Ok, so I arrived yesterday (Friday, 7/18) via Moscow on Aeroflot. Their planes still sport a logo featuring a hammer and sickle, which surprised me. I was met at the airport by Vilius, the real-estate guy hired by the University to help with housing, and taken to my apartment, on Literatu Street. This is a tiny street in the Vilnius Old City that is marked by long walls with hundreds of individually styled plaques and bas-reliefs, each celebrating a Lithuanian writer.

I’m here to attend the summer course of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, a department of Vilnius University. I’m with about 30 others, most of them grad students from the U.S. and Europe. Many are working on PhD’s in history, literature, linguistics or similar subjects. Not all are Jewish; one is from Tokyo. Most speak several languages already.

Vilnius is charming. The old city is full of 18th and 19th century buildings, Baroque style churches, narrow, curving streets and plazas with cafe-bars in full summer bloom. It’s vastly more alive and far younger in tone than when I was here last, in 1995, just four years after Lithuania freed itself from the Soviet empire.

You can read the history elsewhere; it’s long, and complex, and mostly sad. These may, in fact, be the best times seen here in centuries. Putin is a worry, but NATO and the EU are expected to keep Lithuania from falling back into Moscow’s nasty clutches.

Enough geopolitics. I’m sitting in an outdoor cafe, enjoying a Belgian dark beer called Grimbergen, which I heartily recommend, and listening to a half-dozen conversations in languages I don’t recognize. Lithuanian, if you don’t know, is an oddball among European tongues; it has more in common with Sanskrit than with German or Russian. So far I’ve had no trouble using English, which is a big change from 1995. Then you needed Russian or at least German to shop or ask directions; now the Russian speakers are mostly over 50. Young people are like the woman in the telephone store this morning who fitted my Lithuanian SIM card into my iPhone. I asked “Can you help me in English?” “Maybe” she smiled back.