Tag: Vilnius
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.
-
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…
-
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…
ACassel's Pages 