Tarzier
Memoirs |
Part I Old
Latvia
|
KARLIS TARZIERS,
A EULOGY
Peteris and I were proud of our lineage. A family tree, handwritten in
the old Bible, traced the name Tarziers to Lettish princes in the days
before domination by foreigners. In keeping with the pedigree, our father
Karlis became a many-sided man, writer and poet, farmer and worker. His
calloused hands stung like sandpaper when he applied a well-placed slap
to our bottoms, but his poetry moved people to a different sort of tears.
Above all, he loved the soil and land of Latvia. When serfdom was abolished
and land ownership rules loosened in the late 19th century, Karlis jumped
at the chance to own the hundred acres he had worked for a decade already.
Mother’s generous dowry of three hundred gold rubles served as down
payment, and a mortgage took care of the rest. His was the first generation
to own the land it worked, but, he clearly hoped, the first of many.
Father was unusually well educated for the times. He spoke fluent Russian
and passable German as well as Latvian. For years, he wrote regularly,
mostly about Baltic agriculture, for a St. Petersburg daily. In return
for his contribution, our family received a free subscription to the paper.
Peteris and I fought over the magazine insert. The pictures it contained
gave us a glimpse into big city life, a universe away from the Predeli
countryside. After graduating from the Lutheran seminary Father briefly
taught school in another Pagasts before taking on the farm full-time.
Family lore has it that his health was too frail for the ministry, though
it is not clear how farm life was in any way easier. Perhaps Karlis did
not really want to be a full time minister. I would guess his heart was
really in the black Latvian soil.
After a twelve hour day behind the tiller, Karlis would wash up, change
into clean clothes, and cultivate his mind. He played the violin and wrote
religious poems, hundreds in all, to be sung to old Lutheran melodies.
The neighbors frequently called on him to officiate at funerals. He really
outdid himself on those occasions. Rather than rely on ritual, he gathered
personal information from the family of the departed, and wove the information
into a special farewell hymn.
While these talents endeared him to the local folk, they set him at odds
with the Lutheran clergy. The Lutheran pastor demanded cash, while Karlis’
payment was an occasional loaf of fresh home-baked white bread. So Father’s
actions and, in fact, his very presence were a slap in the face of the
church, morally and financially. Karlis rebelled against the authority
of the church in other ways, too. He joined the revival Baptist movement
and eventually organized informal religious assemblies with Baptist speakers
and choir. He was not about to let a pastor tell him how to behave.
Our wealth grew. The steam-driven thresher stood out like a boil in the
face of the Druviena countryside, especially when we rented it out at
harvest time. We became known as “Dampishi” and “Pharisees,”
the latter name a corruption of Tarziers, a reference to what people saw
as obscene money-grubbing. “Bible Stallion” was another choice
insult hurled at Father by the young socialist troublemakers, because
of his prominence as Herrnhuter or Teller at the Assembly. In later years,
his counterrevolutionary activities earned him the name of “Gray
Baron” by the Bolsheviks. But even though we regarded the name calling
as petty and unfair, in retrospect I see that animosity ran far beyond
pettiness, and the local teens only repeated what they heard at home.*
Father not only antagonized the church, he also took sides politically.
Even our relatives disapproved of Karlis’ activities, especially
those against the tsar. One event sticks in my mind, a startling chance
he took with his life. Latvia had rushed to proclaim independence in the
aftermath of the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, prematurely as it turned
out. In the years following this attempt at independence, regiments of
the tsar’s dreaded Cossacks, the Black Hundred, would regularly
march through the village, rattling their sabers. The idea was to suppress,
by fear, the remains of Latvian patriotism. Not about to be intimidated,
Father got together with some of the neighbors and hatched a plan to stalk
the armed Cossacks in the woods at night. They hoped to kill a few with
butcher knives and pitchforks and thus to teach the Tsar a lesson. But
the Cossacks knew better than to enter dense woods after dark. After one
cold, sleepless night of waiting for a horse patrol that never showed
up, Father and his band of revolutionaries gave up that particular revolutionary
effort, and he got to live another thirteen years.
We knew Father primarily as a skilled, dedicated farmer, a messenger of
God, and a passionate political activist. Peteris and I were stunned,
then, when we uncovered a tender side of his. Our find happened more or
less by accident. We must have been fairly young, probably in our mid-teens.
Our parents had left for the day, leaving us in charge of the farm. We
wandered into the storage building to the left of the main farm house,
a cavernous building with all sorts of farm equipment, with hams hung
out to cure. Family belongings were stored here too, in large trunks.
Snooping around in one of the trunks, we found first the original copy
of the first printed edition of the Glück Bible. The book took our
breath away. It was bound in wood plate and leather, meant to last forever.
Another find, however, inspired tenderness rather than awe. It was a bundle
of letters, written in neat longhand, tied with a cord, Karlis’
love letters to our mother Jüle. We had no idea that he was capable
of such sentiment. We knew our parents as a team, and it had never yet
sunk in that their lives had been separate before. We carefully retied
the letters, closed the lid of the trunk, and went about our business,
but the discovery was startling: our father at one time had been a young
man like us. At one time he had wooed and won a young, beautiful girl
who would become our mother. One of my regrets in life was that we burned
the letters and gave away the Glück Bible when we sold the farm in
1922, in preparation for the exodus to Brazil. We were certain that the
end of the world was near, and who would need family keepsakes then? Of
Karlis’ creativity only one poem remains, a spiritual testament
in which he foretold his death.
What more can I say about this complex man? Mother leaned on him even
more than we did. She would never really get over his death. Peteris and
I loved and feared our father. We were trained above all to obey and to
emulate him. Our two older brothers left the farm as soon as they could,
perhaps needing a break from his iron grip. We two younger ones might
eventually have done the same had prophecies of Armageddon not decided
for us (see Spirit Speaks). We were proud of our father’s role in
the community, even though his political leanings would cost him his life
during the first Red Terror. His brutal death shaped the rest of my life,
and that of my brother in Brazil.**
*Decades later, in Brazil, my mother Emilia, Karlis’
daughter-in-law, shared with us girls: “I knew the Tarzier family
back in Latvia, long before I married your father. They were rich, cold,
and arrogant. They thought they were better than anybody else. I didn’t
like them at all.”*Decades later, in Brazil, my mother Emilia, Karlis’
daughter-in-law, shared with us girls: “I knew the Tarzier family
back in Latvia, long before I married your father. They were rich, cold,
and arrogant. They thought they were better than anybody else. I didn’t
like them at all.”—MT
**Even though I never met my grandfather, shock waves from his death resonated
through our household. My father Pedro (Peteris) dealt with his pain with
denial. Crying is a luxury in times of war, and by the time he arrived
in Brazil four years later, his father’s murder was an old story.
His grief surfaced in indirect ways, such as unrelenting hatred of Communism,
the “Reds” as he called them. Miriam and I, Karlis’s
granddaughters, were not raised to become doctors or lawyers or (God forbid)
housewives. We were supposed to dedicate our lives to fighting Communism
or, failing that, the Catholic Church--that is, to carry on Karlis’
work and ideals.—MT
Christmas
1918
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