I came to Lithuania for two reasons. One was to revive my flagging Yiddish language skills. The other was to revisit Kedainiai, which I did this weekend.

As some know, I have been obsessed with this place since about 1990, when I discovered my grandfather’s memoirs about his home town, called Keidan in Yiddish. As I researched, collected and translated material about the town, it took on an almost mythological status, kind of a personal Brigadoon. The primitive website I created was on line from 1996 until 2015; its replacement is here.  In 1995 I actually visited, but only briefly, and for 20 years I’ve been meaning to return.

How to describe it? Cosmic jet lag, maybe, like Kurt Vonnegut’s hero in Slaughterhouse Five, slipping back and forth across history. This wasn’t all in my head: Kedainiai was holding its annual town birthday this weekend, and the old center was decorated with banners depicting street scenes from the past, set near their current locations, like this one of the old market square.

My grandfather wrote lovingly about this place, which in his time was lined small shops where Jews sold produce, hardware, dry goods, everything. The building at left – built as the town hall in the 17th century, but decommissioned when Lithuania was swallowed by Tsarist Russia – was a tavern in zeyde’s day.

If you enlarge the older photo, top, you can just make out the Yiddish sign on the Jewish Folksbank at the back of the street. This was a 20th century innovation, established in newly independent Lithuania after World War I. It acted as a local credit union until the Soviets returned in 1939.

For me, the biggest change since I was here last is the renovation of the Keidan synagogue complex. (The two white buildings in the second pic from top). In 1995 they were abandoned, trash-filled relics. Since then they have been cleaned up and put to good use, one as an art school, the other as a place to teach about Kedainiai’s multicultural past.

Inside what was called the bes-medresh, or study house, the main room has been converted into a meeting and concert hall. (The acoustics are excellent). On the far wall is a slightly spectral but impressive reproduction of the long-gone aron kodesh, the ark of the torah. Upstairs, in what would have been the women’s section, is a collection of photographs of Keidan’s Jews, a community that was wiped out on Aug. 28, 1941, just two months after the Nazis took over.

In the picture above is Laima Ardviciene, a local high school teacher who has developed a curriculum about Kedainiai’s lost Jews. As a student herself, she recalled, there was absolutely no discussion of the Holocaust, no recounting of the swift and horrible end of a 400-year-old community at the hands of Nazis and their local collaborators. She’s been working to change that, with a diligence and clarity that I find inspiring.