The Habitus of Holocaust reckoning during the thaw in Soviet Lithuania

ENSoviet discourse generally obscured the Jewish aspect of the Holocaust within the anti-fascist narrative. But in Lithuania during the Thaw, this pattern was broken by several Jewish poets and writers, sometimes in collaboration with non-Jewish colleagues. While Jews and Gentiles in Lithuania experienced the German occupation from radically different subject positions, and while antisemitism clearly persisted in the postwar era, an incipient process of historical reckoning can be traced among a small group of multiethnic cultural elites underpinned by shared cultural codes, personal memories of war, and the post-genocidal built environment. Surveying works of literature and cinema, this chapter suggests that the process of reckoning with the Holocaust emerged from a distinct habitus or community of affect. Keywords: genocide, memory, reckoning, trauma, locality.