American anti-war expats in Sweden in the 1970s, as portrayed in
Elliot Krieger's new novel
August 9, 2009
by Harvey Havel
There were many in the American Anti-war movement in the 1960s and
1970s who, in fact, did not stay in their own country and continued
their fight against their own government and local draft boards that
forced young men and women into an overseas war that many soon saw as
a never-ending quagmire and a glaring injustice done to a foreign
civilian population. They could not possibly stay in a country where
serving in a war they didn't believe in was imminent, a war that
seemed pointless and had to be stopped at all costs. Many of these
protestors dodged the draft and escaped to places like Canada and
Mexico for safe haven. Others even went to Europe to escape the
madness that was the Vietnam war. Elliot Krieger's new novel Exiles
(SoHo Press, 2009) depicts a small community of anti-war protestors,
Army deserters, and draft-dodgers living in a small city in Sweden
during a tumultous time in our nation's history as they struggle
against the American involvement in the Vietnam War but at an
international distance where they are safer and more isolated from
the long arm of their domestic oppressors.
In Krieger's novel, the small city of Uppsala, Sweden is where a
young, somewhat naive college student finds himself when the police
in his home town in the United States beat him and arrest him for
thinking him someone else. Lenny Spiegel looks exactly like the
person who has destroyed a local draft board's office, and so after
they arrest him, he is rescued by a young law student who is involved
with the American Resistance Movement and knows the leader of the
movement who actually committed the crime.
After Lenny is released with the help of the young law student, he is
taken on as the law student's protege and is introduced to the
underground activities of the American Resistance Movement. Lenny
gets involved enough in the movement to be appointed liaison to a
group of exiled anti-war protestors in Sweden who have made a new
home for themselves but continue on with the struggle against their
own native country. Never does it occur to Lenny that he is secretly
dispatched to Sweden to meet a man named Aaronson, the leader of the
movement who really ransacked the draft board's office back
home. And now Aaronson wants to use Lenny's passport to do his
recruitment work abroad, because for some reason, Aaronson and Lenny
Speigel look exactly alike. But when Aaronson finally leaves Sweden
and Lenny serves as his puppet stand-in, a world of trouble awaits
Lenny as he soon becomes the target of the international intelligence
community as well as the members of his own movement who want to
overthrow his leadership.
Eliott Krieger's Sweden is, at best, portrayed as a cold, insipid,
and an antagonistic environment for these young anti-war exiles to be
in, and herein lies one of the major themes of the novel: that what
starts out as a movement to foster and create the innocence and the
sanctity of peace and social justice, a movement that challenges the
authority of all who defile such a sanctity, slowly turns to
insidiousness, as what is created instead of peace and liberation is
simply an opposing army of exiles that fights against its oppressors
from its perch overseas and involves itself with the real need for
money. The exiles are slowly overwhelmed by the powerful
international political forces that subvert its original objectives as well.
Krieger's tale, while also dealing with the idea of trying to find
one's identity in turbulent political times, is a also sad tale that
marks the slow, inevitable drift from innocence to sophistication -
but a sophistication that turns these anti-war protesters into the
very people they had originally resisted against in the first
place. The book is prescient and wise in this regard - and no less
riveting in how it goes about presenting its story. It leaves
Krieger's readers with a sense of loss but also with the sense that
they are more knowledgeable than when they first started reading the
book. Krieger's work shows how there is always a heavy price to pay
for trying to find and inhabit the places where we think we are truly
free from the forces that chain us.
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'Exiles' follows the lives of Vietnam protesters and deserters in Sweden
http://www.projo.com/books/content/BOOK-EXILES_08-09-09_4TF47EO_v11.19c8474.html
August 9, 2009
By Sam Coale
This beautifully wrought, suspenseful, psychologically astute and
conspiracy-haunted first novel by the former books editor of The
Providence Journal tackles a fascinating subject which, for me at
least, has long been off the fictional table: the intricate and
intrigue-ridden lives of American Vietnam War protesters and
deserters in Sweden.
The novel hinges on a strange circumstance: Lenny Spiegel happens to
look like Brian Aaronson, the guy who smashed up a local draft board
in The States and fled with his girlfriend Tracy, first to Canada and
then to Uppsala in Sweden. The police break in on Lenny's room and
manhandle him, thinking he's Brian. Lenny, incensed, decides to go to
Sweden to see if he can help the anti-war movement.
The plot thickens, as they say. The attractive Tracy gets Lenny to
surrender his passport to Brian so that Aaronson can sneak out of
Sweden and lure American soldiers from Germany to Uppsala. Slowly
Brian's persona begins to take over Lenny's personality not
literally, but in the sense that he's viewed as Aaronson by the other
deserters in ARMS: "American Resisters Movement Sweden." Lenny
winds up on a TV talk show as Brian and gets caught in an anti-war
parade that turns into a riot. He beds Tracy at last.
Nothing is as it seems, including Aaronson. Plots are afoot.
Connections are made with some strange Peace Church, Third World
terrorists, China and the CIA. Every action becomes suspect with
whiffs of betrayal, double-crossing, embezzlement and more.
I don't mean to reduce this formidable and wonderfully written novel
to a "mere" thriller, because Krieger a onetime academic who wrote
a book about Shakespeare's comedies before becoming a reporter and
editor at The Journal, and won an O. Henry Award for his first
published short story, "Cantor Pepper" knows how to get into the
bones and marrow of his characters, the uneasy sexuality and fragile
identities of American exiles in their twenties, the queasy alliances
and sudden attractions that flourish and fade. The central focus
remains Lenny's self-doubts and uncertainties. He's a bit of an
innocent, a bit credulous but intensely likable and sensitive, more
thoughtful perhaps than perceptive.
Krieger's evocation of the Swedish landscape in all its incarnations
and seasons fleshes out his characters' secrets and flaws. There's a
lusty Portuguese deserter, his girlfriend and the actress he's drawn
to; crude angry deserters; right-wing Swedish politicians; a Swede to
whom Lenny is helplessly drawn, and a reporter, determined to figure
out who's who.
This is a great, gripping book, elegantly styled and provocative with
its troubling underplots and psychological fathomings. People die,
identities shift and change, the military police and shadowy
creatures lurk on the sidelines, lust battles love. And through it
all Krieger manages to explore the loneliness and isolation of exiles
everywhere, the uprooting and the homesickness, and the burden of
solitariness that no matter what happens, none can shake.
--
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