure exactly what the stipulations are about attending. For that matter, students in the U.S. are technically not required to attend classes, but given that they or their parents are paying for them -- and often paying dearly -- there may be more incentive to be there. But those that come, especially at the 8:00 am ones, are there and busily taking notes. Note-taking seems to be much more of an ingrained habit here, I suspect because there are serious final exams and some courses consist only of lecture: the lecturer lectures, and the students are expected to take it all in and present it at a later date in some written form. But I have to admit that watching students write down everything I say always makes me a little nervous, as if I am some kind of final authority.

I much prefer the seminar classes, which are geared toward discussion. I have prefaced every seminar class with the caveat that I give at home: the only way to construct meaning as a community of readers is to not assume that I have some kind of correct answer buried in my brain, and that your job is to burrow in, uncover it, and present it to the class. In other words, I tell students, when I ask you what you think of a text, I literally mean what you think of a text, not what you think I think of a text. I can't tell if this puts them at ease or not, but once the discussion starts, we start constructing meaning, and the valid interpretations start sorting themselves out from some of the more invalid ones. I am guessing that this model might be new for some students. If they take anything away from having me in front of the class, I hope that it is this.

The first-year students in my colleague Jeļena's British literature survey are still quieter than the other classes, which are third-year students. I was invited to lead the seminar on Beowulf, a text I teach frequently. It seemed that the students were a bit puzzled by the idea of interpreting literature this way; they were pretty quiet, and getting them to comment on the text was like pulling teeth, very slowly and without novacain. (In all fairness, they were very quiet when Jeļena asked questions of them in the lectures too.) They will take some work, and in all fairness, Beowulf is a peculiar and fairly foreign text. But we have time.

On the plus side, the other fun aspect of being in classes like this -- with Jeļena in the class and Irina when she returns -- is that I get to watch other colleagues teach. Jeļena's discussion of Christian and pagan cultures as a preparation for reading Beowulf is so good that I am stealing it entirely. (Luckily, I was taking notes too.) And that's really the value of a Fulbright: being in a different system with different colleagues and different students, all of whom have different expectations, really energizes your own teaching. I did not expect William Faulkner's stories to resonate so much with a Latvian until I explained to Eliza what Reconstruction was and how it changed the South. She immediately pointed out Latvia immediately after Soviet times was in much the same boat: people could not get their moorings in a culture in which all the rules changed, all at once, and everybody had to adjust to a new model of society while it was in the process of being created. These sorts of parallels, showing how literature is one powerful way of providing the key to how we differ in values -- and ultimately, how we also share them -- well, that's what we teachers live for.