\u201cAll families harbor secrets. What if, in blithe innocence, you set out to research your family history, only to discover that your grandfather was guilty of the most heinous of crimes? \u0160ukys pursues her tragic family memoir with courage and self-examination, often propelled to her painful discoveries by what she believes is a bizarre synchronicity. This is not a book written at a safe distance.\u201d\u2014Rosemary Sullivan, author of Stalin\u2019s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cRiveting. . . . Beyond the historical and familial narrative, Julija \u0160ukys ponders her own exile and her own complicity, allowing readers to do the same, comparing versions of selves and asking which version is truest, an impossible question, but one readers will find as enthralling as these pages.\u201d\u2014Patrick Madden, author of Sublime Physick and Quotidiana<\/em><\/p>\n BUY\u00a0Siberian Exile<\/em>\u00a0at the University of Nebraska Press.\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n BUY Siberian Exile at IndieBound.\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n BUY\u00a0Siberian Exile<\/em>\u00a0at Amazon.\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n When Julija \u0160ukys was a child, her paternal grandfather, Anthony, rarely smiled, and her grandmother, Ona, spoke only in her native Lithuanian. But they still taught \u0160ukys her family\u2019s story: that of a proud people forced from their homeland when the soldiers came. In mid-June 1941, three Red Army soldiers arrested Ona, forced her onto a cattle car, and sent her east to Siberia, where she spent seventeen years separated from her children and husband, working on a collective farm. The family story maintained that it was all a mistake. Anthony, whose name was on Stalin\u2019s list of enemies of the people, was accused of being a known and decorated anti-Bolshevik and Lithuanian nationalist.<\/p>\n Some seventy years after these events, \u0160ukys sat down to write about her grandparents and their survival of a twenty-five-year forced separation and subsequent reunion. Piecing the story together from letters, oral histories, audio recordings, and KGB documents, her research soon revealed a Holocaust-era secret\u2014a family connection to the killing of seven hundred Jews in a small Lithuanian border town. According to KGB documents, the man in charge when those massacres took place was Anthony, Ona\u2019s husband.<\/p>\n In Siberian Exile<\/em> \u0160ukys weaves together the two narratives: the story of Ona, noble exile and innocent victim, and that of Anthony, accused war criminal. She examines the stories that communities tell themselves and considers what happens when the stories we\u2019ve been told all our lives suddenly and irrevocably change, and how forgiveness or grace operate across generations and across the barriers of life and death.<\/p>\n BUY Siberian Exile<\/em> at the University of Nebraska Press.\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n BUY Siberian Exile at IndieBound.\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n BUY\u00a0Siberian Exile<\/em> at Amazon.\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/S\u030cukys_front.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAbout the Book<\/h1>\n
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