Baltic Souls: Remarkable Life Stories from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania

Brokken (The Just) ponders the natural beauty and tangled history of the Baltic states in this lustrous collection of short biographies of artists and writers who hail from the region. Among the portraits is a dual father-son biography of the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and his father Mikhail, a civil engineer who constructed upper-class apartment buildings in Riga. According to Brokken, Mikhail’s fancy, ornamental style became an aesthetic antithesis for his son, who called his father a “cake maker” and derided “all that whipped cream.” Others profiled include painter Mark Rothko, who was born in the Latvian factory town of Dvinsk and emigrated with his family at age 10 in 1913, fleeing antisemitic violence—Brokken says he can detect hints of Dvinks’s “hushed and profound” two-toned landscape (“the red of the sky and the green of the forest”) in Rothko’s paintings; as well as Hannah Arendt, who was raised in Prussian Königsberg, a busy, dense city noted for its freethinking that was almost entirely destroyed during WWII; Brokken argues that the city’s spirit lives on in the “free and frank tone” of Arendt’s writing. Structuring his narrative around recollections of his own travels in the region since the 1990s, Brokken makes keen observations about off-kilter post-Soviet life that provide a whimsical counterpoint to the many mid-20th-century tales steeped in tragedy he recounts. It’s an amusing and erudite travelogue. (Jan.)