Laima Vince Writer

My life has been a process of searching for identity, attempting to understand from the distance of time and geography, an inheritance that is not mine as a birthright, but has come to me through the stories and echoes of Lithuania’s historical and cultural trauma. Vanished Lands is the result of years of scholarly work, but also a lifetime of listening to survivors’ stories. This book grew out of a need to write about those histories that have been shrouded in silence—about a North American Lithuanian diaspora that has lived with its suppressed ghosts of the Holocaust and with its own memories of harsh and often violent occupations, resistance, and exile. For my generation, the echoes of those histories are transmitted to future generations through postmemory in a process that warrants our attention, and our compassion.

Memories of the depravity of the Soviet deportations to Siberia of mainly the intellectual and merchant class, high school teachers, university professors, government officials and military personnel of both Christian and Jewish Lithuanians in June 1941, instilled in Lithuanians a sense of dread together with a loss of hope that Lithuania could be a safe and peaceful country under Soviet occupation. The threat of deportation to Siberia was the main factor that drove tens of thousands of Lithuanians to flee from the second Soviet occupation in 1944, seeking safety in the democracies of the West. Lithuanians faced dire choices: take a chance and flee for the Allied occupied territories of Germany and southern and western Europe; join the armed resistance against the Soviets; risk being conscripted into the Red Army to fight on the front lines; or collaborate with the Soviet occupying forces in some capacity and remain in Soviet-occupied Lithuania. Collaborators who had served the Nazi regime during the German occupation of Lithuania retreated with the German Army and hid themselves among war refugees. Many of these perpetrators managed to later live a double life undetected within the émigré community.

Much of the writing produced by North American writers of Lithuanian descent reflects their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences in Lithuania during and after World War II, their flight westward as refugees, their experiences living in postwar displaced persons camps, and eventual settlement in democratic Western countries, where they clustered in Lithuanian diaspora communities.

A life lived within two or more cultures and languages is second nature to those born into an ethnic diaspora. The children and grandchildren of refugees learn from a young age to hold two or three cultural perspectives and languages in balance. They are the keepers of their parents’ lost nations’ collective historical memory and their parents’ and grandparents’ collective traumas. They are the older generation’s cultural translators and carry the burden of explaining to majority cultures where their people came from and what they have endured.

Writers who emerge from diasporic communities acquire a unique cultural global perspective. They write about the legacy of displacement out of their parent’s and/or grandparent’s homeland, and about what it means to be a foreigner, an immigrant, a refugee while struggling to retain the home language, culture, and identity. They write about the toll it takes psychologically and emotionally to balance dual identities. They take on the responsibility of telling the stories of those left behind. They also take on an inheritance of survivor’s guilt when the nation, or the collective memory group, has suffered collective trauma. They are sensitive to expectations by their elders to carry the nation’s collective memory forwards and never to forget.

In the North American Lithuanian diaspora community, the second and third generations born to parents and grandparents who experienced loss of statehood, deportations to Siberia, the postwar anti-Soviet resistance, Soviet occupation, grew up absorbing the trauma of their parents and grandparents not only in the home, but also through trauma expressed (or silenced) within the collective memory of the diaspora community. The first generation superimposed its trauma memories onto the next generations. These memories were re-enacted in a foreign land and spoken in a foreign language. This sense of living a life that was not their own are a thematic thread that runs throughout these memoirs.

The cover photo for this book is from my family album. Standing on the far left is my grandmother, Janina Simutis, then just in her twenties. On the far right stands her colleague, Werner Wartenberg, a Holocaust survivor. They were both case workers for the American Federation of International Institutes (A.F. I. I.) in New York City after World War II. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, they met ships that brought refugees to New York from postwar Europe. They helped refugees find work, places to live, and assisted them with naturalization paperwork. These two A.F.I.I. case workers, who became close family friends, had their own stories of war and displacement to tell.

It was the art of literary translation that first allowed me access to the stories that had been silenced. When I was a young poet in the eighties and nineties exciting poetry was being written in Lithuania by the generation that had suffered Soviet oppression. I hungered to translate this poetry from Lithuanian into English, to unlock its linguistic secrets and recreate the beauty of this ancient Sanskrit-based language in English. This desire compelled me to travel to Soviet-occupied Lithuania in 1988 to study with the poet Marcelijus Martinaitis at Vilnius University. No sooner had I arrived then the Lithuanian independence movement, Sąjūdis [Unity], began and I was swept up into the excitement of the massive peaceful meetings, discourse, and the singing of folk songs and protest songs that rendered the movement the name, the Singing Revolution. I was asked to interpret for the Sąjūdis at press conferences, meetings with western journalists, and peaceful political rallies.

Lithuanian heritage is understood in this monograph as people who have ancestral roots and heritage in Lithuania, whether their religious faith is Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Pagan, or agnostic. Four of the writers whose work is discussed in this monograph are North American writers of Christian Lithuanian heritage, one is of Litvak heritage, one is of mixed Jewish and Lithuanian heritage, and one is of mixed Scottish and Litvak heritage.

This book brings together North American Jewish and Lithuanian voices who speak over the silences of decades and seek answers. Memory and identity are linked in vital ways to the collective cultural memory narrative of the North American Lithuanian diaspora. Since Lithuania’s period of national rebirth in the late 1980s and early 1990s, almost a hundred works of literature in the genres of fiction, memoir, literary nonfiction, essays, poetry, and drama have been written in English by North American writers of Lithuanian heritage and have been published by commercial and university publishers in the United States and Canada. Thematically these narratives are mostly concerned with collective trauma that has affected Lithuania, ranging from the 19th Century efforts of Tsarist Russia’s authorities to Russify the Lithuanian population, the first and second Soviet occupations (1940–1941 and 1944–1991), and related violence, deportations, resistance, the plight of the displaced persons, and the Nazi occupation and Holocaust in Lithuania (1941–1944), a topic that in previous generations had been shrouded in silence.