{"id":1240,"date":"2016-08-11T08:16:08","date_gmt":"2016-08-11T08:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=1240"},"modified":"2016-08-11T08:16:08","modified_gmt":"2016-08-11T08:16:08","slug":"indigestible-old-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/?p=1240","title":{"rendered":"Indigestible Old World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Vilnius<\/a><\/p>\n

In Vilnius, the ground shakes with contradictions for people who feels history through place.\u00a0 Place itself doesn\u2019t change, and the buildings may or may not change.\u00a0 Only the tenants change. \u00a0In old city, the tenants have gone from Jewish families to emptiness to Soviet bureaucrats. \u00a0 With the departure of the Soviets, the place went to Lithuanians who would never have set foot in these ghettos before the War, to new families, to small entrepreneurs who reinvented charm in the small and picturesque streets.<\/p>\n

The streets are marked with plaques to indicate that here was the so-called small ghetto, here the large ghetto.\u00a0 In the ghetto, once there was a former study house, now an Italian bistro.\u00a0 Once it was a place that imprisoned the weak and infirm, now it is a place of the fit and energetic.\u00a0 The tourists who come to Vilnius are intelligent travelers who appreciate the medieval inner city that hasn\u2019t been opportunistically overdeveloped.\u00a0 They come to eat and wander and visit a graceful university complex, one of the oldest in Europe.\u00a0 They admire Vilnius\u2019 Italianate buildings, its wedding cake pink churches, its bridges and cobblestones and all that we love about old country.<\/p>\n

All that we hate about the old country – its indigestible history.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to keep the Holocaust from blotting out the entire experience. It\u2019s been hard not to create and recreate it in my imagination – an imagination which translates into step and vision. \u00a0As I walk, I feel the city and life that was lived here, both sophisticated and spiritual.\u00a0 It was a city where Jews lived in misery, eking out living by selling on the streets; others had the relatively well-off lives of professionals not so different from their counterparts in American cities.\u00a0 Looking at the photographs in the museum, I lingered on the pictures of girls, noticing that the haircuts were the same as my mother\u2019s with a barrette on the side.\u00a0 Although she lived on the other side of the ocean, I recognized the little cotton dress, the conscientious though innocent expressions, black and white photography at the same technical level. \u00a0I recognized young men with the same penetrating, shy, shiny black eyes as my father\u2019s (so that was the Lithuanian trait.\u00a0 I always imagined we might have been Italian or Spanish!), the same lanky, long-limbed, \u201cintroverts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there were pictures of two sisters holding hands.\u00a0 Pictures of children forcefully separated from their parents and sent to Auschwitz and Treblinka; parents who resisted were shot on the spot.<\/p>\n

It was a powerful experience not yet digested.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Vilnius, the ground shakes with contradictions for people who feels history through place.\u00a0 Place itself doesn\u2019t change, and the buildings may or may not change.\u00a0 Only the tenants change. \u00a0In old city, the tenants have gone from Jewish families … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[489,286,490,480,488,486,483],"class_list":["post-1240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-baltics","tag-holocaust","tag-jewish-ghetto","tag-lithuania","tag-vilna","tag-vilna-gaon","tag-vilnius"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4D5qU-k0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1240"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1241,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions\/1241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jillpearlman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}