[Life should be transparent: conversations about Lithuania and Europe in the twentieth century and today]

ENAurimas Švedas has produced what can be called a historical document about one of the few transgenerational and transformative personalities of twentieth-century Lithuania, Irena Veisaitė. Life Should Be Transparent is neither a memoir nor a biography, portraying one of the most intriguing Germanists, theater critics, and pedagogues still alive. Through her extensive travels and broad acquaintances – everyone from presidents to queens (354) – she has engaged with luminaries like Czesław Miłosz, Tomas Venclova, and a host of others too numerous to mention. Veisaitė is a Lithuanian of Jewish ethnicity influenced by both western and eastern European culture; one might even call her a citizen of the world. In 13 sympathetic interviews, Švedas, the foremost historian of modern Lithuanian culture, has provided a history of twentieth-century Lithuania from the point of view of a frightened young girl maturing through life into an old woman whose memories may soon fade (Editor’s note: Irena Veisaitė passed away on 11 December 2020, yet another bright light extinguished by Covid-19). He gives the reader a remarkable insight into the different epochs she lived through, most notably her survival of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation. [...].