CHAPTER ONE

Neither Russians nor Lithuanians but Lithuanian Jews

1. Problems with the Attribution of the Lithuanian-Jewish Legacy in the U.S. Lithuanian Jews were the biggest group of arrivals from Lithuania besides ethnic Lithuanians.7 Moreover, they were definitely more conspicuous in the United States through their cultural and political work than Lithuanians and even most other Jewries from Eastern Europe. Understandably, the cultural legacy of Jewish Americans from Lithuania is treated as part of Jewish American legacy. However, why is it also treated as Russia’s legacy? American literary criticism abounds in references to Lithuania-born Jewish Americans, but they are ascribed “Russian” Jewish identity. Jews from Lithuania have left many imprints in American history and culture. Only the soil that raised them did not get the credit; or rather, the credit was misaddressed. The settlement of Jews in Lithuania and their six-hundred-year history as a Lithuanian-Jewish community is an episode in the five-thousand- year history of world Jewry. It may seem that it is not worth talking about Lithuanian Jews as a separate group. However, Eastern European Jewry and Russian Jewry are often discussed as groups that lived and formed under specific circumstances and for a long time stuck together when transplanted. In that sense, it is worth talking about Lithuanian Jewry because it has more clearly defined cultural boundaries than the so-called “Russian” Jewry. Lithuanian Jews are also different from Polish Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Even after Lithuania’s union with Poland, they lived by Lithuanian laws. In most histories of immigration the two largest groups of emigrants from Lithuania are covered separately. Lithuanian immigrants are the subject of Lithuanian histories, while Lithuanian Jewish immigration to America is part of American Jewish history. Lately Lithuanian-Jewish history has become a conspicuous branch of Jewish history. In the past two decades, historical studies of Lithuanian Jewry’s past have been written by descendants of once numerous Lithuanian Jewry: Solomonas Atamukas, Masha Greenbaum, Yaffa Eliach, Dov Levin, Nancy and Stuart Schoenburg and others. In the documentary novel Heshel’s Kingdom (1998), a famous South African writer, Dan Jacobson, presents an image of contemporary Lithuania as seen by a third-generation Lithuanian Jew who visits the country of his grandparents. Jacobson touches upon the painful question of the Holocaust that almost completely wiped out the once numerous and culturally distinct Lithuanian Jewry. “Jews of Lithuanian origin now feel towards that country [Lithuania] and its people a peculiarly intense and intimate bitterness which no post-hoc (or post-mortem) declaration will ever do anything to assuage” (178–179). The declaration he refers to is that of the Lithuanian Supreme 14 Aušra Paulauskienơ

Council, issued only two months after the declaration of Lithuania’s restored independence, in 1990. In the name of the Lithuanian nation, the Council condemned the genocide committed during the Nazi occupation in Lithuania, admitted that there were Lithuanian citizens among the executioners who served the occupiers, and assured that the Republic of Lithuania would not tolerate any display of anti-Semitism (178). In acknowledgement of the policies of the Lithuanian government, Jacobson notes that the “new republic’s” record is better than that of some wealthier and more populous countries than Lithuania, such as Austria (179). In the year after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence, 1991, the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, served as a site for the international conference “Education and Culture of Lithuanian Jews before the Holocaust.” It was the first attempt after a lapse of five decades to begin studying Lithuanian Jewish culture and to recapture what still remained. Despite a mass exodus of Jews from the Russian empire, of which Lithuania was a part from 1795 to 1918, the Lithuanian nation-state that came into existence in 1918 had a relatively numerous Jewish community—over 7% of the country’s population (Lempertas, Education and Culture 8). The Jews constituted “almost half of the urban population of the gubernii of Kovno, Vilna and Grodno according to the census of 1897” (Kirby 176). 90% of Lithuanian Jews were massacred by the Nazis, while the remaining few experienced the anti-Semitic politics of the Kremlin after Lithuania’s incorporation into the Soviet Union after World War II (Lempertas, Education and Culture 8). All remaining establishments of Jewish culture were closed, and the very word “Jew” was withdrawn from public circulation.8 The memory of Jewish culture in Lithuania was sinking into oblivion (8). The conference was welcomed and sponsored by governmental and educational institutions of Lithuania. The restored Lithuanian state demonstrated that it considers Lithuanian Jewish culture and history an integral part of Lithuania’s culture and history. In 1991 the tiny Lithuanian Jewish community reopened the Vilna Jewish State museum that had been closed in 1949. Since 1997, Vilnius has served as a site for an annual summer program in the Yiddish language, literature and culture open to world Jewry and people of all backgrounds and ages. In 2000, the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, an associate institution of Vilnius University, was established. “For the first time since the Second World War, a university institute dedicated to Yiddish language, literature and culture has opened its doors in Eastern Europe” (Vilnius Yiddish Institute 1). It is noteworthy that the first post-war Yiddish institution was founded in Vilnius, the area that was “the native area of the thriving pre-war Yiddish civilization” (1). It is important that Lithuania rebuilds the tradition of tolerance to its minorities that was broken by the Holocaust. Jacobson admits that “the killings began in Lithuania only with the arrival of the Nazi armies and