Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017)
Winner of the 2018 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature, Nonfiction, Koffler Centre for the Arts
Winner of the 2018 AABS Book Prize, Association for Advancement of Baltic Studies
2017 INDIES Finalist, FOREWORD Reviews, Autobiography & Memoir (Adult Nonfiction)
Praise for Siberian Exile
“Julija Šukys’s Siberian Exile is heroic.” — Vine Award for Nonfiction Jury
“Rigorous […] inquisitive and insightful.” — AABS Book Prize Jury
“A Gordian knot of drama, pain, loss, and speculation. I don’t think 166 pages can be more complex than they are in Siberian Exile.” — Richard Goodman, River Teeth.
“The range of her work is stunning. It stretches across three continents, thousands of miles of travel, scores of interviews in multiple languages, and decades of history — extending from World War II through the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union to the present — but she also stops and looks at moments, boring deep into an exchange on a train or the night of a massacre. Her work is horizontal and vertical. It is historical and personal. She reveals the history of the last century through the lives of individuals, often as they faced the most dramatic moments of their lives, and she tells us the story of her own mind thinking about the history, the moments, and the people she has encountered. — Ned Stuckey-French, “A Mind Thinking,” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Spring 2018, p. 209-220.
“In uncovering and trying to make sense of the past, Šukys is left only with the past’s imprint on the present – the taste of history’s ashes in her mouth.” —Vivian Wagner, Brevity.
“Books like Siberian Exile are invaluable…. It’s through such efforts that the silence about this history can be broken, its events spoken about, discussed, and given proper consideration.” — Kerry Kubilius, Vilnius Review.
“Wonderfully written, emotional, and real.”— Curtis Woodstock, The Phoenix.
“Interweaving coincidences and reversals with historical precision in a narrative that layers, folds, zags and spikes, Julija Šukys wanders the ghost-filled streets of the present, mingling with kin, real and imagined, and corresponding with multiple unspeakable pasts. I can’t recall the last time I read so gripping and so delicate a documentary of atrocity, complicity, dispossession and survival. Siberian Exile is remarkable, daunting, and disarmingly real.” — Mary Cappello, author of Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack
“All 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? Šukys 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.”—Rosemary Sullivan, author of Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
“Riveting. . . . Beyond the historical and familial narrative, Julija Šukys 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.”—Patrick Madden, author of Sublime Physick and Quotidiana
About the Book
When Julija Šukys was a child, her paternal grandfather, Anthony, rarely smiled, and her grandmother, Ona, spoke only in her native Lithuanian. But they still taught Šukys her family’s 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’s list of enemies of the people, was accused of being a known and decorated anti-Bolshevik and Lithuanian nationalist.
Some seventy years after these events, Šukys 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—a 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’s husband.
In Siberian Exile Šukys 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’ve 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.
The Havighurst Center hosted a discussion with Julija Šukys, author of “Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning.” The book is an account of Šukys’ Lithuanian grandparents: her grandmother, deported to Siberia in June 1941, and her grandfather, who participated in the murder of local Jewish populations.
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