On the night of August 3, 1944—in the hot crickety darkness of Riga, Latvia—my grandparents did two remarkable things.

After midnight, while his children were sleeping, my grandfather—Harijs Mindenbergs—sat down at the kitchen table and wrote three letters: One to Benita, his wife. One to Juris, his son. And one to Ruta, his daughter and my mother.

Soviet troops were advancing toward the city. In five hours, most of the family would flee to Germany. My grandfather, however, had decided to stay. He’d decided to stay and continue filing reports for Latvian National Radio.

And while he wrote these letters, my grandmother was in the basement with a shovel. She was digging a hole in the floor. There, in the loamy soil, she was burying the family’s most valuable possessions: the jewelry, the fine porcelain, the silver. All the gifts that she’d received on September 23, 1939, the day of her wedding.

In October 2007 I received an e-mail with this subject line: “Invitation to Visit Latvia.” Someone at the State Department, it seemed, had read my book, and they’d decided that I might be a good candidate to come to Latvia to speak about Latvian American literature and the American immigrant experience. I started a reply. The State Department of the United States of America? Are you absolutely certain this isn’t a mistake?

I accepted, of course, and prepared to go on a state visit. “Just don’t cause,” my girlfriend said, “any sort of international incident.”

My grandparents at their wedding in 1939.

“Is Latvia a nuclear power?” added my friend Dave Epstein. “Because if it is, I’m building a bomb shelter in the backyard.”

In my creative writing classes we talk a lot about beginnings. There’s a reason, I tell my students, that the Iliad begins during the ninth year of the Trojan War, not during the first. Start in medias res, I say to them. Note that the first line of dialogue in Heart of Darkness is:

“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

Not:

“Hey! I was thinking we might go on a trip to the Congo!”

A narrative works best when it cycles back to the past, when it illuminates the present moment with snapshots of history.

But the challenge that I faced as I prepared to go to Latvia was this: The more I investigated my family’s story, the more I found a new beginning, and a new beginning, and a new beginning.

When I talked to my mom about the State Department trip, we had a long conversation about Latvia and her childhood. She told me half a dozen stories at least, but my favorite, easily, was post-American-immigration, from May 1952. The setting was the family home in Mount Vernon, Washington—the boxy, oak-floored Craftsman that my grandparents had rented in the heart of the Skagit River Valley.

Old friends—Latvian exiles, a couple with three children—came to visit from Los Angeles. The adults stayed up late into the night, drinking cognac and smoking cigars and discussing the politics of a redrawn Eastern Europe.

The kids awoke at seven. They snuck downstairs and my twelve-year-old uncle found some leftover cigars—cigars that, he assured everyone, were of the finest quality, hand-rolled and quite possibly from Cuba. They needed to be smoked, really, because they wouldn’t stay fresh much longer. The adults, if they even noticed, would be thankful for the assistance.

So, where did they smoke them? On the roof, of course.

They crawled through the window, inching out along the sloping surface, assembling near the triangular, tar-paper crown. They lit the cigars, and within minutes, they were all throwing up. No one had told them, sadly, not to inhale. These are the sounds my grandparents awoke to on that May morning: five vomiting children, crying and doing their dizzy best not to fall to their deaths, waking the neighbors with the sound of their retching, waking all the neighborhood dogs.

And though it would certainly make for a lovely transition, I did not get airsick on the flight to Riga. Instead, I successfully negotiated customs (“Do you have any fruit, or birds?” “No. I have no fruit, nor birds.”) and emerged into baggage claim.

Immediately, an embassy official flagged me down. He offered me a friendly handshake and a “security briefing” in a manila folder. What I discovered from this briefing was that I needed to develop “counterintelligence awareness.”

Know the foreign intelligence recruitment cycle: spotting, assessing, recruitment, and handling. Know motivators: money, ideology, and ego.

BE ALERT to foreign intelligence use of unofficial Americans, third country nationals, and false flag approaches.

The United States Government, I suddenly realized, had given me at least three titles for sure fire espionage bestsellers. I envisioned a trilogy. First: Money, Ideology, Ego. Then: The Unofficial American. And finally: False Flag Approach. I would call my film agent as soon as I got to the hotel.

More seriously, though, the State Department had also given me the chance to see, for perhaps the last time, the apartment building in central Riga that belonged to my family, the apartment building at 9 Sencu Iela. It was there that my mother spent the first year of her life. And now she was selling it, motivated by her own retirement and by the difficulties of managing a rental property from across the world.

Of course, my mom had told me when I’d gone home over the holidays, the paperwork was proving a bit tricky.

“So we pay taxes to the local municipality,” she said. “But only on the appreciation of the land since 1991. Improvements to the buildings are appraised separately and the profits are held in escrow.” She looked at me.

“Escrow,” she said, “or esgrow? Grow as in plant? Or crow as in raven?”

And here she made a cawing noise and flapped her arms like a bird.

“How about another glass of bourbon?” I suggested.

The building itself was worth just over a million dollars, and its history was a thumbnail sketch of the history of the country. Built with a flourish of optimism in the years between the First and Second World Wars, 9 Sencu Iela rose three stories from the pavement. It was an expansive private residence—the result of my great-grandfather’s success in business.

Then, in 1944, the Soviet occupation began.

In exchange for volunteering to donate his home to the Latvian People’s Soviet Socialist Republic, my great-grandfather managed to avoid deportation to a Siberian gulag. Nine Sencu Iela was then subdivided into nine apartments. In one of these apartments my great-grandfather and great-grandmother died—in 1950 and 1951—of medical problems exacerbated by extreme hunger. It was where my great-aunt subsequently lived out the remainder of her life in crushing poverty.

Once the Soviet Union fell, the city slowly rebounded, reclaiming some of its beauty and its bourgeois vitality. And so it was to this rebuilt neighborhood that my grandmother returned in 1993, when she was dying of cancer. She wanted to see the house that had haunted her for half a century. But she only wanted to look. She didn’t want to try to unearth the things she’d buried in 1944.