1. What This Book Hopes to Do “Lithuania Is Becoming a Symbol of Horror in America”; “The American Author Explains Why He

INTRODUCTION 1. What This Book Hopes to Do “Lithuania is becoming a symbol of horror in America”; “The American author explains why he portrayed our country as hell in his novel”; “Lithuanian anger on Thanksgiving Day,” shouted the headlines of the leading Lithuanian daily Lietuvos rytas on November 24, 2001 (Alksninis 1). On Thanksgiving Day, 2001, the American author Jonathan Franzen did not receive thanks from Lithuanians. His recent novel The Corrections (2001), a National Book Award winner and a U.S. national bestseller, presents an image of contemporary Lithuania that Lithuanians find “negative,” “grotesque,” and “caricature-like” (ýesnienơ). The Lithuanian Ambassador in Washington, Vygaudas Ušackas, sent letters of protest to the author and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, his publishers. Franzen responded by expressing his regret that the “fruit of his imagination” was perceived by Lithuanians as “likely to have negative consequences” (Draugas). The writer believes that a “majority” of his readers will understand that The Corrections belongs to the genre of fiction, not journalism (Draugas). While acknowledging Franzen’s right to imagination, I think he underestimates the power of fiction in forging images and stereotypes in the public imagination, particularly in fiction that portrays countries as obscure to Americans as Lithuania. Almost a hundred-year gap separates Franzen’s novel from the first American bestseller that featured Lithuanians, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). Both writers portray Lithuanian arrivals in the United States. Sinclair presents an immigrant of the beginning of the twentieth century, Jurgis Rudkus, and Franzen a trans-national migrant of the end of the twentieth century, Gitanas Miseviþius. Franzen even used his imaginary Lithuania as a setting. There are other American works with Lithuanian elements; however, unlike Franzen’s and Sinclair’s bestsellers, they are either hardly known or their Lithuanian motifs are visible only to few insiders. My study will present these overlooked pieces of literature to American and Lithuanian readers. All my sources feature Lithuania’s emigrants, who are at the same time first- generation American immigrants from Lithuania. By introducing these images of Lithuania and Lithuanians, I hope to speed up the readjustment of American scholarly and literary discourse to the political realities in and around Lithuania. The process of readjustment to the political remapping of Central and Eastern Europe began in the early 1990s, when Lithuania and a number of other countries of post-Soviet Europe re- emerged as nation-states. American politicians adjusted to the changed situation by drawing a line between Eastern Europe, consisting mostly of the remnants of the former Soviet Union, and Central Europe, consisting of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia and the three escapees from the Soviet Union: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. 2 Aušra Paulauskienơ But a large number of American historians and literary critics continue to see so-called “Eastern Europe” as a gray and uniform area, a region rather than a group of historically and culturally distinct nation-states. I want to contribute to the process of Lithuania’s discovery and, in a sense, rediscovery, in America. The sources I will discuss suggest that even the meager body of knowledge about Lithuania and Lithuanians that existed in the U.S. before the Second World War was lost as a result of the post-war remapping of the world that was especially disastrous to the three Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Although it may seem that the remapping of the Baltic States occurred after the War, it actually happened on August 23, 1939 with a secret agreement between Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. This treaty, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, in Czeslaw Milosz’s words, “re-established a colonial principle” according to which the two dictators “divided between themselves neighboring countries that possessed their own capitals, governments, and parliaments” (Beginning with My Streets 279). Milosz, the Polish poet who grew up in Lithuania, publicly uttered this uncomfortable truth in 1980, in his lecture given upon his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in literature. He questioned the significance of such international organizations as the League of Nations and the United Nations if they accepted the unlawful annexation of their three former members as an irreversible fact (279–280). In 1990, with lukewarm support from the international community, the three Baltic States reclaimed their right to self-determination and re- established their independent states as well as resumed their vacated seats in the United Nations. Historical justice was restored; however, the fifty-year absence of the Baltic States from the political map created a gap in the world’s memory about the three absentees. In the Western imagination the three Baltic nations became associated with what was Soviet or Russian. In his book The Captive Mind, written in the 1950s in Paris, Milosz tried to explain to the Western world how alien Soviet reality was to Stalin’s new acquisitions: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. According to Milosz, the invasion of the Red Army was no less a shock to the three Baltic states as the invasion of the Spanish must have been for the Aztecs (227). In the eyes of the Soviet authorities, the Baltic people “who were so well off that they put the rest of the Union to shame, represented a scandalous relic of the past” (229). Prisons were filled and certain categories of people were deported to labor camps. However, in the contemporary Western imagination, Lithuania and Russia represent the same amorphous region covered by the indefinite term “Eastern Europe.” Does one have to wonder that the American author Jonathan Franzen chose the most atypically Eastern European area to represent the typical ills of the vague, unfamiliar Eastern Europe?.

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