Journey into the heart of family
Our writer tells of an extraordinary quest to uncover her Balkan roots
FOR MORE than 20 years my husband and I have been interested in tracing our family stories. I have two surnames that I can confidently match to places; he can identify ancestors back to the 18th century. We always knew they came from Russia but were curious to find out more.
This summer we at last made a trip to Lithuania and Latvia, with our student son, to visit the small provincial towns where our greatgrandparents lived and said goodbyes before emigrating to Britain. We had long pondered those twists of fortune, decisions to escape Tsarist oppression, famine or poverty, that surely influenced our very existence as a Jewish family in London in 2015.
Vilnius, Kaunas and Riga are welldocumented cities, but would our shtetls in the countryside match the impressions we had gathered from maps and photographs? What would Prienai and Vilkaviškis, Krustpils or Jekabpils be like?
In preparation, my son and I read Heshel’s Kingdom, Dan Jacobson’s memoir of his family’s emigration from Lithuania to South Africa. It summed up everything I felt about my own family, from the ordinary folks to those who made it big. I keenly wanted him to know what I knew, to be as fascinated by our heritage as I was. But Isaac pressed the book back into my hand. He couldn’t click with Jacobson’s portrait of his grandfather, a small-town rabbi sketched through some hand-medown objects.
Fair enough: a great-great-grandfather is so remote he can hardly be real to a 20-year-old. Jacobson seemed to underscore the imaginative effort required when he said his contemporaries thought their Lithuanian immigrant forebears simply came from “Nowhere”.
My husband and I however felt these places must be far from vanished figments. We wanted not only to see what was left physically, but to connect with the past. Coming with us on this trip, might our son feel these were his histories too?
We spent a weekend on Lithuania’s Baltic coast, in Klaipeda, formerly Memel, the most northerly point of Germany, and the Curonian Spit, where the writer Thomas Mann took holidays. We would travel with a guide in the countryside near Kaunas before going to Latvia for another ancestral day trip in the company of friends.
Before we had even started looking for roots, Jewish life hit us unexpectedly. We chanced upon an exuberant Shabbat lunch on the grounds of Klaipeda’s pre-war cemetery. Despite arriving late we were welcomed as if unexpected foreign visitors turn up weekly to this frum redoubt. Speaking fast Russian between mouthfuls of mushrooms and vodka, Lyuba, Boris and Daniel set out plates and urged us to join them.
Jewish life in Klaipeda received its final humiliation under the Soviets, they explained. The cemetery was crushed to rubble and an antenna was mounted on top to jam broadcasts from Voice of America.
That Shabbat, the bearded men