[LAST UPDATE: 9 AUG. 2024]
OPINION | YIDDISH | GREEN HOUSE | LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT
◊
Those of the founders of the Vilnius Summer Program in Yiddish, twenty-six years ago, in July 1998, who are still around and active will today wish to extend the heartiest of welcomes and the best of wishes and godspeed to all the participants of this summer’s mini-revival (two weeks rather than four, no university credit options, but with every perspective of equaling and surpassing the original conception in the years ahead). The new course has issued its program of studies (see the 1998 program for some perspective). The instructors are the well known Yiddish teachers Alec Eliezer Burko, Dov-Ber Boris Kerler, Yuri Vedenyapin, and Anna Verschik. All were at one time or another students of the original course’s founder, underlying the venerable Vilna tradition of chains of learning over the years. In the case of revived Yiddish studies in Vilnius, an early catalyst was the Oxford-Vilnius agreement of 1991 that enabled Lithuanian students to study Yiddish and Judaic studies at Oxford University in the 1990s.
For those interested in the program’s origin, we have initiated an online album with memorabilia of the first 1998 program (this will be growing in the coming days and weeks, and more details added in the description box). Among the people without whom the program would never have arisen are the Lithuanian Jewish Community’s legendary leader for decades, Dr. Shimon Alperovich (Simonas Alperavičius, 1928–2014); Vilnius University’s Professor Meir Shub (1924–2009), and the Open Society’s Foundation Lithuania founder and longtime director, previously a professor of European culture and theatre studies, Dr. Irena Veisaite (1928–2020). The program will never forget them, and numerous other local and international partners. Enabling a new intensive Yiddish university-level program to rise in Eastern Europe was a feat of many makers working in harmony and with a genuine sense of historic purpose.
The program’s undisputed star over two decades is Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky. She is a veteran of the best Yiddish secular schools in interwar Vilna (including Sofia Gurevich’s inspirational school), as well as of the Jewish Partisans who valiantly fought the Nazis in the forests of Lithuania. Now, at the age of 102, she is too frail to participate, but thanks to dozens of videographed interviews, walking tours, guided tours through space and time, students can benefit at least from those digitized and uploaded (as part of the Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive, or LYVA, and indeed, other projects).
ONLINE ALBUM OF MEMORABILIA OF THE FIRST VILNIUS SMMER PROGRAM (1998)
But there are two requests that Fania conveyed to us personally in her last taped interview, in early March 2020, when the quarantine in the wake of the pandemic was announced. Both requests related to what had become beloved annual components of the summer program, and more broadly, must-do list items for all Jewish-interested visitors to Lithuania.
She called me over for what she might have felt might be a final long and meaningful meeting. First, that whoever visits Lithuania would visit the unique forest fort where some 100 escapees from the Vilna Ghetto, including young Fania, fought valiantly against the Nazis (indeed there are videos of her showing us around the fort on multiple occasions). Because of local politics, and the timidity of so many Western visitors, efforts calling for preservation of the fort — Fania’s Last Wish — have repeatedly fizzled out. Besides, of course, arranging a visit with a professional guide (it’s a half hour ride from Vilnius), this year’s revived summer program in Yiddish will hopefully produce a plan by a group of participants to ensure that Eastern Europe’s last surviving Jewish fort from the years of the Holocaust will be preserved. At present, it is rapidly sinking into the earth. Folks from the area help themselves to logs and building materials, and without preservation, it will be, by the elements alone, gone without a trace in a few years time.
The second major address that is central for Fania (and all of us) is right in the heart of Vilnius and needs no bus to get to. It is the Green House (at Pamėnkalnio St. 12), the only Holocaust museum in Lithuania that tells the simple truth about the Holocaust (though some exhibits were forcibly removed or mitigated over the years). The Green House’s long time director and dauntless defender, Fania’s close colleague and friend Rachel (Rokhl) Kostanian, also a Yiddish summer program stalwart for decades, valiantly fought for each exhibit. Now deep in her nineties in Berlin, where she retired to be with her family, Kostanian was awarded the order of merit by the president of Germany in 2021 (no local awards, though). Even more to the point, this is the only Jewish museum in Lithuania created by the minds, hearts and hands of the last generation of Yiddish speaking Jews who came to maturity before the Holocaust (including Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky). Indeed, all exhibits have the Yiddish language included in all descriptions. For them it couldn’t be otherwise in their beloved Yerusholáyim d’Líte.
Very significantly, in addition to its rooms on the Holocaust in Lithuania, there is a room right in the middle of the Green House dedicated to the living Jewish culture of Vilna and Lithuania, prominently featuring the major builders of modern Yiddish culture. Naturally, all summer course participants will want to study its treasures, and hopefully add their voices to efforts for the preservation of its exhibits intact, once the Green House is dismantled (slated for the near future, when the umbrella Jewish museum opens its new Holocaust museum in the Old Town). For more, see our review of the new (and excellent) Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews (and the review’s comments on the Green House).
❊
From the viewpoint of Vilnius and Yiddish, a number of things have changed over twenty-six years. The Yiddish chair at Vilnius University, established a year after the first summer program (held on its historic sixteenth century Old Town campus), was terminated. Blissful harmony was in one fell swoop brutally undermined on the day in 2008 when armed plainclothes police came looking for two of the most beloved heroes of Jewish resistance to the Nazis in the forests of Lithuania, Rachel Margolis and Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky in a state prosecutors’ campaign against Holocaust survivors (my papers on the wider East European effort to revise the history of the Holocaust). Yiddish Studies would suddenly be lavishly instrumentalized by some state agencies bent on Holocaust revisionism and more, dissidents disemployed, defamed, and subject to far-right attack), as merry diversion (my comments on the wider phenomenon of both right and left wing manipulations of Yiddish are online, pp. 295-300 of Yiddish and Power), in a program that has included high state honors (and sundry other pots of lentils) for significant foreign Jewish figures who have towed the desired line and sometimes jump at the chance to trash and delegitimize vocal dissidents — particularly their own former teachers. Indeed the sport and art of knifing one’s own old teachers seems to thrive most among those with deep Soviet background themselves, with enhanced knife-twisting relish reserved for their own doctoral supervisors. Even Bloomington, Indiana’s Borns Jewish Studies Program was drawn rather deep into the morass that destroyed academic Yiddish studies in Vilnius. While six NATO ambassadors wrote to the chair of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute’s support group in Los Angeles, the Borns Jewish Studies Program was working overtime convincing them that a full-time professor is not needed in Vilnius, the summer-fun sojourns from bored Bloomington residents would be more than enough. It’s only Vilnius, and it’s only Yiddish.
Vilnius still offers rich, authentic Lithuanian Yiddish — not just an anodyne club & college variety
But this pales in comparison to the passing of that last generation that can only laid at the feet of God, who as my late father, poet Menke Katz, used to say, “makes such wonderful people to live on this earth for such few years.” A big part of the logic of the program (which I moved from Oxford) was the magnificent linguistic luxury of interacting with dozens and hundreds of elderly native Yiddish speakers who grew up before the Holocaust and lived all their lives in the historic Eastern Ashkenazic homeland of the generations. Their lectures, seminars and walking tours were the soul of the core authenticity of the program. Theirs was no university-bred sterile Yiddish pidgin experiment. It was, and is, the warm, natural, full-of-love, humor-loving, bona fide, full blooded language of the Lithuanian lands within East European Jewish civilization.
The good news is that in Vílne, native family-transmitted Yiddish has often persisted rather longer than in many other cities. The upshot is that even today, students from all over the world can come to Lithuania and benefit from lectures, seminars, meetings, walkabouts and even just a cup of coffee or l’chaim — entirely in Yiddish — with master Jewish tour guides Chaim Bargman and Yulik Gurvich; Professor Pinchos Fridberg (a physicist who has in recent years turned to researching forgotten Vilna Yiddish poets); Misha Jakobas, longtime beloved director (and de facto builder over three decades) of the Sholom Aleichem ORT School in Vilnius who himself participated in the 1991 Oxford summer course in Yiddish, the antecedent of the Vilnius program); Professor Joseph Parasonis (a professor of building sciences, and veteran leader for years active in both the Lithuanian and Vilnius Jewish communities); former Yiddish theatre actress and beloved librarian, Polina Pailis, whose monthly bilingual exhibits (Yiddish and Lithuanian) adorned the Jewish community’s entrance hall for years (hopefully they can still be enjoyed somewhere in its archives); psychologist Dima Kuniskis, one of the leading figures in the small Litvak Orthodox community in town.
Last but not least, we hope the organizers have included a Yiddish lecture by the one (?) native-born fortyish guy who can pull off a Yiddish lecture with panache: Simon Gurevich (Simonas Gurevičius) the former elected chairperson of the Vilnius Jewish Community, and for many years before that, executive director of the Lithuanian Jewish Community who for decades interacted intimately, always with gentleness and love, with that now-gone generation of Holocaust survivors. My own favorite Yiddish lecture by Simóntshik, as he is lovingly known by virtually all of Lithuania’s Jews today, is, in fact, on the recent history of the country’s Jewish communities (some will laugh, some will cry, all will come away enriched).
Among immigrants, there is of course the fine Yiddish of Chabad Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky who is always happy to “switch to Yiddish” when there is a request from shul attendees whom he heartily welcomes from all corners of the earth. Participants have this year missed, unfortunately, just by a few weeks, the annual sojourn of Rabbi S.J. Feffer, whose rich Litvak rabbinic Yiddish has been a treat for Yiddish studies visitors for decades now. For a bit of the flavor, you can check out one of his videos meeting with participants of the longtime Yiddish weekly reading circle a few years back, or, just a few months ago, answering our question on the difference between a Litvak and a Chabadnik, on the Vilna Gaon’s attitude toward health care, or on the current dispute over plonking a museum and memorial center in the middle of the Old Vilna Jewish cemetery (see also recent developments). No doubt the organizers will next year coordinate dates with Rabbi Feffer.
In other words, students can this year, twenty-six years later, take advantage of the bona fide, real McCoy Litvak Yiddish (a Lítvisher Yídish) of remarkable people whose discourse, knowledge, memories, and eagerness to share are indispensable treasures. Hopefully they will all be included in the program. Doing so will be among the highlights of the revived Yiddish summer course. May it be blessed with every success.
◊
Note 1: The author invites all to use his free online Yiddish Cultural Dictionary (known in Yiddish as the Vílner vérterbukh) and to write in with missing words and corrections (at: info@yiddishculturaldictionary.org). He tries to put all his life’s work online free, including: Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish; Yiddish and Power; Issues in Yiddish Stylistics; Seven Kingdoms of the Litvaks; Windows to a Lost Jewish Past:Vilna Book Stamps; works on Yiddish stylistics; Holocaust Studies; four books of Yiddish fiction, mostly set in pre World War I Lithuania (anthologies have appeared in English and German translation). His projects currently in progress include the Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive (LYVA), translation of the Bible into Lithuanian Yiddish, Litvish: An Atlas of Northeastern Yiddish; Virtual Mini Museum of Old Jewish Vilna; Virtual Mini Museum of Interwar Jewish Lithuania (original collections periodically available as part of visiting groups’ seminars in Vilnius). Website: www.dovidkatz.net (Yiddish Linguistics page; Lithuania page). He also edits Defending History, which has for a decade and a half been combating Holocaust revisionism and antisemitism in Eastern Europe, and supporting Lithuania’s valiant Jewish community and the preservation of Jewish cemeteries and other historic sites.
Note 2: For participants seeking family roots and genealogical archive research, and/or guided tours (in English, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Polish, or Russian) not affected by “state-varnished versions” on delicate issues of history and culture, we recommend Regina Kopilevich. Regina is a legendary master of uncovering lost family histories that folks with Lithuanian Jewish ancestors never even knew they had. See also our list of all the professionals in the field known to us. Please remembers that this is the profession of these specialists.
Note 3: Participants interested in current Lithuanian Holocaust issues are invited to review recent events. There is also the prospect of meeting with Lithuania’s major truth-telling documentary film maker, Saulius Beržinis, whose latest film has been effectively banned (and privately seeing the film or at least its five minute trailer, viewings that many foreign visitors have found to be important over the last year). Defending History’s summary of the saga. Draft circulated of a foreign journalist’s article that was withdrawn after various threats.
Note 4: Participants with a deeper stake or interest in the past years’ history of Yiddish in Vilnius, and the integrity of the field internationally, as well as those who might like to use a living Yiddish library, might make some polite inquiries about the fate of the thousands of wonderful Yiddish books donated by people and institutions all over the world to Vilnius University for its Vilnius Yiddish Institute. Since the political forces that wrecked the institute found it to be of little further political use and closed it down altogether, there have been torrents of misinformation from various parties in reply to the simple question: Where are the thousands of Yiddish books that were in the library of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, meticulously hand-catalogued via vintage library cards by librarian Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky right up to the sad day of the institute’s closure? Glib responses of “It’s all there, but it’s closed this week” and “Oh, the room is being renovated right now” have been dished up to naive foreigners. Where are the books? Nobody is suggesting they have been destroyed but rumors and versions fly about (“They were put into boxes for storage, but now they are randomly back on shelving units in the building where the institute once existed, so the foreigners will be happy”). The operative question is: Are they available for study and reading to students, scholars and summer program participants? What happened to Fania’s card catalogue that covered every last book? Is there now an online catalogue by which books can be ordered up or scans ordered? The simple solutions that come to mind: Include all the books (which have Vilnius Yiddish Institute stamps) into the library of Vilnius University. Or, if not needed there, they can surely be absorbed by the excellent and suitably supported Judaica section of the National Library? In all scenarios they need to be as catalogued and as available as all the other 20th century books in town. That is the very least owed to a respect for Yiddish and to many donors who were told they were sending books to a permanent Yiddish institute at the University of Vilnius. See also comments at an earlier inventory of Yiddish and Judaic units in Vilnius, and a post in Defending History.
Note 5: Theatre goers note that a major production on the Ger Tzedek of Vilna (Graf Pototski) based on the Yiddish book by Sholem Zelmanovich (Kaunas 1934, republished Vilnius 2022 in Yiddish with Lithuanian and English translation) is now playing in Vilnius! Be sure to catch one of the remaining performances. The book was rediscovered and translated by the late beloved scholar, educator and museum curator Roza Bieliauskienė (1946–2023), a Yiddish summer course guest lecturer and guide from day one. Congratulations to all involved in making it happen. Just two issues of possible interest to Yiddish summer program participants, that we brought to the attention of the director in June: (1) Not a word of Yiddish in the production (Lithuanian, Russian, Hebrew are freely and copiously featured), and (2) all traditional Vilna Ashkenazic Hebrew was rendered in modern Israeli (“Sephardic”) pronunciation. Without even some symbolic Yiddish at key points (there are in any case simultaneous modern translation texts above the stage), and with the replacement of pre-Holocaust Vilna Hebrew by contemporary Israeli, there was a certain loss of authenticity and respect for bone fide East European Jewish culture. Hopefully both issues have by now been addressed. If not, feel free to add your voice for the inclusion of some Yiddish in a production based entirely on a Yiddish book, and one set in a Vilna where all the Jews spoke Yiddish and prayed in Lithuanian Ashkenazic Hebrew. In any case, enjoy the show!
Note 6: Chaim Bargman, legendary Kóvne-born and -based Jewish guide in Lithuania (immortalized in Dan Jacobson’s “Heshel’s Kingdom”) is now in Vilnius for a few weeks (for the first time since recovery from serious illness). He is one of the last masters of Lithuanian Yiddish who was born and bred, and is still resident, in Lithuania. Hoping those deeply interested in authentic Yiddish will arrange to meet him (perhaps a little group of visitors in town?). For contact details please scroll down to his name on our information page on local guides and genealogists.