Finding the Form with Lilita Tannis

My close family friend who was from another generation, from another time of history, who lived across the world, had died. Mara was a Jew who survived the Holocaust in Latvia. My brother told me that her son was at the funeral and described him as a beautiful person. Leonid. For some reason we had never been introduced.

I realized that he was the son of a survivor of which there were few. I texted him. Would he meet me in Riga in a few months. I was a writer and I wanted to learn about the Holocaust. Of course, he said.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with the interview. I didn’t know if it would end up as research, a profile piece, whether I would write it in English or Latvian, or at all. I didn’t know what kind of man I was about to meet or what he was about to tell me. I knew little about the Holocaust in Latvia at the time. I had a few months to study up.

Leonid spoke three languages but not very good English. I interviewed him in my second language Latvian. I recorded our interview so that I could transcribe and translate his words later into English. The recording, I realized later, allowed me to replay and repeat all of Leonid’s details or inferences during the interview that I missed at the interview, or at first listen.

My home research led me to Latvian place names I’d never heard of, although I’d visited Latvia often after its independence from Soviet Russia in 1991. I read from Jewish, Latvian, Canadian and American sources. A fellow writer forwarded contacts to a contemporary Latvian historian. Sometimes I would ask him three times about some confounding military detail especially if I was reading the information in Latvian. I would pose questions to him in English mostly, to be precise. He would answer me in Latvian, so that he too could ensure correct information. I visited the Jewish Museum in Riga. I went to Šķēde, a Jewish memorial and mass grave site in southern Latvia.