When I arrived in the former Soviet country of Latvia as a US Peace Corps volunteer in 1999, the members of my cohort and I were still raw from the duck-and-cover legacy of the Cold War. At first, hearing Russian brought a primal shiver of fear. “Vot tak,” said the Russian-speaking Latvian Peace Corps nurse before sticking me in the arm with one of our required vaccines. “Vot tak,” it turns out, is not a threatening phrase but a benign placeholder, meaning something like, “There you go.” But linguistic and nationalistic propaganda is effective. As a friend who grew up in the Soviet Union recently reminded me, everyone there had been sure that it was Reagan who was going to bomb them.
During my years in Latvia, I became close with someone whose husband had served in the Soviet Army. Every other week, we women would steam together naked in their backyard sauna, where we beat each other with birch branches. Then we would join the men and children for a meal of meat and potatoes, after which we’d play cards or tell jokes and stories. On a few occasions, after we’d had an especially delicious meal, people told me that when meat was scarce, families would pass around a single morsel on a plate so that its aroma would flavor everyone’s experience of their potatoes, though it was the man at the head of the table who ultimately got to eat it.
“You were the enemy,” my friend’s husband told me the first time I visited them. He was a compact man, lit from inside, kind. “And now you’re in my house. At my table.” Then he clapped me on the back and passed me another pork cutlet.
My best friend from Latvia, who asked to be called Katrina in this essay, does not like it when I speak of Latvia as post-Soviet, because this suggests that the Soviet experience defines Latvia, rather than being an aberration in Latvia’s much longer history. The problem for me is that I entered at a specifically post-Soviet moment, and the people with whom I lived and worked were constantly talking about how things used to be.
Take unemployment, for example. “In the Soviet Union,” they would say, “you could not not work,” the double negative signifying that unemployment was both a grammatical and moral deviation.
Or housing. “In the Soviet Union, pensioners got the ground-floor apartments so they wouldn’t have to walk up the stairs with their bad knees.” This observation came from my elderly neighbor in the fifth-floor walk-up where I lived across from the bus station; she sometimes brought me apples from her dacha.
Money was another example. “In the Soviet Union, we had money but no products on the shelves. Now we have products but no money!”
The world was new and strange. Sometimes people would show me their old Soviet passports, red and worn, kept in drawers for posterity and maybe also just in case.
Katrina has since immigrated to Germany, which, in one sense, is far from Latvia and its Soviet past. But as I write this essay in March of 2022, with the war in Ukraine raging, she tells me that her group of friends is buying iodide tablets in case of another Chernobyl. So, in another sense, it’s close.
What is close and what is far? Who is us and who is them? At the malleable age of twenty-two, when I agreed to live and work for two years in Latvia without yet being able (I admit) to locate it on a map, I believed my time abroad would transform me into someone with clarity, perspective, a specific and coherent identity. But what I learned was that once you start speaking someone else’s language — once you welcome it into your body, once it becomes a filter for your everyday heartbreaks and cups of tea — your identity becomes more diffuse, not less.
After my two years in the Peace Corps, I returned to Latvia in 2004 on a fellowship, then went again in 2014 to do research for what would become a book about language and migration. The city where I lived, Daugavpils, is across the forest from Belarus, up the road from Lithuania, down the train tracks from Saint Petersburg. The community there is largely made up of people whose families had come during Soviet times from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other republics to study at Daugavpils’s universities, to work in its industries, or to train in the military. Most everyone communicates in Russian. In fact, to attract tourists and language learners, Daugavpils sometimes bills itself as “the most Russian-speaking city in the EU.”
When independence was won in 1991, following the Baltic Singing Revolution in which Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians protested against Soviet occupation by singing songs in their own languages, the status of Russian in the country changed, and a series of new language and citizenship laws were instituted. “Non-Latvians,” initially defined as Latvian residents who had arrived after 1940 (or whose parents had), were required to take a Latvian language and history test for citizenship or be stripped of many rights. This policy left between seven hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand residents without citizenship — this in a country whose population in 1991 was only 2.65 million. Most of those included in the “non-Latvian” demographic were Russian speakers.
Latvia’s later entry into the EU entailed a revision of certain aspects of these laws, in line with Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. But the language ideologies that were hardened within these laws, at least during the time I lived in Latvia, persisted. For many people, Russian represented the Soviet past, while Latvian and English were seen as the Western future, or at least as a logical continuation of Latvia’s rightful Western European identity. We Peace Corps volunteers who arrived with our duffel bags and liberal beliefs to teach English at the behest of the US and Latvian governments were part of a larger Westernization campaign based, in part, on assumptions about the relationship between language and geopolitical alliances.
One friend in Daugavpils with whom I lived for a time in 1999 was born in Russia and couldn’t or wouldn’t learn Latvian. She bred exotic cats and used her training in home economics to sew a vest with fifty small pockets to smuggle cosmetics across the Russian border. “Latvians say they were oppressed,” she told me once, jamming her thumb into the kitchen table over a dinner of rice and mayonnaise. “We should have pressed harder.” “We” is a slippery pronoun, and I wonder if the constitution of her “we” has since changed.
Back then, I slept on a couch separated from her bed by a bookcase, and each morning when the alarm sounded, she would yell, “Kakoy-to kashmar!” This does not mean, “Good morning!” It means, “What a nightmare!” I didn’t agree with her politics. But her expression captured the whiplash she and so many others must have been experiencing as national and linguistic borders were being redrawn.
The New York Times recently reported that 34 percent of Latvia’s population is ethnically Russian — higher than not only that of Estonia and Lithuania but also that of Ukraine, for whom the protection of Russian speakers was one of Putin’s specious casus belli. Other sources cite slightly different figures, but regardless, the country is clearly at the crossroads of Russia, the EU, and NATO.
On its Instagram account, Latvia’s national language agency has been posting videos of a boy — maybe twelve, with floppy blond hair — translating common phrases, such as “Good morning,” “Please,” and “Thank you,” from Ukrainian to Latvian, presumably for Latvia’s growing number of Ukrainian refugees. I read these language lessons as a welcome. I also wonder about the status of communication in the language that many Latvians and Ukrainians already have in common: Russian.
In Daugavpils, School Number Nine was the language school. I happened to teach at a sports school, where all the students seemed at least a foot taller than me. Each day when I entered the classroom, they stood up in a great clatter, terrorizing me with this sign of respect, to which I eventually became accustomed. I would then proceed to teach conversational English. Idioms. The present continuous. I like to think I stopped short of inflicting upon my students the five-paragraph essay, but the truth is I don’t recall.
The truth is also that I didn’t deserve that much respect. The Peace Corps philosophy at the time was “sustainable international development,” which meant we were to develop community projects in such a way that they would not result in reliance on continued funding from the United States. But most everyone I knew in Latvia could make a meal for five out of mushrooms they found in the woods, while most of us volunteers were raised to throw away broken toasters, so who was really teaching whom about sustainability?
During our three months of in-country pre-service training, during which I lived with a loving ethnic Latvian family, the Peace Corps had taught me Latvian, and taught it well — then sent me to a community where hardly anyone spoke it. I understood, of course, why Latvian had been emphasized. We were guests in a small country that had faced such severe Soviet-era Russification that the last Soviet census, in 1989, revealed the Latvian population had diminished to 52 percent, and that only 20 percent of nonethnic Latvians spoke Latvian. There was also the Soviet deportation of Latvians to Siberia, whose number the Migration Policy Institute puts at a horrifying sixty thousand. What’s more, economic uncertainty, among other factors, had led to a declining birthrate, which meant that the number of Latvian speakers was shrinking. Although by 1999 many ethnic Russians were learning Latvian to gain citizenship, the history of Russification was recent and present. (I did, to my wonderful trainers’ credit, get a crash course in Russian two weeks before leaving.)
At the time, what I noticed is that Latvian is a beautiful language. “Nice to meet you,” which we spent the first week of our language training learning, is eleven gorgeous syllables, full of diphthongs and good cross-cultural intentions: “Priecājos iepazīties!” And I loved the tenderness with which my host mother hailed me in the diminutive “Katīte,” accent on the first syllable. I feel warm just typing it.
Still, it was awkward to show up to Daugavpils with all those Latvian vowels in my mouth. “Listen to her Latvian,” the well-meaning principal of my school instructed my colleagues after our first meeting, where I used the Latvian conditional to ask politely for a glass of water. “She can be an example for us!” I watched as one of my new colleagues pursed her lips and looked down at her shoes. Later I learned that all the teachers would soon have to speak passable Latvian or be fired. I really did not want to be that kind of example.
So I endeavored to learn Russian.
Due to Latvian politics at the time, Russian wasn’t written in public spaces. But it was the default spoken language. So instead of reading labels or signs, I learned by asking for things: a pen to write in my journal, for example. I learned how to ask for a fine-tipped pen, as fine as possible, the finest one you have, really. Yes, that one will work perfectly. I learned to ask for the pastries I liked, which were filled with a kind of cottage cheese called biezpiens in Latvian and tvorog in Russian. I learned to watch people’s mouths, to let them finish my sentences, to wait for them to tell me what variety of cheese or cut of meat I was actually asking for.
I learned even more through conversations, in which I would do everything I could to keep people talking. My strategy was to repeat a few key phrases: Seriously? Unbelievable! Understood. Really? Of course. Exactly. Tell me about it. Tell me more. The more people spoke, the more I understood. Russian is an intensely literary language, but I experienced it as an oral one. Years later, when I was taking a linguistic aptitude test as a requirement for some fellowship or other, the proctor was shocked at the poor quality of my written Russian. “But you speak so well,” she said, as if my tongue had been telling lies.
And I suppose, in a way, it had. I am not a Russian Latvian. I am a Luso Arab American, which is a long enough compound for a lifetime of identity crises, thank you very much. But I liked the person I was becoming in Russian, in Latvia. I was funny. Daring. Quick to say yes. More than that, I liked the people who spoke Russian to me. I liked how we didn’t think twice about stripping to our underwear for a swim in a lake on a warm day. I liked how, for my twenty-fourth birthday, my friends and I made three different kinds of mayonnaise salads, and then the men lifted my chair in the air twenty-four times. I liked the integrity and passion with which people asked questions, the way they declared their friendship, their love. In Russian, the word for “horseradish” is also slang for “dick,” and it’s used in phrases like “Only horseradish knows!” Twenty-three years later, I am still laughing at this perfect expression, which seems to me to describe the world as it actually, incontrovertibly, is.
In this way, with the help of shopkeepers, coworkers, acquaintances, friends, and also Katrina’s mother, who was my beloved Russian tutor during those years, I learned the Russian words for birch trees, for pen caps, for hedgehogs, for certain tasty varieties of mushrooms that hid in the forest such that one had to call for them like this: “Aaaahhhhhhooooooo baraviki!” And then the baraviki would reveal themselves, and after a time, one would traipse back to the dacha to make mushroom stew.
English was still somewhat exotic in Daugavpils in 1999. I remember a friend asking me what it meant to “shag.” She had been corresponding with a British suitor and could not find the word in the dictionary. I had a colleague who knew all the Beatles songs by heart and would play them in a soulful way, eyes closed, on her guitar for our students in the tenth and twelfth grades. Under her guidance, they aced their English exams.
I can taste those years. The sweet black tea we would drink in the teacher’s lounge as we filled out our student evaluations in the thick gradebooks we shared. The vodka someone had made from potatoes fermented in their bathtub, accompanied by herring salad slathered in mayonnaise and beets, which was called “herring under a fur coat.” Herring under a fur coat!
There was no longer a wall, no longer a fear of nukes. The radiation meter above the hotel in what used to be Lenin Square still blinked red with certain numbers, but it was a relic. Soon it was torn down and the hotel was rebuilt, transfigured from concrete to glass. Is there anything more optimistic than a building made of glass?
Looking back, I see how in my youth and privilege, I consistently glossed over difficult realities. “Have you ever noticed,” a fellow Peace Corps volunteer once asked me, “how thin our students’ wrists are?” I was ashamed that I hadn’t. Another time, a local friend got exasperated with my effusive love of all things Latvian. “But you can leave,” she said. “And you will.” She was right. We didn’t know at the time that after Latvia’s entry into the EU in 2004 — and then after the global recession burst the optimism with which people had begun remodeling their bathrooms and trading in their humble Ladas — so many others would, too.
“Kak perovoditsa fuck you?” a boy of nine used to ask me as I was preparing my lessons in the classroom with the windows that opened to the tram tracks below and the bazaar across the street — the bazaar with its multicolored tents, its pirated Macy Gray CDs, its exotic kittens sold by my friend’s daughter in her short dress, its tracksuited men lined up with plastic bottles to buy beer from a barrel, its beets. “How does one translate ‘fuck you’?”
“Fuck you” in English was a common enough phrase in global material culture, imprinted on imported T-shirts and scrawled in local graffiti. At the time, I thought this child just wanted to see how I’d react to what he knew was a profanity in my language. He would look at me expectantly, barely holding back his laugh, and would stay, repeating the question, until he was shooed out of the room by another teacher.
More than two decades later, it seems an increasingly logical question for him to have asked an American who could come and go as she pleased. As Latvia transitioned from the Soviet Union to independence to the European Union — where the common language was English, not Russian — shouldn’t Latvians have been able to understand exactly what they were saying to their interlocutors when they told them where to go? You never know when you might need to tell a foreigner, from whatever country, to fuck right off.
In the years since I left, I have not been a perfect friend. As I got married and then divorced, raised a child and built a career, lived my whole life stateside and elsewhere, some close relationships waned. One burst open in conflict. Others grew surprisingly intimate with the advent of Skype and then, bless the gods of international audio messages, WhatsApp. The internet notwithstanding, it’s not actually possible to be in two places at once. But part of me is always still trying, still working my declensions, still gendering my past-tense conjugations, still fixing my tongue around both Russian’s and Latvian’s impossible soft l, still with the belief that if I could say the magic words in just the right way, I could be one of them.
My friend Katrina, the one who lives in Germany, recently returned to Latvia for a visit, where she joined throngs of protesters at the Russian embassy in Rīga. They have changed the name of the street where the embassy is located. It is now Ukrainian Independence Street. Likewise, the Russian embassy in Lithuania is now on Ukrainian Hero Street. If anyone understands the symbolic importance of street names, it’s people in countries whose every city, up until about thirty years ago, had a Lenin Square. One Latvian member of parliament, no longer able to watch from Rīga as the war unfolded, left his post to fight in Ukraine. Other Latvians have done the same.
But Latvians are not united in their opposition to the war. Many get their news from Russia, though more than one Latvian contact has told me that they have cut off ties with pro-Russia family members. One anti-war Latvian friend has a family member in government in Moscow and asked me if the United States could bring sanctions against her. And a former student from Daugavpils told me that because of his anti-war beliefs, he has been called a Russiaphobe, despite being a Russian speaker himself.
The language you speak does not determine your political leanings, if leanings can even be called political in the context of so many state-sponsored lies. In terms of politics, language is just a red herring, smelling up its coat of beets.
It’s never language itself that creates conflict or, for that matter, builds peace. It’s people who choose to use language, that intimate and uniquely human resource, as a blunt weapon of colonization. And it’s also people who say the collective words that allow them to meet, as best they can, the awful exigency of their moment.
The musicologist Guntis Smidčens says that in the Singing Revolution, Latvians didn’t always sing about freedom. They sang about farm life. About children. It was a signal to the adversary that they were who they were, armed only with their endlessly musical diphthongs, with the melodies in a minor note that their mothers and grandmothers had sung to them. Singing in your own language becomes an argument for your right to exist.
One of my Latvian host mothers, whom I’ll call Anna, was born in Ukraine. “They’re bombing my Ukraine,” Anna messaged me in Russian when the war began. Then she sent me a video of her granddaughter, who had just learned to walk, in Rīga, Latvia’s capital. I used to like to sit at Anna’s feet and drink tea and listen to her stories about her girlhood in Ukraine, her education in Russia, her arrival in Latvia, how she knew when she met her husband that he was the one. “Vot takaya zhizn’!” is something Anna used to say to me at the end of her stories. Such is life! Or, “V zhizni vsjakoje bivajet.” In life anything can happen. She has always been so annoyingly right.
Anna says that all of Europe, plus NATO, is behind Latvia, so not to worry. She says her relatives in Odessa are going about relatively normally, except for some shooting, though that was several brutal weeks ago. She says they are waiting for peace. She says it will all be okay. Her husband, a Belarussian Latvian, is old enough to have survived on foraged mushrooms in Belarus during the Second World War. I am now in my mid-forties, a mother myself, but still I listen at her feet. I never did learn to write properly in Russian. It takes me forever to text her back in Cyrillic, and when I transliterate to the Roman alphabet, my words are autocorrected beyond recognition, so I leave audio messages in Russian. But the truth is I no longer know what to say.
In Russian, the term for “vocabulary” is “reserve of words.” My reserve dwindles. But words are not something you keep in reserve in order to use later. You don’t pile them up in a bunker or mail them across a border, unlike the one thousand tactical vests, two hundred ballistic helmets, and fifty thousand euros’ worth of meds that another friend in Rīga told me he was trying to get through customs to Dnipro.
At the university where I work in Wisconsin, some younger Peace Corps volunteers, recently back from Ukraine, are also organizing a drive for supplies. My daughter and I go to Walgreens, where I purchase items on the most-needed list: one thousand tablets of ibuprofen, Vaseline, bandages, tweezers, Neosporin, surgical tape, gauze. I imagine their possible uses, find myself mouthing the words people might say as they apply them, and soon I am sobbing in the aisle over the wounds of people I have never met. I am literally sending Band-Aids to a war zone.
In the meantime, Katrina continues to send me a steady stream of protest pics, videos, and memes: A TikTok of a young Ukrainian woman teaching viewers how to commandeer an abandoned Russian tank in the same tone she might use to teach them how to apply the perfect smoky eye. “Whoaaa!” she says in delight, as the video starts, her enthusiasm somehow familiar. A tweet about a woman knocking a Russian drone from a balcony with a jar of cucumbers, no doubt pickled from the summer’s harvest, and then later a picture of the smashed cucumbers on the sidewalk. A meme of the cover of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, except “War” is replaced with “Special Operation.” Clips of Ukrainian tractors pulling tanks. An update that the Channel One protestor is alive. There is also a picture of Katrina, my brave and determined friend, born in Russia, raised in Latvia, now living in Germany, speaker of English, Latvian, Russian, German, Italian, and also maybe French and Spanish? No matter. She is draped in a Ukrainian flag. In the same text, she sends me a picture of a poster. “Freedom to Ukraine!” it says in Latvian.
“Brīvību Ukrainai!” Those vowels with the diacritical marks? In Latvian, you hold them a beat or two. Like singing.
