Tag: Lithuania
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B. Cassel
My grandfather, Boruch Chaim Cassel, was born in Keidan, then part of the Russian empire, in 1877, and arrived in New York in 1904. He had served as a clerk in the Russian army and worked as a bookkeeper in Riga, but his first business enterprise in the U.S. was a candy store. The photos…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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