What
do you do if you spent an inspiring summer back in 2004 studying
Yiddish in Vilnius, Lithuania, and researching a painful
mystery in your own family, while naively becoming a pawn
of a government-sponsored effort to downgrade and confuse
the country’s World War II history? Unhappy with the country’s
murder rate of the Jewish population (at around 95% among
the highest in Europe, because of massive local collaboration),
some of the country’s politicians, academics and media folks
have invested heavily in “fixing” this unwanted history.
If, like Ellen Cassedy, you are a talented memoirist, you write a readable memoir
of that summer, skillfully tying in the antecedent and subsequent
threads. But what if ― here the plot thickens ― things have
changed markedly over in Lithuania concerning the very people,
institutions and issues you wrote about, undermining your
conclusions? For example, if two elderly women Holocaust
survivors you recall with fondness, Fania Brantsovsky (born
May 1922) and Dr. Rachel (Rokhl) Margolis (born October 1921),
both escapees from the Vilna Ghetto and anti-Nazi resistance
heroes, have in the meantime (incredibly and ridiculously)
been accused of being war criminals in a deeply antisemitic
state-sponsored effort to rewrite history? After all, an
event on this scale, an attempt to turn the tables by “blaming
the victims,” as the Economist put it in 2008, has not taken
place in any other country. Great Britain’s former prime
minister Gordon Brown has stood up for Dr. Margolis with
infinitely more backbone than the American Jewish author of the book under review.
Or, if a state-sponsored commission
on both Nazi and Soviet crimes that so impressed you back
then has since been scandalized because its only Holocaust
survivor member, Dr. Yitzhak Arad, was himself also accused
of war crimes (in 2006)? As a result, international scholars
including Sir Martin Gilbert (London), Prof. Gershon Greenberg,
Prof. Konrad Kwiet (Sydney) and Prof. Dov Levin (Jerusalem)
all resigned from the Commission and its associated committees.
Or, if a Yiddish institute you grew
to love is now free of Yiddish (and Jewish academic staff)
for eleven months a year, and has effectively been turned
into a purged government PR unit, whose non-Yiddish-speaking
leaders are regularly dispatched by the government to Astana
(Kazakhstan), Jerusalem, London and further afield to spread
the government’s gospel?
If in 2008, neo-Nazi parades started
getting the government’s green light for the center of the
capital city on the nation’s independence day, growing markedly
in 2011 and 2012?
If in 2010, public swastikas were
legalized and shortly thereafter the “Jewish” view of the
Holocaust actually criminalized? If right up to today, the
actual local murderers who unleashed the Lithuanian Holocaust
in 1941, the “white armbanders,” have been increasingly honored
by the state as “freedom fighters”?
In fact, a number of local Holocaust
collaborators were rehabilitated and posthumously honored
by the former Lithuanian president, Valdas Adamkus, who was
chosen (!) to provide one of the three blurbs adorning the
back cover of Cassedy’s book. In May of 2012, Adamkus actually
attended and defended the reburial of a major Holocaust collaborator,
the 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister of Lithuania who personally
signed orders for a concentration camp for Jews (it was actually
a torture and mass murder site) and for all of Kovno’s Jewish
population to be incarcerated in a ghetto within four weeks.
◊◊◊
Something is amiss.
The author’s solution to the whole
lot was to leave intact the good old days of 2004, and now,
upon the book’s publication, to publicize it as a subservient
spokesperson for Lithuanian government apologetics regarding
the Holocaust. She has even gone so far, recently, in the
course of promoting her book, as to tell a Vilnius publication:
“I went to Lithuania, hoping to decide who was right and
who was wrong; to put people in a column, who was a victim,
who was a killer. And then those lines began to blur.” The
antisemitic far right in Eastern Europe could not hope for
better luck than an American Jewish author who can be so
readily persuaded to “blur the lines” between perpetrators
and victims, confusing it all into precisely their own kind
of “Double Genocide” goulash.
The 2012 “author’s note” added at
the end of the book contains two lame paragraphs on some
of these matters which, for the sake of the artificial symmetry,
equally cite some long-ago solved internal Jewish disputes
and the government’s alleged generosity on other matters.
As if nothing can be written about without “equal time,”
as if there is no right or wrong, truth or falsehood in the
bigger picture of Lithuanian Jewry and its calamitous and
utterly non-symmetrical end. A calamitous end, incidentally,
that must not obscure the more than six centuries of usually
peaceful coexistence that for centuries was often a paragon
of tolerance and multiculturalism in the spirit of the originally
pagan medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a coexistence that
continued in numerous respects right up to the Second World
War.
The Holocaust and the Soviet crimes
against the peoples of Eastern Europe were never equal but
a number of East European countries have invested a lot of
funds, even in difficult economic times, to get the European
Union (and the rest of the West) to say that they were. The
motives are simple, especially in the case of the Baltic
states’ nationalist elites: to obfuscate their own ignominious
Holocaust-collaborationist history; to blacken the name of
the Jewish resistance fighters by Soviet associations (in
fact there were no American or British troops they could
have turned to in those parts ― it was the USSR fighting
Hitler then and there); and to be able to use Holocaust-style
claims for reparations claims against today’s Russia and
as geopolitical stick in contemporary east-west politics.
The “red-equals-brown” movement reached
a peak with the signing of the “Prague Declaration” in June
2008, to the dismay of the Holocaust survivor community.
The only Jew in Europe to have signed it is one of the “court
Jews” featured in Ms. Cassedy’s book, a right-wing member
of the Lithuanian parliament.
It is moreover disturbing that events
to launch the book’s publication in 2012 were held under
the auspices of the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington DC and
groups closely manipulated by the embassy. Lithuanian nationalists
are quite thrilled to have naive American Jewish spokespeople
who can be dazzled by diplomatic glitter.
◊◊◊
But these flaws, which are irrevocably
fatal to history and justice, and display a gross lack of
loyalty to and empathy with the victims and survivors of
the Holocaust, do not take away from a well-crafted memoir
of the summer of 2004. Moreover, had the history of Lithuanian-Jewish
relations taken a different turn in the ensuing eight years,
the same book would have had a very different ring to it
now. But that is reminiscent of the Yiddish expression used
in response to such “ifs”: If your grandmother had wheels,
she would have been a trolley car.
Still, once the propaganda element
(which does not in general overburden the good prose) is
isolated out, we are left with the only book-length memoir
to date of the Vilnius summer program, combining the author’s
(unmanipulated) summer of 2004 immersion in Yiddish with
an (unmanipulated) personal search for answers to a vexing
family puzzle along with the (manipulated) (mis)representation
of East European Holocaust politics.
Some of Cassedy’s finest descriptions
are of the two major Yiddish talents in Vilnius that summer:
master Yiddish language teacher Yitskhok Niborski of Paris
(originally of Buenos Aires), and the uniquely authentic
Yiddish culture educator Mendy Cahan of Tel Aviv (originally
from Antwerp). The extraordinary synthesis of knowledge,
charisma and passionate Yiddishism of both these Yiddish
educators is described by Cassedy more successfully perhaps
than by anyone else to date. It is also a comment on the
electric energy of intensive short immersion courses for
language and culture, sometimes equaling rather more than
the sum of the hours. It is a long overdue testament to two
of the most successful Yiddish educators of our times.
Turning to the descriptions of local
Jewish specialists, Cassedy’s portrayals of the celebrated
family-roots and Jewish-sites guide Regina Kopilevich are
likewise exemplary.
For Yiddish enthusiasts, the juxtapositions
of well-chosen snippets from the poems and stories being
studied, with the living experience of the cohesive summer
course group and Cassedy’s ongoing personal family quest
will be poignant and delightful (perhaps a tad too much for
non-Yiddishists, but then again this is on one level a book
about a Yiddish summer course).
◊◊◊
The non-fiction plot line, so to speak,
is cleverly shoehorned into a convenient symmetry which is,
however, also directly connected with the book’s central
weakness. This is the author’s attempt to play Holocaust
scholar. It results in unintended exposure of the way she
had been stage-managed by those close to the Lithuanian government
to espouse, to some degree, the East European far right’s
theory of Double Genocide which postulates that Hitler’s
and Stalin’s crimes resulted in human suffering so parallel
that recognition by each side of the other’s suffering as
“equal” is singularly crucial to reconciliation. One of the
strings is the locally understood implication that Jews were
in general responsible for Communism, a notion that might
come as a shock to unsuspecting foreigners. A number of macabre
elements of the tale, including the “Olympics of suffering”
competition and the phenomenon called Holocaust Envy have
yet to be studied in depth.
The essential flaw is evident from
the book’s title, We are Here, the translation of the final
line of the Vilna-origin Jewish partisan hymn authored by
Hirsh Glik. Finding that a similar Lithuanian phrase, Mes
dar esame (literally “We are still here” or “We are still
alive”) was used by Lithuanian anti-Soviet partisans in the
forests, after World War II, Cassedy ends her book in a triumphant
finale proclaiming equalization in all three languages: “Mir
záynen do. Mes dar esame. We are here.”
The problem is that it’s not true.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Lithuania was a state of
millions of sophisticated Europeans ready in relatively short
order to join NATO and the European Union. For all its problems,
the Lithuanian people, and their remarkable language and
proud culture really are still here and thankfully have a
radiant future. The country’s population actually grew under
Soviet misrule.
But Lithuanian Jewry, and its Litvak
Yiddish dialect and lore, have been reduced to a tiny remnant,
now rapidly approaching statistical zero in the ancestral
homeland.
If you travel up and down the country,
you will happily find Lithuanians of every age, size and
shape. Of the roughly 255 Jewish communities in the country,
some 250 (all but the major cities) are now Judenrein, with
only mass graves, remains of old cemeteries and assorted
architectural traces. The triumphant finale of the book,
beyond being offensive to Holocaust survivors and their families,
is morally untenable and empirically unsustainable.
A second reason for taking offense
is that some of the most celebrated postwar “Forest Brothers”
were recycled fascists who had murdered their country’s Jewish
citizens during the Holocaust. Moreover, their own primary
targets for murder were civilians. Not a very appropriate
symmetry partner for the handful of Jewish escapees from
certain death who rose up against the Nazis.
In fact ― there is no symmetry at
all.
◊◊◊
Nevertheless, tackling a family conundrum
enables the author’s memoiristic talent to shine forth unimpeded.
She wants to know the truth about her great-uncle Will who
she understood had been a member of the Jewish police in
the Shavl (Šiauliai) Ghetto. Her recounting of internal weighing
and measuring, of argument and counterargument, about what
her uncle did or didn’t do, for good or not for good, led
her to serious family research in archives in Lithuania and
the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. These are
among the book’s best passages.
But the concocted symmetry is not
held in abeyance for long. There is the perceived need to
“match” even this deep family quest with one about a Lithuanian
resident of her great-uncle’s hometown, Rákeshik (now Rokiškes).
From the structural point of view in a non-fiction narrative,
it is done rather well. Before the trip to Lithuania, the
need to explore the truth about great-uncle Will is “symmetrized”
by a letter from a town official in Rokiškes reporting that
an old Lithuanian man, Steponas, wanted to speak with a Jew
before he died. When we eventually make the much-hyped trip
to the ancestral shtetl, however, Steponas basically shows
her where the Jews were killed and makes some typical claims
about his family having tried to help the victims a little
here and there. This is an experience seasoned travelers
to the region have encountered in just about every former
shtetl.
The real point, that there is a thriving
Lithuanian community in today’s Rokiškes, and not a single
native Jew in what was called in Yiddish Rákeshik, says it
all (the descriptions of a single Jewish-heritage person
who happened to move there for work is unconvincingly held
up as some sort of symmetry).
That is because there was only one
genocide, one Holocaust, and all the Soviet crimes perpetrated
against Lithuania (and there were many and they were brutal)
can never approach the annihilation of an entire people on
the basis of their racial or ethnic or religious identity.
There is no symmetry, there was no double genocide, and even
an “American Jewish book” cannot will it into existence to
make Baltic nationalists happy. (The Lithuanian edition is
being rushed to press.)
◊◊◊
Nevertheless, the historic fallacies
of the book turn this into an honest memoir in a rather different
sense. We learn exactly which Jewish and non-Jewish people
the author met in Vilnius in the summer of 2004 and for anyone
who knows these people, the descriptions are both authentic
and heartwarming. They are all “professionals” in the field
of Jewish life and culture who understandably have a highly
developed sense of political correctness in discourse with
visitors, a skill absolutely necessary to their being able
to continue their important work in Lithuania.
Unfortunately, this is not balanced
by even a single description of any meeting with an everyday
Jewish person in Vilnius or anywhere else. Their views would
be (and are) very different from those she reports from most
of the “professional Jews.” It doesn’t compute that a memoirist
of her ability would have failed to talk to some of them,
at the synagogue or Jewish community center and at various
of the events described. Perhaps she didn’t want to include
thoughts that detract from “reconciliation at any price”
and are rooted in the experience and actual views of the
tiny remnant of Lithuanian Jewry still to be found on their
native soil? It is these people who actually live in admirable
everyday harmony with their friendly Lithuanian neighbors,
a harmony that is not undermined by their espousing the internationally
accepted history of the Holocaust which is currently being
revised by nationalist East European politicians, media folks
and elites.
The book’s dedication to “reconciliation”
suffers from the author having been overly influenced by
the version of reconciliation propounded by the government
and its “court Jews” and, as they are now called in Litvak
circles, “Quisling Litvaks.” Shallow and short-lived reconciliation
insists that Jews and Lithuanians pretend that each people
caused the other roughly equal grief (Jews by virtue of some
of them being Communists or pro-Communist), and recognizing
both peoples’ tragedies as “equal as a matter of principle.”
The second naive fallacy which the
author swallowed hook, line and sinker, is that it’s somehow
anti-reconciliation to criticize the Lithuanian government’s
shameful ongoing record in tolerating front pages of mass
circulation newspapers that look as if they’ve popped out
of 1930s Germany; city-center Nazi marches with legal permits
and participation of members of parliament; state adulation
of Holocaust perpetrators; defamation of survivors who resisted;
legalization of swastikas; and criminalization of the view
that the Holocaust was the only genocide in Lithuania’s twentieth
century history.
That is not to say that the author
is wrong to pursue reconciliation. It is a noble goal, and
it is being pursued every day by people of diverse backgrounds
living in Lithuania. It has been progressing all along, not
least because many courageous Lithuanians who have nothing
to do with the country’s government have come out with the
truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in the
same spirit so many had earlier done in Germany and elsewhere.
These bold citizens, who often suffer for their views, especially
in career advancement and income, have nothing to do with
the government. Cassedy seems never to have met a single
one of them. That is a pity.
The result is a fine memoir of a summer
in Eastern Europe devoted to family roots and the study of
Yiddish, that is unwittingly also the story of an author
who has been manipulated rather successfully by forces committed
to obfuscating the Holocaust. algemeiner.com
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