L.A. Teacher’s Song Fires Up Baltic Rebels

Baltic-American groups are aiding their rebellious cousins’ push for independence from the Soviet Union in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania by supplying them with a rousing song written in Sherman Oaks and translations of such landmark U.S. political documents as the Declaration of Independence, leaders of the Baltic community in Los Angeles said Sunday.

Human rights groups in Latvia asked Latvian-American organizations about two weeks ago to provide translations of the U.S. Constitution and other basic American political documents, said Valdis P. Pavlovskis, president of the American Latvian Assn.

“They did not specifically say so, but we assume it is because they are trying to organize an independent state and they are consulting these things as models,” he said.

Pavlovskis spoke at an emotional ceremony to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Latvia’s independence, after a week of unprecedented pressure in the three Baltic nations--Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia--for greater independence from Moscow.

Although the most drastic step taken so far--the Estonian parliament’s attempt last week to assume veto power over Soviet laws--stopped short of outright secession, the Latvian group specifically asked for a translation of the Declaration of Independence, Pavlovskis said.

He said the group has also been sent the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and “we are working on the the civil rights laws they asked for, and also all the basic laws on labor unions and some state constitutions.”

Activists in Estonia “have asked for all the literature we can send them on nonviolent resistance movements,” said Jaak Treiman, consul for the Western United States of the exile Estonian government.

The United States refused to recognize the Soviet annexation of the three nations and the State Department still recognizes the exile diplomats as representatives of their nations. Los Angeles is the only city in the world in which all three maintain diplomatic missions, said Treiman, a Canoga Park attorney.

300 at Meeting

About 300 people from all three communities attended Sunday’s ceremony at the Latvian Community Center near Griffith Park. About two dozen of them, mostly women, wore colorful, traditional dress.

A high point of the program was the singing of “Marai Tantai,” Latvian for “To My People.” Brigita Ritmane-Jameson of Sherman Oaks said she wrote the song about 10 years ago with her father, who left Latvia during World War II.

The song, “a prayer to God to bring the Latvian people home to freedom,” found its way to Latvia on cassettes bought by Latvian tourists, she said.

Ritmane-Jameson, a music teacher in the Los Angeles public school system, said she was surprised to learn only recently that the song had become associated with the political unrest in Latvia.

“I was watching a videotape of the demonstration in Riga on Oct. 7, when all of a sudden a friend said to me, ‘Brigita! The crowd is singing your song!’ There were thousands of them, and I thought, ‘My God, when we wrote the song . . . it was hopeless. I never thought this could happen in my lifetime.”

The three Baltic nations were independent after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, until 1940, when Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin divided Eastern Europe. There has been a strong resurgence of nationalism since Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of “glasnost.”

Last Wednesday, the Estonian parliament approved a “declaration of sovereignty” asserting Estonia’s independence in all areas except defense and foreign affairs, and overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment requiring Estonian approval of Soviet laws. The Lithuanian parliament held back a similar declaration Friday after the Kremlin declared Estonia had violated the Soviet Constitution. The Latvian parliament is expected to take up the issue Tuesday.