THE DEATH OF TONY

A novelist reflects on a life rooted firmly in his native Canada but lived spiritually in his parents’ homeland of Lithuania.

The son of immigrants who fled Russian and German incursions into Lithuania during World War II, Sileika grew up in “the glow of postwar prosperity.” Early on, his parents’ turbulent past held no interest for him. Like his equally Canadianized brothers, Sileika was interested in hockey, baseball, suburban life, and the wondrous unknown of his future. Even though the author was “deep under [the] imperial spell,” native Canadians still called him out as a “foreigner.” By the time he reached college, his love for Canada—and in particular, his “imaginary…homeland of England”—had “evolv[ed] from empire and commonwealth to language alone.” Rather than be known as Tony, the author embraced his identity as a cultural outsider with newly opened arms and reverted to his Lithuanian birth name, Antanas. That heritage-reclaiming act marked the beginning of a personal revolution—not just as an individual but also as a writer. Though he was always “knee deep in Lithuanians,” his more conscious preoccupation with his parents’ distant homeland didn’t begin until after the birth of his children in the 1980s. Just as he and his first-generation Lithuanian wife began immersing their children in the ancestral heritage both had taken for granted, Lithuania began its bid to break free of a crumbling Soviet empire. At the same time, the newly politicized author was drawn into the unfolding narrative of national struggle. Those experiences, as well as the ones that marked his own coming-of-age as the son of Lithuanian immigrants, later became fodder for the novels Sileika began to publish in the 1990s. Intelligent and observant, his memoir illuminates the experiences of a little-discussed ethnic group while probing the meanings of real and imagined homelands.

A thoughtful reading experience.