The \u201cOld Country\u201d was never much specified when my sister and I pressed \u201cwhich country?\u201d\u00a0 The borders were always changing in Eastern Europe, and as my mother used to say, \u201cwe were nothing anyway.\u201d\u00a0 When we demanded a name, the short answer was Lithuania.<\/p>\n
I was curious to know, when coming to Lithuania this summer, whether I would feel an inkling of roots.\u00a0 Since my Jewish family emigrated to the US in the 1880s, it\u2019s been a long time.<\/p>\n
We were riding on a small bus through the forest, melancholy mix of fir, birch, pine on a recent humid, drippy day.\u00a0 I\u2019d been nodding into a deep lull – on learning that we\u2019d crossed over into Lithuania, the name stirred an old panic.\u00a0 My nerves were alerted to a place of being an outsider, a place of danger.\u00a0 The tuning came from deep down – as if the hypnotic sleep brought the opportunity for deep insight.<\/p>\n
Seeing the fir forest, I though this isn\u2019t our nostalgia, not our forest.\u00a0 Seeing the villages, I felt what kind of \u201cnothing\u201d my mother had always talked about.\u00a0 I remembered a letter my Uncle Irv wrote to me: \u201cYour great-grandfather was a peddler and pushed his cart from village to village\u2026and your great-grand mother was a beauty.\u00a0 She had coal black eyes like yours.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was much fascinated by its curious beauty, but it turned out that landscape was not the landscape of our Jewish history (it was beachy, owned by Prussians).\u00a0 But now we\u2019re leaving the beach, traveling into the heart of the countryside towards Vilnius, into the area where the Russian Empire once pushed millions of Jews.<\/p>\n
Vilnius is something different. \u00a0Once called the Jerusalem of the North, Vilnius had 105 synagogues and prayer houses.\u00a0 It had renowned scholarly and secular traditions, Yiddish newspapers and universities.\u00a0 During the war, ninety percent of the population of 100,000 Jews was destroyed.\u00a0 And a relatively recent archeological dig uncovered a tunnel that survivors dug to escape a joint Nazi-Lithuanian liquidification. \u00a0 The horrific work took place outside the city – a concentrated slaughter over three years whereby some 70,000 Jews were taken by train to the site that would be their grave and shot.\u00a0 Where else, in the forest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The \u201cOld Country\u201d was never much specified when my sister and I pressed \u201cwhich country?\u201d\u00a0 The borders were always changing in Eastern Europe, and as my mother used to say, \u201cwe were nothing anyway.\u201d\u00a0 When we demanded a name, the … Continue reading