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Abstract
This paper deals with the identity concept of two Lithuanian Jewish writers, Grigorii Kanovich and Markas Zingeris. Kanovich, as a member of the Holocaust generation, writing in Russian, depicts his protagonists as spiritual and hardworking people with strong self‐confidence, resting on religion and custom. By means of the narrative technique of memory, Kanovich creates a literary resurrection of the Lithuanian Jews as a people which was almost completely exterminated during the Holocaust. Omnipresent pictures of cemetery and grave transform the Lithuanian space into a metonymy of death and, grotesquely, to the only place of home, being the “shelter” for the killed bodies of the Lithuanian Jewry. Markas Zingeris, growing up in post‐war Soviet Lithuania, represents the concept of open identities, changeable in time and place. Calling himself a Lithuanian writer who has been raised within a Lithuanian, Jewish, and, not least, Soviet milieu, Zingeris depicts his protagonists in in‐between situations. Writing in Lithuanian, speaking several languages fluently and working as translator, Zingeris embodies the cosmopolite. At the same time, though, he is a writer of collective memory. He comments on the apparent loss of the great utopia of an autonomous identity with ironic melancholy, pointing instead to the rich variety of hybrid identities.
Notes
1. Kanovich, Kozlenok za dva grosha, 128.
2. Zingeris, “Speaking Simply about Complicated Matters,” 48.
3. Eighty‐one per cent of the 3.5 million population are Lithuanians. See De Munck, “Primary, Secondary and Metamagical Constituents of Lithuanian Identity,” 211.
4. See Lustiger, Stalin und die Juden. The loss of Yiddish results less from assimilation than from repression, especially in Soviet Russia. See “Lenin and Stalin on the Jewish Question,” 46; “The Jewish Cultural Revival,” 71ff; “On Trial: A Language,” 244.
5. See Cejtlin, Dolgie besedy v ozhidanii schastlivoi smerti, 52: “After the war, I changed my name. Was Jakov. Became Jokubas. Thought and wrote in Yiddish – now in Lithuanian. Even the diary. Even the letters to the daughter in Israel … How is it, however, to explain that J. consciously kept the language once spoken by their grandparents from his children? … He shut on them the door to the world of Judaism.”
6. Ibid., 170. The originality of the book’s creative form, between diary, interview and record, excited the cultural scene. The book’s problems, so far never discussed in Lithuania, provoked the Lithuanian cultural community in the late 1990s. Josade was harshly criticised by the media and the Jewish community for the denial of his Jewish identity.
7. This is also been pointed out in Meras’s reply that the Jewish rebellion in Warsaw’s ghetto saved “the Jewish people’s honor” (Mėnulio savaitė).
8. See Sluckis’s novel Laiptai į dangų, whose plot is located in post‐war Lithuania. The farmer Indriunas, comparing Soviet and Nazi occupation in Lithuania, says the latter only harmed the Jews, not the Lithuanians. The author gives his comment with the reply of the farmer’s wife: “Aren’t these also human beings?” In the novel Adomo obuolys, the protagonist, representing the ostracised geneticists in Soviet times, remembers the disastrous development when his younger brother became a member of the shooting squads that killed the town’s Jews.
9. Kanovich grew up in the small town of Jonava, near Kaunas, where he studied in Cheder. Evacuated to Kazakhstan as an adolescent, he encountered the Russian language (see his novella Liki vo t’me). I refer to the literary critic Valerii Shubinskii, who stresses Kanovich’s excellent knowledge of Russian, seeing him as the “only outstanding Russian writer so far who truly studied the Russian language” and whose correct Russian would give us much more of a natural impression than the jargon of Odessa in which almost all Jews in Russian literature communicate (Shubinskii, “Dom zhizni – dom smerti,” 2).
10. The idiom “home” is barely mentioned in recent cultural discourse. This is understandable, taking into consideration its irrational use throughout history but also the postmodern objections to the authentic. Western discourse, however, does not weaken the significance and actuality of “home” and “homeland” for the newly constituted or reconstituted national states in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and their search for the “authentic.”
11. See Cejtlin, Dolgie besedy v ozhidanii schastlivoi smerti, which records Jokubas Josade’s experiences; the memoirs of Katz, Von den Ufern der Memel ins Ungewisse; and Ranaitė‐Čarnienė, Neveroiatnaia Pravda, the notes of Grigorij Šur, “Die Juden von Wilna,” and others.
12. Kanovich’s presentation to the Jewish community of Vilnius on 23 September 1991, on the 50th anniversary of the extermination of Lithuanian Jews in Paneriai.
13. See Books about the Holocaust and Judaica in Lithuania, edited by Lithuanian Publisher’s Association and Markas Zingeris, with a preface by the latter. See the anthology of poems Šiaurės gėlės (Northern Flowers), edited and with a preface by the Lithuanian politician Emanuelis Zingeris, who emphasises this book’s meaning as a memory of Lithuanian Jews’ lively life, dominated by work and hopes, not death.
14. See Kanovich, Park Evreev, 257; Basche, “Des Menschen Kopf hat keine Federn.”
15. See the remark of the narrator’s father about God as the “pure betrayer of Jewish people” in Zingeris’s story “Kaip buvo dainuojama Laisvės alėjoje.”
16. See Marius Ivaškevičius on the deconstruction of national myths (Ivashkevichius, Malyish’ and Zhali), and Sigitas Parulskis, Trys sekundės dangaus, on pronouncing the generation of the fathers guilty for the Soviet system.
17. Lithuanian Jewry differs from Central European Jewry as described by Milan Kundera as the “intellectual cement of Europe” (Kundera, “A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows out”). Lithuanian Jews, who have lived on Lithuanian land since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, are said to be more connected to the earth. Living poorly, they have been craftsmen, working in “every possible trade” (Levin, The Litvaks, 10, 11). Settled in an area that nowadays extends over Lithuania and parts of Latvia to Belarus, living in small towns but also in the countryside together with Lithuanian peasants, Litvaks were characterised as patient, reserved and stubborn (Lempertas, Litvakes, 7) – the latter being one of the “much‐trumpeted character features of the proverbial Litvak of Yiddish folklore” (Katz, Lithuanian Jewish Culture, 199). Dovid Katz, professor at the Yiddish institute of Vilnius University, understands his studies on Lithuanian‐Jewish culture as an investigation into “various cultures of Lithuanian Jews, or Litvaks (Yiddish, Lítvakes),” sometimes equating “Lithuanian Jews” with “Litvaks,” sometimes accenting the difference (13). Being religious opponents of the Chassidim in the Ukraine and Poland, Litvaks, also called Misnagdim, were seen as rational people, “mind rather than feeling‐oriented” in religion and daily life, devoted to the study of Tanach and Talmud (Lempertas, Litvakes, 8). The importance of Lithuanian Jewry “in its intellectual, rational approach” and its scepticism “regarding false messianism” is also confirmed by Levin, The Litvaks, 10, 11; and Katz, Lithuanian Jewish Culture, 80: “But the major attribute of Lithuanian Jewish society is, in one word: learning.”
18. Referring to Eliyahu ben Shlomo‐Zalmen, the Gaon of Vilna, Dovid Katz defines a characteristic of the Lithuanian Jewry (Litvaks) as follows: “a certain personal distance in general came to be one of the folkloristic attributes of the Litvak. Others include stubbornness, an intolerance for wanton innovation, an obsession to get to the bottom of every mystery confronted, a dislike of crowds and commotions and overt emotional outpourings, and an all consuming passion for simplicity of lifestyle, honesty in daily life and above all: learning, learning and more learning, a non‐stop lifelong endeavour to study. All of these personified the Gaon, and his people who tried as much as they could to follow him, the Litvaks – Lithuanian Jewry” (Katz, Lithuanian Jewish Culture, 89). Izraelis Lempertas, a researcher on Yiddish studies in Vilnius, uses geographical, linguistic and religious criteria to describe the Litvaks’ personality, stressing the Yiddish language as the dedicated spoken mother tongue of Lithuanian Jews (Lempertas, Litvakes, 7). Katz, Lithuanian Jewish Culture, 18, 128, 145, emphasises Lithuanian Yiddish as “the only language to have ever been spoken throughout any phase of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.” Otherwise “Litvakness” would go deeper than dialect into the “concept Lítvishkayt,” which invokes “a host of associations, values, memories and attitudes,” including the literally “good Lithuanian heart” and, first of all, the religious aspect “in the context of a new dispute.” “In the larger sense, they were all Litvaks who spoke a litvishn yidish (Lithuanian Yiddish). But in a narrower sense, Litvak and its adjective litvish came to mean “Misnagdic’ in discussions of religious matters or in style of Talmudic scholarship.”
19. See Meras, Geltonas lopas; idem, Lygiosios trunka akimirka. Meras was a very famous author in the Lithuania of the 1960s. After having left for Israel in 1973, he became temporary chairman of the Union of Emigrant Writers from the USSR. He continued to write in Lithuanian but could not revive his former success.
20. The American philosopher Seyla Benhabib claims that the main principle of the “generalised other” leaves the “concrete Other” with his/her history and individuality unnoticed. This, in turn, results in new exclusions (“Der verallgemeinerte vs. der konkrete Andere”). Kanovich claims this concreteness for Lithuanian Jewry.
21. In this respect memories correspond to the “communicative memory;” see Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 50. In Kozlenok za dva grosha we become acquainted with the Dudak family over four generations, beginning with Ėfraim Dudak, the stonemason and his three sons, the interpreter Shachna, the revolutionary Hirsh and the Purim clown Ezra, each of them representing Jewish careers at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century – socialism, assimilation or show business. Ezra’s bride Danuta will give birth to their son Jacob and, after Ezra’s death, she will have a second son, Aaron, with Shachna. The novel Ne otvrati lica ot smerti shows her and her sons’ life on the eve of the Soviet occupation in 1940 and the Nazi occupation in 1941 and ends with her and her grandchild’s death. While Jacob stays the grave‐digger of the shtetl, Aaron becomes a KGB official and will lose his just‐born first child at the end of the plot – an anticipation of the tragedies of Lithuanian Judaism in the Holocaust. The two novels are the third and fourth parts of a tetralogy beginning with Slezy i molity durakov and I net rabam raia, which are connected or identical with the places depicted in the later works: the residential settlements Zhmud (Žemajtija), the district of Rasėiniai on the river Neman or the village Ionava on the river Vilia.
22. “Lithuanian soil” is to be understood in its historical and cultural meaning, determined by geopolitical changes, but in general as a space located in present‐day Lithuania, Belarus and Latvia where Lithuanian Jews settled over centuries. Levin distinguishes the history of the Litvaks into an ethnic, a historic and an inter‐war Lithuania. Levin focuses his studies on the territory of “inter‐war Lithuania” with its capital Kovno but also deals with historic and ethnic Lithuania and mentions “other important Lithuanian communities, such as Vilna – Lithuania’s historic, and contemporary, capital.” Ethnic Lithuania, in his understanding, represents “an area of some 70.000 sq. km. to the east of the Baltic, mostly covering the Žematija … region as well as the Nemunas (Niemen) and Neris (Vilija) basins and settled very largely by ethnic Lithuanians.” Historic Lithuania applies to the height of Lithuanians’ power in the fourteenth century, when Lithuania encompassed “a vast expanse of territory stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.” The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its cultural and religious tolerance towards minorities, seen as Lithuania’s Golden Age, influenced society over centuries to a comparatively communal tolerance. This is praised by Katz as the basis for the attachment and love of the Lithuanian Jews’ to Lita as their geographical and cultural homeland (Katz, Lithuanian Jewish Culture, 18, 63). Katz refers to the “‘conceptual stability’ of places for a stateless culture” and, in that respect, for Lithuanian Jews, for whom “geographic concepts” have been more durable than for classic national states (63). He also mentions the importance of Lithuania’s multiethnic society (63), which diminished the pressure on Lithuanian Jewry even during the Tsarist occupation after the three partitions of Poland, when Lithuanian Jews became part of Catherine the Great’s Russian Empire (299). See also Atamukas, Evrei v Litve: 10, 11: Atamukas refers to five communities (Brest, Grodno, Trakai, Luke, Vladimir‐Volynsk) at the end of fourteenth century in the united kingdoms of Poland and Lithuania where Jews were both peasants and city dwellers, especially traders and craftsmen. The decree of Prince Vytautas (1388–9) established privileges that formed the foundation for regulating judicial, industrial, economic and social relations between the ruler and the Jews and between the Jews and the Christian population. This time, when Jews as free citizens were only subjugated to the prince, is inscribed into Jewish history as the “Golden Period.” After Vytautas’s victory over the crusaders at the battle of Grunvald (1410), the state “Poland/Lithuania” had a Jewish population of 6000.
23. In quick sequence the novels Slezy lezy i molitvy durakov, I net rabam raja, Kozlenok za dva grosha and Ne otvrati lica ot smerti were published. His last novel, Park Evreev, came out in Jerusalem in 1997.
24. Julia Kristeva analyses the history of European national states and the processes of exclusion of the minority which accompany the constitution of national identity. In the tradition of the French Revolution, Kristeva demands the priority of civil rights above birth rights. Following this position, Lithuanian Jews, living for centuries on Lithuanian earth, should have had civil rights as well as birth rights. See Kristeva, Fremde sind wir uns selbst. On Kanovich’s work see also Parnell, “V poiskach priiuta dlja dushi”.
25. See Kanovich, Ne otvrati lica ot smerti.
26. See Kanovich, Vera Il’ichna
27. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 34–48.
28. Ibid., 48–66.
29. Assmann submits these figures referring to the topics of exodus and exile in Jewish history.
30. See Assmann on Maurice Halbwachs (La mémoire collective, Paris 1950) (Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 34).
31. Kanovich, Park Evreev, 29. I refer to a remark in literary critique regarding Kanovich’s “modernisation” of the psychology of his figures. The author criticises Kanovich’s inaccuracy in religious details of Judaism but comes to the conclusion that he may have consciously modernised his figures’ way of thinking to make them more current – a position with which I agree (Shubinskii, “Dom zhizni – dom smerti,” 4).
32. “Paneriai [the site near Vilnius where Lithuanian Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1944] belongs to me, not to Lithuania. Maidanek is not Polish land. Dachau is not German. Babii Iar is not Ukrainian. It is ours” (Kanovich, Park Evreev, 140).
33. Kanovich, presentation to the Jewish community of Vilnius on 23 September 1991, on the 50th anniversary of the extermination of Lithuanian Jews in Paneriai.
34. Assmann speaks on this occasion about the “retrospective memory” of a group, constructing the image of unity and integrity (Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 61).
35. In Russian – Neman; in German – Memel; in Lithuanian – Nemunas.
36. See the meaning of Vilnius as the “lost dream” in Kanovich’s novel Son ob isčeznuvšem Ierusalime.
37. See Kanovich, “Schitaiu sebia russkim pisatelem. Besedu vel M. Gejzer”: “Kanovich is a descendant of free Jews,” Gejzer adds. “Even tragedies which are so frequent in the destinies of Kanovich’s heroes do not turn them into moaners who have lost hope and memory of the past.”
38. See also his fellow student’s denial of being Jewish in Kanovich, Liki vo t’me, 39, 46, 112, 33: “‘I am, Girsh, not Jewish, not Jewish,’ Levka spoke vehemently. ‘Why everybody thinks that I am – well, I am not. My mother is Armenian, but father is of pure Russian blood. Nikolai Anatol’evich. And as to you – I am not bum‐bum.’”
39. Hermand, Judentum und deutsche Kultur, 1.
40. Daxner, “Schtetl‐Faszination,” 170.
41. Pankau, “Elias Canetti – das Selbstbewusstsein des Außenseiters,” 335–58.
42. Kanovich, “Schitaiu sebia russkim pisatelem. Besedu vel M. Gejzer.”
43. Ibid. According to Shimon Markish, Kanovich turned out to be the first writer after Isaac Babel’ who created Jewish prose in the Russian language. Following Markish, Russian‐Jewish literature can only be regarded as such if its author is of Jewish origin and connected with Jewish culture and religion, writes on Jewish themes and applies elements of Jewish narrative tradition. See Markish, “Religioznaia stikhiia kak formoobrazuiushchii element russko‐evreiskoi literatury.” I also refer here to a paragraph, written with Shimon Markish’s participation, on Russian‐Jewish literature in the Short Jewish Encyclopedia, 551: Kanovich is mentioned here as one of the most profiled Russian‐Jewish authors.
44. Kanovich talked about the reasons for his emigration to the literary critic Azovsky in the journal Vilnius in 1994. He gave personal reasons (his son lives with the family in Israel) as well as reasons of artistic creativity (as a Russian‐speaking writer in a new national state of Lithuania he would have been left without readers). See Kanovich, “Neobchodimo posmotret’ na sebia storony,” 4–16.
45. He described this problem in an interview of 1995; see Kanovich, “Budto sled ptitsy v vozdukhe,” 4–10.
46. For the concept of “mnemotopos” see Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 59.
47. Kanovich, “Ikh ni na kakuiu vstrechu uzhe ne priglasish.”
48. To clarify these concepts: cold societies resist any change in their structure, while hot ones have “intense longing” for a change; see Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 68–70 (here Assmann quotes Claude Lévi‐Strauss, La pensée sauvage, 1962).
49. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 52. See also Assmann’s thoughts about myth as the “truth of the highest degree” and about the special role of historical myth in Jewishness.
50. The permanent longing of his protagonists for their Lithuanian land in Kanovich’s work of the Israeli period gives one an idea about the relativity of identity criteria. Thus, the protagonist of the novel Park Evreev looks with self‐ironic amazement at the daughter‐in‐law of his old friend – an Ethiopian Jewess, a stranger to Lithuanian Jews. Differences among Jewish people deconstruct the understanding of the autonomous and united Jewish identity. “Israel as it lived in my imagination, in my heart, is not fully identical with that which I encountered in real life,” the author says. “Here, in Israel, I am going through a personal drama … when I lived in Lithuania, I thought that I knew Jews well, knew their character, their life. Here it turned out that I am not such an expert with respect to my nation. Which is surprising to me, as I was born into a traditional Jewish family” (Kanovich, “Schitaiu sebia russkim pisatelem. Besedu vel M. Gejzer”).
51. Regarding the concepts of “Eastern” vs. “Western Jew” see Ahrendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, 62, 84.
52. His paternal side is rooted in the well‐off educated bourgeoisie of Kaunas, while the maternal side belongs to the poor Litvaks of the shtetl. One can read about their life in the stories “Mano vargse, vargshe teta rozaliia and “Didzhioii vakariene.”
53. Zingeris, “Speaking Simply about Complicated Matters,” 48. On the function of language as a binding organ of group education see Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 139. For Zingeris, the Lithuanian language is his instrument of creativity. Yiddish in his memories has more of a meaning of a native dialect, thus fulfilling the function of national and cultural identity in the historical context. See Zingeris, “Markas Zingeris Answers Questions by Christina Parnell.”
54. The narrator in Zingeris’s works is mostly the alter ego of the author
55. Zingeris, “Repatriantai.”
56. See the motif of parricide in the works of Sigitas Parulskis, where the generation of the sons ascribe responsibility for their traumas to the fathers and blame the latter for a lack of national and moral values (Parulskis, “Trys sekundės dangaus”).
57. Zingeris, “Repatriantai.”
58. See the quotation of his novel Grojimas Dviese (Playing Duo) published in an abbreviated form in the journal Vilnius in English: “Like his father, he was able to sympathise with people who had been pushed off the avenues and boulevards” (Zingeris, “Speaking Simply about Complicated Matters,” 56).
59. Zingeris, “Repatriantai.”
60. Zingeris, “Playing Duo.”
61. Zingeris, “Repatriantai.”
62. Zingeris, “Markas Zingeris Answers Questions by Christina Parnell.”
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Zingeris, “Repatriantai.”
66. Zingeris, “Markas Zingeris Answers Questions by Christina Parnell.”
67. In Zingeris’s opinion, it is especially difficult to convey irony through the Lithuanian language because Lithuanian is a very old language. The paradox, he mentions, is the fact that he, a Lithuanian Jew, brings a new tone into this old language (Zingeris, “Markas Zingeris Answers Questions”).
68. Zingeris, “Repatriantai.”
69. Scenes of an uplifted mood are always connected with moments of social freedom or hope for it as in 1956, after Khrushchev’s speech on the Stalinist repressions, when “it smelled of freedom;” see Zingeris, “Repatriantai.”
70. Ibid.
71. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 219: “What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually … remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of differences … Such assignations of social differences – where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in‐between – find their agency in a form of the ‘future’ where the past is not original, where the present is not simply transitory.”
72. Zingeris, Grojimas dviese.
73. See a version of this image in the novel by Meras, Ant ko laikosi pasaulis, where a Lithuanian peasant woman saves children of different nationalities and accepts them as her own.
74. Bhabha, The Location of Culture.
75. Although Cejtlin refers to the productive feature in Josade’s tragic splitting which would allow him to see the same event “with his eyes and afterwards with his neighbour’s eyes,” Josade describes his position between the sides as very painful: “I am a Jewish and a Lithuanian writer. Jewish as well as Lithuanian. At the same time. Actually is this compatible? Is this possible?” For him, it seems to be impossible: “Now I am a stranger for everybody! I cannot understand: why did I ‘betray the Jews’ and what do I flatter the Lithuanians with?” (Cejtlin, Dolgie besedy v ozhidanii schastlivoi smerti, 172, 173).
76. Zingeris is the director of Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum (Centre of Tolerance).