The Language of Memory

Shanah Tovah! It seems fitting that the first day of the Jewish new year, a day meant for reflection and celebration, is the one-month anniversary of my plane landing in Vilnius.

I’ve written and re-written this first post a few dozen times before realizing, like my Fulbright journey, it should start with a story about my family.

Years ago, a cousin visited the place where my great-grandfather’s farm once was and returned with a jar of dirt. He gifted this to my Great Aunt Syd, the eldest of the family and first-generation American. Part of growing up in the Jewish diaspora is a lack of the tangible; we’re generations removed from our homelands, a continent away from where the atrocities of the Holocaust happened. Much of what existed then is only real for us in stories.

This jar of dirt was a cure for lack of connection. It was a representation of our roots that Aunt Syd – matriarch of my paternal family and my grandmother in everything but name – deeply cherished.

Living in Vilnius is a study in tangible. I’ve walked (and occasionally stumbled) the cobblestone streets of the Old Town knowing that my great-grandmother did the same. I’ve sat for services in the synagogue that my family could have attended, in a language they understood.

I’ve been faced with (and occasionally stumbled into) the realities of the Holocaust in Lithuania. I planned a trip to a historical site and mass grave and read etchings left by Jewish prisoners hours before their deaths. On a drive back from a poetry museum, I wound up on an idyllic wooded road that took me to another mass grave. A Jewish walking tour of Vilnius stops first at the largest mass grave in the country.

(You can likely see the theme of the history I’ve found; The synagogue I went to today is the only one in use in the country, one of the few still standing. Its torah scroll’s cover declares that it survived the ravages of World War II. It seems not much else did.)

Living in Vilnius is also a testament to the importance of language, be that Yiddish, Ukrainian, or Lithuanian, as opposition to oppression. It’s a shock of grief that I feel again and again for the family members passed from age or hatred, strangers I never knew and never will, those whose deaths are now a place I’ve visited and no longer an abstract loss.

Most importantly, living here feels like a responsibility to bear witness and tell the story of these things I’ve encountered. I can try to preserve them in new ways for those who come after me. I can share my poems with my friends, the ghosts who lived here first, and one day my grandchildren, and hope that I didn’t forget details of Aunt Syd’s stories as she can’t write them down herself.

I think it’s safe to say that living here is, among these other things, starting to feel normal. I have a local grocery store, road-trip friends, enough Lithuanian in my pocket to get by. I’ve made connections with experts on Jewish history and on Matilda Olkinaitė, the Jewish poet I’m studying whose young life was cut short. I can confidently use public transit, order takeout, and wander the city without a map. And, now that I have a better sense of my project and a better idea of how busy I am, I’ll likely start writing more, albeit shorter, blog posts.

For now, I’m glad to have a moment to reflect. It’s easy to get caught up in the profane of everyday and forget how sacred it is to be here, to experience Vilnius and my personal history up close, for things to have fallen into place as they have.

(For example: The professor I reached out to a year ago to conduct my Fulbright language assessment is now my Lithuanian teacher at Vilnius University. The building I live in, with a lease lucked into from a past Fulbrighter, is the same building where Matilda Olkinaitė once lived, and the site of other historical Jewish achievements.)

Living in Vilnius is, at the end of the day, a privilege.

To finish the story: A few years before she passed, Aunt Syd’s jar of dirt from her father’s family farm was thrown away by a well-meaning nurse. Aunt Syd had been the first to tell me about our homeland, Vilna, a place she named in a dying language where my ancestors lived and worked the land they couldn’t own for being Jewish.

Now, in Vilnius, I vacuum the sidewalk sand I’ve tracked into my apartment. I search the dirt for rocks to leave at graves. I water plants on my windowsill and think of poet Tracy K. Smith who wrote:

Everything that disappears
disappears as if returning somewhere.

Tomorrow, I’ll run my finger down a fresh page in my journal and feel the imprint of today’s pen. Out of this experience, I hope, grows something indelible.