By Rita Gabis
Bloomsbury, £20
'What is history?" The question is asked by Rita Gabis of her Lithuanian language tutor. "History," comes the reply "is who you've lost." While researching A Guest at the Shooters' Banquet, the loss for New York writer and poet Gabis was her 1960s' child's-eye view of the grandfather she knew as Senelis.
Tall and wide as a "tree with low, spreading branches", freshly shaved in a plaid shirt, Senelis led her to a New Jersey bakery and spoiled her with an abundance of eclairs, sugar-cookies, and butterfly cakes - anything, he said magnanimously, anything she wanted was hers...
Every grandchild loves a sweet memory. But none would choose the poisoned patrimony that was Gabis's grandfather's secret legacy. As an adult, Gabis, daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, learned that Senelis had been a Nazi collaborator and killer.
Neither an infamous name brought to judgment at Nuremberg, nor hunted down by Simon Wiesenthal, he was nonetheless an ugly footnote in Holocaust history, complicit (or worse) in the mass murder of 7,000 Jews at Poligon in September 1942. To save bullets during that two-day slaughtering spree, small children were battered to death against what came to be called a killing tree. The shooters' banquet of her title refers to the free feast held in honour of the "good deeds" done by the firing squad and attendant truck drivers.
Every grandchild loves a sweet memory
The book is both long and lyrical. It tracks the family findings that change the author's sense of who she is. It is about a 15-year search for the truth from which her mother's side of the family had turned away - and that Gabis herself could understandably have shirked. It is about the mysteries (did Senelis also perhaps save lives?) and secrets that remain, and learning to accommodate the sins of a forefather. Gabis clarifies the plight of wartime Lithuania as a country hoodwinked by two wartime persecutors.
First, Stalin pledged to return Vilnius in exchange for setting up military installations, then the Nazis marched in, falsely promising that independent government would persist.
To dogged research through thousands of microfiches, photos, newspapers and official documents, Gabis adds touching stories of Lithuanian loved ones vanished, destroyed or just as randomly spared.
This is not an easy book, either in terms of content or order: it follows no linear chronology, evades no grimly graphic detail. A scholar of the Kovno ghetto tells Gabis of Jews made to strip and dance on the Torah before dying.
Babita, her grandmother and Senelis's estranged wife, bore lifelong scars where, before being despatched to Siberia, she'd been tortured and the skin pulled off her arms. No wonderher daughter, Gabis's mother, suffered "chronic sadness". It was clearly also not an easy book to write.
Life conspired against the writer, who suffered an aortic aneurysm just before her first visit to Lithuania. Her apartment flooded, destroying precious papers and a critical flash drive memory device.
Exiled to a rented apartment, Gabis found her new street, and her street alone, plagued by mosquitos. On one Lithuanian trip she was hospitalised with food poisoning: "I want to go home," she told her Jewish husband.
"You have to stay," he said softly but with great seriousness. And he was right: Lithuania has long been cagey about its past. A young relative where Senelis was Chief of Police, says of his town: "This is a place of tears". Gabis opens her (and our) eyes and lets those tears flow.
