Category: History
-
Kedainiai
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…
-
Musical interlude
This isn’t all that weird. Really, it isn’t. Yes, they’re very Nordic, and the Yiddish is accented a bit oddly. I know. And yes, it did feel a bit like (I imagine) a member of the Lakota nation must have felt watching Disney Indians or Iron-Eyes Cody on TV way back when. But hey, Jewish music…
-
Language mavens
Like the ad said, you don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s Yiddish. This was taken at our last weekly Shabbes “tish” – Yiddish for table, a sort-of traditional Friday night gathering in which we light candles, say kiddush and hamotzi, then eat & drink whatever anyone’s brought: Herring, cheese, salad, wine, vodka and…
-
Ms. President
So this is how things swirl around here. Friday morning, we’re in class reading a poem by Kadia Molodowsky, a much-loved Yiddish writer who died in 1975, when we suddenly can’t hear the teacher, because a brass band is playing. Out the window, which is on the second floor of the ancient Vilnius University (founded…
-
Shadows
It may be just an accident of geography that the Jewish Holocaust museum here is only a couple of blocks from the Lithuanian Museum of Genocide Victims. Or it may have been someone’s politically pointed choice. At any rate, it’s a very short walk between two perspectives that co-exist uneasily here. The Holocaust exhibition, in what…
-
Reunion
When I came to Vilnius in 1995, Regina Kopilevitch was just beginning her career as a guide and researcher for Jews visiting Lithuania. Yesterday she took several Yiddish Institute students around the city, demonstrating the same deep knowledge, insight and wit that made that long-ago visit so memorable for me. She’s practically an institution here…
-
Fania
Fania Brantsovsky’s title at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute is librarian, but it probably should be legend, or living memory. She was raised in Vilna, went into the ghetto with her family in 1941, escaped in 1943 and fought with the Jewish partisans until 1945. After the war she worked as a statistician. The other day…
-
Proletarians
Talk about bad timing. Among the strongest memories of my visit here 20 years ago are – were – some massive Soviet-era hero statues, one each on the four corners of a bridge over the Neris River. Workers, peasants, soldiers, students. Proletarians all, earnestly building the socialist state. Turns out they were torn down just…
-
Main Street
A main drag doesn’t tell you everything about a city, but it does tend to concentrate activity, and thus become part of the local narrative. This is Gedimino Prospekt, roughly Vilnius’ Champs Élysées – or Broad St., if you prefer a Philadelphia analogy. In Tsarist times it was St. Georgjius Ave. After World War I,…
-
Eating Yiddish
Speaking of eating, classes began yesterday at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute’s summer program, my reason for coming here. Inexplicably, I am in the advanced class, which means that after two days my head is about to explode. The teachers are scholarly, erudite and eloquent. Following along is like holding on to a roller coaster with…
ACassel's Pages 