Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

Jewish and human rights activists in Latvia charge that the book contains statements insulting to the Baltic nation's minorities.

"Latvian Eulenspiegel," a reference to a popular jester-like character in German and Latvian folklore, contains references to Jews as zids, a pejorative term.

The book, which describes pre-World War II Latvian history, also contains "terrible insults" about Russians and Poles, according to Mikhail Avrutin, director of the Baltic-American Bureau on Human Rights, an affiliate of the UCSJ that is based in the Latvian capital of Riga.

Last spring, copies of the work were delivered as a gift to the country by people of Latvian heritage living in the United States.

The Latvian Education Ministry subsequently ordered that each school in the country receive copies of the two-volume work.

The ministry recommended that it be used as a companion to history textbooks, according to Grigory Bikson, a teacher at the Dubnov Jewish Day School in Riga, which received copies of the book.

The president's response reversed the stance taken in letters to the UCSJ in October, when Latvian Education and Science Minister Juris Celmins defended "Latvian Eulenspiegel" as satirical rather than xenophobic and described the book as a "monument of Latvian literature."

Despite the presidential apology, the book remains on school bookshelves, Bikson said in a phone interview from Riga.