Tag: Travel
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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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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…
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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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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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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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Churches
You can’t throw a rock in old Vilnius without hitting a church, not that anyone should throw rocks at churches, of course. Last night I stood with a few hundred others in the nave of St. Casimir’s, a gorgeous Renaissance-era structure, and heard a wonderful organ concert. There are all kinds of churches here; Catholic, Russian…
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Frank Zappa
On a quiet Vilnius corner, not far from the old city center, a statue of Frank Zappa has stood since 1995. Why? This is a popular question.
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Mushroom hunting
A lovely warm day in the forest, about 20 miles south of Vilnius toward the border with Belarus. Dima — a Russian former newspaper editor who lives here, and whose acquaintance I owe to the inestimable John Pancake — his friend Mischa, my American friend Ellen (who instigated my coming here in the first place) and I…
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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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New food
You’d think, living in the cosmopolitan foodie U.S., that the chance of running across something totally new and unknown to eat would be fairly small. South Asian, East Asian, Ethiopian, Peruvian, been there, done that, check check check. But it’s a big world, and apparently a lot remains out there to be tasted. Witness last…
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