Should the KGB term “informant” be used to refer to interviewees? Are Lithuanians the only “folk” in Lithuania? Are Lithuanian Jews “foreigners” in Lithuania? Is Lithuania still “post-Soviet”? The articles compiled in this volume were written at least six years ago, a long time in a rapidly evolving European democracy. Moreover, the essays were originally written in Lithuanian. The Foreword introduces the book as “the first collective scholarly publication in English” whose mission is “to present the state of academic folklore studies in post-Soviet Lithuania” (xviii). What this volume translates to western academic audiences is a struggle to remain relevant as a discipline, and a search for affiliations with other academic fields. As a Lithuanian scholar myself, I understand the difficulty of the country's return to the western academic world after a long break and the limited access of some scholars to English-language academic sources and forums.
In A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust Memory in Lithuania (2020) Myra Sklarew speaks about twenty years of walking the villages and towns to learn the history of the country from “testimony and reflection” and welcomes the insights of various disciplines to the “study of trauma and memory” (viii). Could the discipline of Lithuanian “folklore studies” offer such insights? After all, Lithuanian small towns and villages, not the cities, were the actual Bloodlands (Timothy Snyder) long hidden from the western world. A few chapters of this volume contribute to memory and trauma studies by including testimonies of Lithuanian witnesses of the 1941 massacres of their Jewish neighbors.
Aelita Kensminienė (Chapter 1) quotes two childhood memories of a Lithuanian woman born in 1933. One is of her Jewish playmate taken away in a truck to a massacre site, and the other is of the town people splitting up Jewish property. However, the author focuses on the visuality of “the informant's” narrative style in the first case, and an association with a Lithuanian proverb in her second example (21–23). While the inclusion of such memories may be honest and welcome, their interpretations seem callous towards the Jewish victims. More testimonies by Lithuanian residents are retold by Lina Būgienė (Chapter 4) with a conclusion that “the Jews were good people” (103). The attitudes of her interviewees to the behaviors of Nazi collaborators are those of condemnation and shame, but also of reticence and denial (104). Such testimonies address the trauma of the witness of atrocities, the type of trauma not yet properly acknowledged in Lithuania. The author refers to the brutal massacre of Jewish citizens as “the Jewish tragedy,” however, not Lithuania's tragedy (105). Similar perceptions of Litvaks as the Other comes across in Chapter 7 by Salomėja Bendoriūtė in the opposition “we-they” (179). The author explains the abundance of “folklore” of jokes about Jews by quoting an outdated myth that “Jews differed from Lithuanians in almost all respects,” including customs (180).
Not only is the mocking of a vulnerable minority unjustifiable; the cultural divide between Litvaks and Lithuanians may be exaggerated. One affinity between the two groups is the attitude to the dead and the places of their eternal rest. The importance of memory, essential to the Jews, and only exacerbated by the Holocaust, is known to Lithuanians from the fiction of Grigory Kanovich, centered around Jewish cemeteries and their guards. One of the novels of this saga about Lithuanian Jewry, Devilspel, became accessible to English-speaking audiences in 2020.
In my favorite Chapter 3 of this volume, Daiva Vaitkevičienė, records similar respectful attitudes to the dead in Lithuanian culture, also heightened by the traumatic injustice. In 1988, as Lithuanian independence movement Sąjūdis grabbed the historical chance to restore the statehood, the survivors of Soviet deportations and their descendants saw Russia's brief democratization as an opening for repatriating the remains of their loved ones. Vaitkevičienė claims that “most of these private journeys are unknown to scholars” (54). She records personal histories of families who exhumed their relatives’ bones with their own hands, in some cases retrieved the remains from ice or wooded areas of the Siberian taiga, and flew them back, often illegally as personal belongings, to their native villages and towns. In this well-written article, Vaitkevičienė convincingly argues that this was a cultural act whose driving force was the traditional belief that the dead must rest at home, and that the survivors are bound by duty to fulfill the deportees’ desire to be buried in the homeland. The author only briefly mentions, and I want to emphasize, the political and humanistic aspects of this act. Even before the declaration of restored independence in 1990, culture-driven private initiatives preceded the official narrative. That such actions were taken privately, silently, and after decades of demonizing the deportees as “criminals,” is a remarkable tribute to humanism that survived Sovietization, and the credit goes to the healthy core and vitality of “folk” culture.
Vaitkevičienė mentions those who could not return: buried in unmarked mass graves (53), or their graves destroyed by construction (54), or the wooden crosses that marked the graves burned (55). Similarly, I would like to note, in Soviet-occupied Lithuania, mass graves of Jewish victims went unmarked, tombstones from Jewish cemeteries were used as building materials, and a huge sports arena was built on the site of the oldest Jewish cemetery in Šnipiškės, Vilnius. A positive development was the 2021 decision of the Lithuanian government to forego the reconstruction of this Soviet building into a modern convention center in favor of turning it into a memorial to Holocaust victims.
Since this collection of articles was “part of the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore's research program” of 2012–2016 (xviii), the material and approaches represented in the book may not accurately reflect the current memory work, or the state of Lithuanian cultural studies, to which, I suggest, the studies of “folk” or traditional culture belong.
