OPINION | MUSEUMS | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS | YIDDISH AFFAIRS
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by Dalia Epstein (Dalija Epšteinaitė)
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When speaking about the Holocaust in Lithuania, it is customary to cite 95%, that is, more than two hundred thousand people. This is not only the lives lost, but also schools, synagogues, kheyders, yeshivas, books, newspapers. This is the white tablecloth and fresh challah of Shabbos, these are the Sabbath conversations in the bes-medresh, which tailors, blacksmiths, carpenters, and tinsmiths in the shtetls wait for all week long, for whom conversations about the Torah are a long-awaited spiritual respite. Today, in such a former synagogue you can see a carpentry workshop, a fire department, a gym, a bathhouse, a funeral services business, and at best a library… After all, there are no more Jews. In the town of Butrimonys (Yiddish: Butrimánts), the name of the former owner, Pertzikovich, has been preserved above the entrance to one house. We stopped to take a photo. A young woman with a little girl came out.
“Yes, Pertzikovich used to live here. And now we live here,” she said calmly and walked on.
We are witnessing the consignment of memory to oblivion. The language spoken, read and written by Jews in the towns and cities of Lithuania has been destroyed. The Nazi occupation exterminated 95% of Yiddish speakers, the bearers of a culture that had suddenly blossomed so brightly in the 1920s and 30s.
Where did Hebrew and Yiddish teachers, journalists, poets and prose writers come from at that time? How was it possible to open so many schools and gymnasiums (secondary schools) with these languages of instruction? Memory, the living memory of many generations carried this culture through years and centuries of humiliation and persecution. You see, 95% — that’s almost all the Jewish population of Lithuania that was almost completely exterminated. Nevertheless, in the first post-war years (1945-47) Yiddish schools were still operating, Yiddish speech was heard on the streets, and the Lithuanian Writers’ Union had a Jewish section, which included poets and prose writers. Stalin, Hitler’s friend and ally, completed the work begun by the Nazis – Endlösung – the final solution to the Jewish question. He succeeded.
With the restoration of Lithuania’s independence, the restoration of culture, including Jewish culture, began. But how difficult it was! There were no professional specialists in Jewish history and culture… Yesterday’s engineers, geologists, lawyers, physicists became historians, archivists.
Archives opened. People rushed to Lithuania in search of family documents. Researchers appeared. The results of their searches were publications. But not so much in Lithuania…
In France, for example, the memoirs of Asya Turgel, who survived the Vilna Ghetto and the concentration camps, were published. The tragic epic of the Smolar family, part of which lived in Germany on the border with Lithuania, and the other part in a Lithuanian border town, also saw the light of day in France. A researcher from Lille introduced the names of Jewish female doctors into historical circulation, and among them – the image of the ghetto activist Rozalia Shabad-Gawronska, who went to her death together with the pupils of the orphanage she founded. Author Odile Suganas collected extensive information from archives about Yiddish cultural societies in Lithuania in the 1930s, sharing it in an introduction to a collection of short stories by Yiddish writer Dovid Umru, her uncle, and published the book in French and Yiddish. All this – not here, but abroad…
Rare publications of such valuable books as the diary of Itskhok Rudashevsky, the diary of Matilda Olkinaite, Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever’s memoirs about the Vilna Ghetto, and a book of his own poems, are outstanding, but exceptional phenomena. Yes, neither poetry nor prose is written in Yiddish today in Lithuania. But does this mean that we should not remember the literature that arose in cultural combat with established traditions, when Jewish literature existed only in Hebrew? Someone thought about the language they or their parents spoke. Someone thought that only the male population of Jews had been literate, but women also want to read. This is how modern Yiddish literature was born – from the short stories of Isaac Meyer Dik and Jacob Dinezon to the magnificent works of Sholem Aleichem and poems of Bialik… Who in Lithuania today knows that in a single shtetl there were sometimes several bookbinders, and that there often was one library for books in Yiddish and a second one for books in Hebrew?
A tourist from Israel, a neurologist, recently stopped in front of a granite slab with a map of the Vilna Ghetto in today’s modern Vilnius, where there was an inscription in Yiddish. Excited, he read out loud what was written and exclaimed: “This is what remains of the Lithuanian Jerusalem!” Yes, today they do not create in Yiddish in Lithuania. This language is not taught in our educational institutions. Does this mean that there should not even be an inscription in this language on the building of the Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews, a primary premises of the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History?
And yet it was there not long ago!
Yes, here and there you can wade into a remnant, right in the midst of the River of Oblivion. You just have to bend down and pick up what hasn’t sunk into the dark depths yet. These are archives, libraries, family histories. After all, not even a hundred years have passed since all this happened!
That Yiddish inscription on a stone slab made someone remember that today’s Vilnius was once the Jerusalem of Lithuania.
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