Tag: Shoah / Holocaust
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Aharon Pick’s Diary
Here’s what I’ve been up to: As a young man, my grandfather had a friend named Aharon Pick. The two of them collaborated on a project to collect Yiddish folksongs in and around their hometown, Keidan, in Lithuania. My grandfather emigrated to the U.S. in 1904; Aharon Pick went to France, where he graduated from…
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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…
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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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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…
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