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.
An interview with author Karen Babine is presented. Among other things, Babine talks about her book All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer, which tells the story of her mother's cancer ...and her treatment.
The Still Small Voice Sukys, Julija
Queen's quarterly,
12/2015, Volume:
122, Issue:
4
Journal Article, Magazine Article
Peer reviewed
I wrote provisionally, assuring myself that all could be trashed if necessary. Even so, I encountered resistance. "This sounds so stupid," a censoring voice within me would say. "Just leave it for ...now. It's too early to judge," a braver one countered. Sitting quietly and listening for the still small voice was essential. In time, I discovered I contained rhythms, refrains, and images. I put what I heard onto the page. At times, I felt I was riding a wave, and the force of an idea made me laugh out loud in the silence of the library. I could see that it wasn't fiction or poetry I was writing, but it wasn't scholarship either. I didn't know what it was, but taking the advice of my braver voice, I ignored the problem of how to categorize my text, and kept going. Ultimately, over that second fellowship year, I built a relationship with my subject. Thinking back to the ancient history of my comp lit days, I am surprised to find that it was the program's dreaded narratology1 seminar - whose reading packets were so heavy that I had to equip my bicycle with saddlebags to transport them - that lefta mark on me. At the start of each class, our professor would point to one of us and say, "rehearse the argument" (though he, a New Zealander, pronounced it "ah-gument"). We then had to provide our classmates with a digest or diagram of the article in question. Though the memory of those fat spiral-bound books still makes me shudder, I now see that the class trained my brain to do difficult things. Rehearsing arguments each week taught me to dissect a text's logic and cry foul when it wasn't sound. That year of weekly conversations instilled a sense of respect for rigorous rhetoric and showed me how to keep going back to a text until I'd understood its mechanics. Most important, that class taught me to look at a thing relentlessly - again and again and again, from all different sides. In this respect, and against all odds, narratology taught me how to think like an essayist and creative nonfictionist. Thirteen years after defending my dissertation, I've found my way back into the university, a context I have always loved, but this time through a different, more suitable, door. I now teach creative writing - specifically, creative nonfiction. (Of course, the irony of ending up in an English department after decades of obsessive language learning and collecting amuses me to no end.) And even though I'm now ostensibly an expert of sorts in this genre, I continue to wander through the world of FOI with the wideeyed wonder of a novice. Together with my students, I marvel at the power of Joan Didion's work and the audacity of Annie Dillard's. W.G. Sebald blows all of our minds. And there's always more to learn and read. "You have to see this," my students say, thrusting a new discovery into my hands. I never tire of these books, of these conversations, or of the surprise and pleasure of a text built on the wisdom and daring of an author's still small voice. It's a good sign, I think. Surely this is how scholars who are right in their skin feel about their work and objects of study. Perhaps this is even how the New Zealander felt about narratology.
The librarian walks the streets of her beloved Paris. An old lady with a limp and an accent, she is invisible to most. Certainly no one recognizes her as the warrior and revolutionary she was, when ...again and again she slipped into the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Vilnius to carry food, clothes, medicine, money, and counterfeit documents to its prisoners. Often she left with letters to deliver, manuscripts to hide, and even sedated children swathed in sacks. In 1944 she was captured by the Gestapo, tortured for twelve days, and deported to Dachau.
ThroughEpistolophilia, Julija Šukys follows the letters and journals-the "life-writing"-of this woman, Ona Šimaitė (1894-1970). A treasurer of words, Šimaitė carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of her life, including thousands of letters, scores of diaries, articles, and press clippings. Journeying through these words, Šukys negotiates with the ghost of Šimaitė, beckoning back to life this quiet and worldly heroine-a giant of Holocaust history (one of Yad Vashem's honored "Righteous Among the Nations") and yet so little known. The result is at once a mediated self-portrait and a measured perspective on a remarkable life. It reveals the meaning of life-writing, how women write their lives publicly and privately, and how their words attach them-and us-to life.
The Missouri Compromise Sukys, Julija
Queen's quarterly,
03/2015, Volume:
122, Issue:
1
Journal Article, Magazine Article
Peer reviewed
Missouri is flyover country: Middle America, the Midwest, the Upper South. Smack in the centre of the continent, our new hometown of Columbia (every state seems to have a city by this name) lies ...halfway to everywhere in North America. It turns out that halfway is pretty far in practice: to drive anywhere at all is a big commitment. "When I moved to Missouri," a poet colleague once told me over lunch, "I wondered how it was possible to live so far from the ocean," he paused, then continued: "But life in Columbia is easy." The dreadlocked and soft-spoken writer ("two generations from slavery," he told me that same day) had come of age in a commune in Berkeley, California. He'd changed his name from the one he'd inherited to something he chose for himself. Well, if he could live here, right in the Centre, I figured, so could I. "I didn't know where Missouri was, so I looked it up. It's the belly button of the United States. Why would you move there?" These sentences arrived in an email from my cousin, also an academic who moved thousands of kilometres from her home for a teaching position. When I arrived at St Louis's airport for my on-campus interview (universities typically have three finalists visit, having culled this short list from applications that can number in the hundreds), I watched as a large man boarded the airport shuttle bus to Columbia. Boisterous and friendly, he was on his way home from a trip to Hawaii, where he'd met some Canadians. "They said it was minus forty degrees in Edmonton. Why would anyone live in a place like that?" he asked, incredulous. He posed the question to no one in particular, and I said nothing in response, even though I'd given a reading in the Alberta capital only a couple of weeks before. My cousin, the one who asked me why I would move to the belly button of America, now lives in Edmonton. BUT OVER THESE MONTHS of tracking what the world has to tell me about Missouri, I have most often found its assessments dismissive and even harsh. An example: in his memoir The Ticking Is the Bomb, American writer Nick Flynn describes learning, in childhood, that his father is in prison. "From the map on the wall," he writes, "the one you stare at when you're supposed to be listening, you know Missouri is in the middle of nowhere." So far, with a hundred or so pages still to go, it's the only mention of Missouri in a book about New York City, Istanbul, Rome, and Abu Ghraib. Flynn's use of this phrase, "in the middle of nowhere," betrays a notion, I think, that some places matter and others don't. That some places are worthy of attention, and others aren't.
The Names of a Place Sukys, Julija
Queen's quarterly,
09/2014, Volume:
121, Issue:
3
Journal Article, Magazine Article
Peer reviewed
Initially, the island's noises surprise me most. Gozo's cicadas are deafening. Sean tells me that in the ancient world cicadas were a symbol for music. He recounts to Sebastian a Greek myth about the ...insect's origins. Young girls, he says, loved to sing so much that they forgot to eat. They then turned into insects, and now sing eternally. But the cicadas' song is dissonant. Its harmonies, while not entirely unpleasant, are somehow not musical either. Bleating and barking intermingle with their drone. Roosters signal the end of the day and wake us every morning. One's crow sounds exactly like the cry of a young child, and for weeks Sean and I leap out of bed and run to Sebastian each day at dawn, only to find him sound asleep. We curse the bird. Gozitans not only name the winds; they name their houses. With very few exceptions, there are no house numbers on Gozo. To get a letter to us, for example, you need not use any numbers at all - our house name, "Ta' Tina," will suffice. Postal codes are strictly optional. And the names of many Gozitan houses record the paths of returning émigrés. Every day on the way to school, Sebastian and I pass a house called "Toronto Ontario." On my morning runs, I see one called "God Bless Detroit," and another named simply "Australia." On neighbouring streets you will find "O Canada," "Maple Leaf," "Native Canadian," and my favourite, "Skydome." These are families who have returned from exile. We made it, say the house names. Like Ulysses, who ultimately got off Ramla Beach and left Circe behind, the Gozitans living in houses named for faraway places have survived their long voyage home. "It'll never happen," says my friend Emese, as we watch a group of sexagenarians dance one night during Carnival. A Hungarian violinist, she emigrated here with her husband and children in search of a quiet life. "At least I hope it doesn't," she adds. "They say that twenty years ago Malta was like Gozo - innocent. Isolation and relative poverty have protected it, but that's changing. In another twenty years that innocence will disappear from here as well. With a bridge, it would happen even faster."
The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay distinguishes itself by the wide range and scope of its themes, voices and approaches. Thirty-five leading essayists, literary critics and writing instructors ...explore the essay from multiple perspectives, including its theories, forms and histories as well as its cultural, political and pedagogical contexts. In particular, the volume extends the theory of the essay by addressing topics such as the construction of an essayistic self and the political dimensions of essaying. It further explores the relationship between the essay and other forms, such as philosophical writing, the column, science writing, the novel, the lyric and the advert as well as the essay in digital spaces.
On May 26, 1993, the Algerian novelist and poet Tahar Djaout was gunned down in an attack attributed to Islamist extremists. An outspoken critic of the extremism roiling his nation, Djaout, in his ...death, became a powerful symbol for the "murder of Algerian culture," as scores of journalists, writers, and scholars were targeted in a swelling wave of violence.
The author of twelve books of fiction and poetry, Djaout was murdered at a critical point in his career, just as his literary voice was maturing. His death was a great loss not only for Algeria and for Francophone literature but also for world literature. Rage at the news of his slaying was explosive but did nothing to quell the increasing bloodshed.
Silence Is Deathconsiders the life and work of Djaout in light of his murder and his role in the conflict that raged between Islamist terrorist cells and Algeria's military regime in the 1990s. The result is an innovative meditation on death, authorship, and the political role of intellectuals. By collapsing the genres of history, biography, personal memoir, fiction, and cultural analysis, Julija Šukys investigates notions of authorial neutrality as well as the relationship between reader and writer in life and in death. Her work offers a view of reading as an encounter across time and place and opens the possibility of a relationship between different cultures under peaceful terms.
Archival Materials Julija Šukys
The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay,
10/2022
Book Chapter
Over the pandemic days of 2020, I took to doing jigsaw puzzles for the first time in my life. In the early spring of our year-long confinement, my son and I put together a surprisingly difficult ...image of colorful popsicles and ice creams that was all swirls and mottles. After finishing our first challenge, we next chose a lake scene. Mostly sky and water, that one was hard too. The last puzzle I finished was a thousand-piece iteration, an image of four rows of eight painted wooden doors. Each night, I sat and worked until my hips hurt and my
This article examines the riddle (following Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Nancy Huston, and Hélène Cious) of how to be a mother and writer. Through its portrayal of a ...writer-researcher's relationship both to the deceased Ona Simaitè, a Holocaust rescuer (her biographical subject), and to the baby she is carrying, the article poses the question: Is there room for both life and death inside a new mother? Will the birth of a child forever displace the writer's companion, this beloved ghost? Or will the trio of mother-baby-ghost, writer-life-death successfully establish a balance? Process-oriented, conversational, and self reflexive, this article situates itself within and engages the tradition of feminist life-writing and biography.
