Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War Ii, and the Heart of Our Century

By Edward Axont

Part history, part autobiography, WALKING SINCE DAYBREAK tells the tragic story of the Baltic nations before, during, and after World War II. Personal stories of the survival or destruction of Modris Eksteins's family members lend an intimate dimension to this vast narrative of those millions who have surged back and forth across the lowlands bordering the Baltic Sea. The immense cataclysm of World War II devastated the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, sending many of their inhabitants to the ends of the earth. WALKING SINCE DAYBREAK belongs in the great tradition of books that redefine our understanding of history, like J. R. Huizinga's THE WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES and Jacob Burckhardt's THE RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. Eksteins's two-pronged narrative is a haunting portrait of national loss and the struggle of a displaced family caught in the maw of history. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395937477
• ISBN13: 9780395937471
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Boderlands

Modris Eksteins is a professor at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, who has won prizes for his insightful 'Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age' and for the present book. This one is an account of his family's life, beginning with his maternal great grandmother in Latvia. (Modris was born there in 1943). He moves the story sequentially to the postwar period with the Eksteins in England and...

Herald of a New Branch of Historic Inquiry Into World War II

The greatest "unreported" story of World War II was the massive geographical dislocation of millions of Eastern Europeans in the wake of the Soviet-German conflict. There has been little historiography on the subject available to a general readership in English. Modris Eksteins' account of his family's flight from Latvia to uncertain sanctuary in Canada is a splendid, heart-rending sign that should encourage more popular history...

A Beautiful Work

"The girl with the flaxen hair. Beautiful she was, everyone said. Temperamental and strong-willed, too. And in the next breath they mentioned her hair, long and blond. Everyone noticed her hair."- Walking Since Daybreak Perhaps one can imagine what life was like during World War II. Perhaps one can imagine the horrors faced by many people during this time. But is imagining really good enough? Can one really know what happened...

Thoughtful, compelling

I am most pleased to have chanced upon this book, aptly titled "Walking since Daybreak: a story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the heart of our century." I have known little of Latvia's history. Not only has Modris Eksteins done a masterful job situating the Balts in modern Europe, but he has stated well the pathetic question, "Why did humans behave so badly?" Is this wild slaughter the heart of our century? Rather...

Modris Eksteins and I have the same scars.

Modris Eksteins and I have the same scars. I remember him as a little boy from the D.P. camp in Lubeck where his mother, Biruta, was my girl scout leader. His book focused and gave framework to the glimpses of horor and feelings of despair that are a large part of the memories of my childhood. It explains the cynicism and wariness that even as a young girl I had for the noble sounding rhetoric of war like "death with honor"...