Page 64 - issue

rid of all the Poles (literally, as only Stalin room, and to make it good, the hotel gave
could), so all you have today are Ukraini-
ans – and Russians (whom Stalin moved
in). And look at all the ethic wars going
on in Ukraine today!
uuu
And so we flew into “Kaunas” on Sun-
day night, arriving at our non-fancy ho-
tel after midnight. The late hour of our
arrival was a harbinger of the frenetic
pace of our journey, which was its most
challenging feature. As in an old Jack
Lemmon movie, my son and I were given
our key, went up to the fourth floor and
unlocked our room, triggering shouts;
the room was occupied! I went down to
tell the hotel guys; they were incredulous
but confirmed my report by activating
the spy cameras they evidently have in
every room. You are in the Former Soviet
Union, after all, and old habits die hard.
Big Brother is watching all the time…
when he is bored.
Of course, we were given another
5 There I go with my Polish names. In Lithuania they call it Ukmerge, with accent on the last syllable, as in Ukmergay
!‫שנה טובה‬
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me and Shmuli a pair of tickets entitling
us to a free train ride to Vilkomir,5 plus a
free beer once we got there. Now, I think
my father once dated a girl in Vilkomir in
the 1920s, but that wasn’t enough of a
magnet. So if anybody out there wants a
free beer in Vilkomir, let me know; I have
two tickets.
The next morning our tiyul began in
earnest. To my mind, there are two ways
of approaching a trip to this part of the
world. You can concentrate on the Holo-
caust, or you can concentrate on every-
thing before that. Unfortunately, the Ho-
locaust has an advantage, which it ought
not to have. Between Hitler, Stalin, and
the local population, all physical traces of lasted eight years on the Eastern Front.
the old Jewish neighborhoods and build-
ing were destroyed and replaced with
new buildings or parks. In other words,
not only did they kill the Jews, they re-
moved the physical evidence that there
ever was a thriving, pulsating Jewish life
faWrniedendpthsahatirnpoknosvaeflrolrtohuyeroupdraelasotryyafelratiyern.adnsd
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Hashanah!
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involving about a million people.
That’s a million people if you think
about Litvishe Jewry (‫ )יַהֲדוּת לִיטָה‬in its
broad sense. You see, ‫לִיטָה‬, in Jewish
geography, culture, and history denotes
an area much larger than the territory of
the current Republic of Lithuania, which
came into existence only 98 years ago.
‫ לִיטָה‬includes what is today Lithuania,
Latvia, Belarus, and even a bit of Western
Ukraine. Indeed, a classic story reflects
this famous reality.
First, some background: Not many
people are aware of the fact that, al-
though World War I lasted four years
(1914-1918) on the Western Front, it
The Germans did in fact withdraw from
the Eastern Front (where they had tri-
umphed militarily over Russia) at the
end of 1918. But in the wake of the Ger-
man withdrawal, everything collapsed.
The Russians (Reds vs. Whites), the new-
ly-independent Poles, Belarusians, Lith-
to eat round things on
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