"Lite" in the Jewish mental maps
LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Erdvinės koncepcijos; Žydų Lietuva; Nacionalinės teritorijos; Spatial concepts; Jewish Lithuania; National territories.
ENAsya Gusinsky was born in 1919 in the town of NeveF at the northeastern corner of Vitsiebsk Province (in the same year Nevel was transferred to Pskov Province of the Russian Federation). When Asya married David Merimsky, who was born in southeastern Ukraine, in Leningrad in 1936, her mother-in-law Betya used to call her “litvechke” (“Lithuanian Jew” in Yiddish). It is likely that Lithuanian peasants in the core area of ethnic Lithuania hardly believed that people from Pskov Province, situated so far from Vilnius and Kaunas, could be considered to be “from Lithuania” in the twentieth century. It is common knowledge today that there exists a Jewish subgroup called Litvaks and that the members of this group are obviously different from other Eastern European Jews: Polish, Galician, Ukrainian, Hungarian, etc. Originally, Litvak was a Yiddish word meaning a Jewish person originating from Lithuania (Lita in modern Hebrew pronunciation, Lite in Yiddish and in Ashkenazic Hebrew), a Lithuanian Jew. Besides this geographical definition, there are two other definitions of Litvaks. The first one is linguistic: The Litvak is a Jew who speaks Lithuanian or the northeastern dialect of Yiddish, litvish. [Extract, p. 312-313]
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