ACassel's Pages

Category: Vilnius 2015

  • Postscript: Berlin

    My month in Vilnius was followed by a few touristic days in Berlin. For American children in the 1950s, this may have been the first non-U.S. city to enter our consciousness, via newsreels, cartoons and the general sense that WWII was still very much with us. For Jewish children, moreover, this was Mordor – the seat…

  • Vilna, Vilna

    Before leaving Vilnius, some random thoughts and images. We were invited the other day to the final match of a basketball tournament featuring the Maccabi Tel Aviv junior team and a local sports academy. It was a spirited contest, with some surprising 3-point shooting by both teams, but Maccabi ran away with it in the final…

  • Graveside

    Kedainiai today is a town of about 25,000, situated near the geographical center of Lithuania, supported mainly by agriculture and ag-related processing. There’s a fertilizer plant, an ice-cream dairy and a number of cucumber-packing businesses. (Even in my grandfather’s day the town was famous for its cucumbers.) Sadly, though, for Jews like me, the most…

  • *היימ–ארבעט

    איך האָב ניט ליב זיך צו באַרימען מיט מיין יחוס, אָבער איך וואָלט פאָרט געוואָלט דערמאָנען, אַ דער זיידע מיינער איז געווען אַ שטיקל פאָלקלאָריסט. ניט קיין פּראָפעסיאָנעלער און דאָך אַ גאַנץ פעאיקער. סוף 19טן יאָרהונדערט, ווען די פּעטערבורגער פאָרשער – גינזבורג און מאַרעק – האָבן פאַרבעטן די פאָרשטייער פון דער אינטעלעגענץ זאָלן זיך פאַרבינדן מיטן פאָלק…

  • 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…

  • Over the river

    Every city needs a place like Užupis, and I suppose over the years many have had them — districts close enough to be part of the urban scene but just outside the central jurisdiction, so that popular activities viewed as unwelcome in the city proper can still thrive. Užupis means “over the river,” the river being the…

  • 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…