Sad reality oftheshtetl exposed

IN ANY OTHER society, the shtetl would have a romantic, nostalgic feel to it — a colourful, lost world about which a writer like Isaac Bashevis Singer could produce masterpieces, and a showstopper like Fiddler on the Roof could fill theatres on Broadway and in the West End for years.

In reality, it has about it all the romance and nostalgia of a slaughter yard. The colour was there sure enough — red, from the blood of its murdered inhabitants.

When my son and I presented a BBC Radio Four programme a couple of years ago, we walked the streets of my maternal grandfather’s home village of Dunilovich, now in Belarus.

It was a place where only one street (the one with the church) had gentile inhabitants. We passed the mikvaot, the matzah bakery, the yeshiva — or at least where they used to be, until the day in 1941 when the village’s 900 Jewish residents were all murdered.

We also went to Baisogala in Lithuania, where no one seems to have any memories. That was where my other grandfather was born. So was the grandfather of Sara Manobla, author of Zagare: Litvaks and Lithuanians Confront the Past (Gefen, £13.50). She had relatives with names similar to mine, so we could be related. Traditionally, they are known as Litvaks.

But it is not Baisogala that Manobla writes about; it is Zagare, her grandmother’s birthplace where her family lived before emigrating to Newcastle.

Zagare was the village to which she and a non-Jewish cousin made a pilgrimage, met local inhabitants and the village’s solitary remaining Jew (a rabbi would ring him to tell him when Yom Kippur or Pesach was due) a one-time Red Army hero.

However, too much space in this slim volume is taken up to tell the familiar, wartime history of this part of the world. Better is the emphasis it places on the area’s Lithuanian population at the time and the locally manned death squads who did so much of the Nazis’ evil work for them.

We see not just the lack of serious apology from the average man and woman in the Zagare street — perhaps the very one where 2,300 Jews were murdered — but also the fact that, to most of them, the Holocaust never happened at all.

For these people, the real historical criminals in those parts were the nasty Soviets, who came with the Nazi defeat, although when Sara Manobla spoke to Lithuania’s president, he talked of the “cloud” hanging over the country.

Most locals would be hard pressed to admit that they knew much about the German occupation — let alone knowing even of the existence of the people who called themselves Litvaks.

A rabbi would ring him to tell him when Yom Kippur or Pesach was due