Saturday 31 March 2018

From one village to the next you change language

That's in Russia! I had to look it up in an atlas. Not far from the Baltic Sea. There are several small countries in those parts: Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia ... With Poland and Russia surrounding them. The national borders don't match ethnic boundaries. From one village to the next you change language. And on top of that you've got Jews spread all over, constituting a separate race. And besides that, there are the communists!

G. Simenon, Pietr the Latvian (1930) tr. D. Bellos (2013), 129

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