Tag: History
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A 50-year civil war?
Jill Lepore argues in The New Yorker that the Kent State shootings, of which today is the 50-year anniversary, followed by those at Jackson State in Mississippi, followed by the “Hard Hat Riot” in New York (in which construction workers beat up student antiwar protesters) began a civil war that continues today, with Trump’s shock…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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Ghosts
No one can be here long without feeling burdened by history. Over the last century, Vilnius’ national identity changed half a dozen times, with control passing among Russia, Poland, Germany and the Soviet Union as well Lithuania, which won and lost its independence several times. In the process, hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered, exiled…
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