Litvak legacy

ENThe Yiddish, and with it the Jewish-Lithuanian civilisation, is usually considered - at least in the West - as having completely vanished with the Holocaust. Until recently, when it was not altogether forgotten, the world of the northern part of the Pale of Settlement aroused evocations of peaceful Shtetls and benign Rebbes similar to those illustrated by Ilex Beller or Wisna Lipszyc. These naive and charming remembrances could be considered at first sight as all that seemed to have survived to the disappearance of a major, coherent and very ancient society. Of course, there were good reasons for that, the sorrow and grievance of so many innocent victims was part of the answer. The cold war and the "inaccessibility" of the area (because of the existence of the iron curtain) to the average western tourist were also important factors which made the civilisation of the russian shtetl seem almost like a dream. But there were also more hidden reasons to this collective amnesia. The descendants of the survivors wanted to forget for ever these lands where their ancestors had lived, toiled, created and so much suffered for six centuries. They wanted to forget the hardships, the poverty, the pogroms of this lost "world of our fathers." They wanted to built a new society based on other roots located either in the bible, in Israel or in the culture and ideology (communism or liberalism according to their options) of their new homeland.But, it is a fact of life that the past always comes back one day and a new generation of young Jews is now looking behind the back of their grandparents, trying to understand what lies beneath the cultural references of the world in which they live. Their instinct and intuition tell them that much of what they see and experience today originates from somewhere and that these bits of a lost culture: religion, art, law etc. they observed all over the world in the Jewish communities and further apart, must indeed have a common origin. Eager to understand, they now try to locate the epicenter of this forgotten cultural earthquake. One now knows that this lost Atlantide lies somewhere in what the Jews used to call "Russia", precisely between Kaunas, Riga and Minsk, why not in Vilnius, the former Jerusalem of the North and, since the days of the Gaon of Vilna, the spiritual capital of the Yiddish world [p. 52-53].