Our People
Our People

Author: Ruta Vanagaite

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-03-15

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1538133040

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A famous Nazi hunter and a descendent of Nazi collaborators team up on a journey to uncover Lithuania’s Holocaust secrets. This remarkable book traces the quest for the truth about the Holocaust in Lithuania by two ostensible enemies: Rūta a descendant of the perpetrators, Efraim a descendant of the victims. Rūta Vanagaitė, a successful Lithuanian writer, was motivated by her recent discoveries that some of her relatives had played a role in the mass murder of Jews and that Lithuanian officials had tried to hide the complicity of local collaborators. Efraim Zuroff, a noted Israeli Nazi hunter, had both professional and personal motivations. He had worked for years to bring Lithuanian war criminals to justice and to compel local authorities to tell the truth about the Holocaust in their country. The facts that his maternal grandparents were born in Lithuania and that he was named for a great-uncle who was murdered with his family in Vilnius with the active help of Lithuanians made his search personal as well. Our People exposes the significant role in implementing the Final Solution played by local political leaders and the prewar Lithuanian administration that remained in place during the Nazi occupation. It also tackles the sensitive issue of the motivation of thousands of ordinary Lithuanians who were complicit in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. At the heart of the book, these are the issues that Rūta and Efraim discuss, debate, and analyze as they crisscross the country to visit dozens of Holocaust mass murder sites in Lithuania and neighboring Belarus. This book follows them on their remarkable journey as they search for neglected graves, interview eyewitnesses, and uncover hints of the rich life that had existed in hundreds of Jewish communities throughout Lithuania.

Lithuanian Beer
Lithuanian Beer

Author: Lars Marius Garshol

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2014-11-08

Total Pages: 88

ISBN-13: 9781502738523

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Lithuania has one of the most interesting beer cultures on earth, but it's a beer culture that is almost wholly unknown outside the country itself. This guide explains what is so special about Lithuanian beer and helps you choose the right places to go and the right beers to drink. I've travelled to Lithuania a number of times over the last four years to learn as much as I can about Lithuanian beer, and this book summarizes what I've learned. It describes the various styles of beer made in Lithuania, the main breweries, and where to find the beers. It also gives some cultural, linguistic, and historic background.

White Field, Black Sheep
White Field, Black Sheep

Author: Daiva Markelis

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 0226505316

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Her parents never really explained what a D.P. was. Years later Daiva Markelis learned that “displaced person” was the designation bestowed upon European refugees like her mom and dad who fled communist Lithuania after the war. Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, though, Markelis had only heard the name T.P., since her folks pronounced the D as a T: “In first grade we had learned about the Plains Indians, who had lived in tent-like dwellings made of wood and buffalo skin called teepees. In my childish confusion, I thought that perhaps my parents weren’t Lithuanian at all, but Cherokee. I went around telling people that I was the child of teepees.” So begins this touching and affectionate memoir about growing up as a daughter of Lithuanian immigrants. Markelis was raised during the 1960s and 1970s in a household where Lithuanian was the first language. White Field, Black Sheep derives much of its charm from this collision of old world and new: a tough but cultured generation that can’t quite understand the ways of America and a younger one weaned on Barbie dolls and The Brady Bunch, Hostess cupcakes and comic books, The Monkees and Captain Kangaroo. Throughout, Markelis recalls the amusing contortions of language and identity that animated her childhood. She also humorously recollects the touchstones of her youth, from her First Communion to her first game of Twister. Ultimately, she revisits the troubles that surfaced in the wake of her assimilation into American culture: the constricting expectations of her family and community, her problems with alcoholism and depression, and her sometimes contentious but always loving relationship with her mother. Deftly recreating the emotional world of adolescence, but overlaying it with the hard-won understanding of adulthood, White Field, Black Sheep is a poignant and moving memoir—a lively tale of this Lithuanian-American life.

The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386-1795
The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386-1795

Author: Daniel Z. Stone

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2014-07-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0295803622

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For four centuries, the Polish�Lithuanian state encompassed a major geographic region comparable to present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Estonia, and Romania. Governed by a constitutional monarchy that offered the numerous nobility extensive civil and political rights, it enjoyed unusual domestic tranquility, for its military strength kept most enemies at bay until the mid-seventeenth century and the country generally avoided civil wars. Selling grain and timber to western Europe helped make it exceptionally wealthy for much of the period. The Polish�Lithuanian State, 1386�1795 is the first account in English devoted specifically to this important era. It takes a regional rather than a national approach, considering the internal development of the Ukrainian, Jewish, Lithuanian, and Prussian German nations that coexisted with the Poles in this multinational state. Presenting Jewish history also clarifies urban history, because Jews lived in the unincorporated "private cities" and suburbs, which historians have overlooked in favor of incorporated "royal cities." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the private cities and suburbs often thrived while the inner cities decayed. The book also traces the institutional development of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland�Lithuania, one of the few European states to escape bloody religious conflict during the Reformation and Counter Reformation. Both seasoned historians and general readers will appreciate the many excellent brief biographies that advance the narrative and illuminate the subject matter of this comprehensive and absorbing volume.

Lithuania
Lithuania

Author: Gordon McLachlan

Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9781841622286

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Now into its fifth edition, Lithuania is an invaluable guide for planning a memorable vacation in this most hospitable of European countries.

We Are Here
We Are Here

Author: Ellen Cassedy

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0803240228

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Ellen Cassedy’s longing to recover the Yiddish she’d lost with her mother’s death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the “Jerusalem of the North.” As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after he’d left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. How does a nation—how do successor generations, moral beings—overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These are the questions Cassedy confronts in We Are Here, one woman’s exploration of Lithuania’s Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own family’s place in it. Digging through archives with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing natives, including an old man who wants to “speak to a Jew” before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupation—Cassedy finds that it’s not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them.

Lithuanian Chicago
Lithuanian Chicago

Author: Justin G. Riskus

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 0738598542

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Today, there are more than 100,000 Lithuanians in Chicago, making the city home to the greatest concentration of Lithuanians outside of the country itself. Their presence in Chicago began in 1834 and drastically increased during the 20th century as immigrants and their descendants sought work in the stockyards and other industries. Lithuanians in Chicago were dedicated to celebrating and preserving their unique culture, evident in its churches, schools, museums, and community centers in neighborhoods such as Bridgeport and Marquette Park. They also maintained ties to the homeland and played an important role in Lithuania's struggles for independence throughout the 20th century. Many prominent Lithuanian Americans are from the "City of the Big Shoulders," including football great Dick Butkus, actor John C. Reilly, and director Robert Zemeckis. The former president of Lithuania, Valdas Adamkus, was a resident of Chicagoland for nearly 50 years.

The Golden Age of the Lithuanian Yeshivas
The Golden Age of the Lithuanian Yeshivas

Author: Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 0253058511

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The Golden Age of the Lithuanian Yeshivas tells the story of the last chapter of Jewish rabbinical schools in Eastern Europe, from the eve of World War I to the outbreak of World War II. The Lithuanian yeshiva established a rigorous standard for religious education in the early 1800s that persisted for over a century and continues to this day. Although dramatically reduced and forced into exile in Russia and Ukraine during World War I, the yeshivas survived the war, with yeshiva heads and older students forming the nucleus of the institutions. These scholars rehabilitated the yeshivas in their original locations and quickly returned to their regular activities. Moreover, they soon began to expand into areas now empty of yeshivas in lands occupied by Hasidic populations in Poland and even into the lands that would soon become Israel. During the economic depression of the 1930s, students struggled for food and their leaders journeyed abroad in search for funding, but their determination and commitment to the yeshiva system continued. Despite the material difficulties that prevailed in the yeshivas, there was consistently a full occupancy of students, most of them in their twenties. Young men from all over the free world joined these yeshivas, which were considered the best training programs for the religious professions and rabbinical ordination. The outbreak of World War II and the Soviet occupation of first eastern Poland and then Lithuania marked the beginning of the end of the Yeshivas, however, and the Holocaust ensured the final destruction of the venerable institution. The Golden Age of the Lithuanian Yeshivas is the first book-length work on the modern history of the Lithuanian yeshivas published in English. Through exhaustive historical research of every yeshiva, Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky brings to light for the first time the stories, lives, and inner workings of this long-lost world.

Lithuanian Jewish Communities
Lithuanian Jewish Communities

Author: Nancy Schoenburg

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 1568219938

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This volume lists, in alphabetical order, the major Jewish communities that existed in Lithuania before World War II. The name of each community is accompanied by information about it: when it was founded, the Jewish population in different years, shops and synagogues, and the names of citizens. An appendix locates each town on a map of Lithuania. Since most of the Jewish communities in Lithuania were destroyed in the Holocaust, this volume will be a valuable tool in recreating a picture of Lithuanian Jewry.

Legal Developments During 30 Years of Lithuanian Independence
Legal Developments During 30 Years of Lithuanian Independence

Author: Gintaras Švedas

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-17

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 3030547833

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This volume provides an overview of selected major areas of legal and institutional development in Lithuania since the Restoration of Independence in 1990. The respective chapters discuss changes in fields varying from the constitutional framework to criminal law and procedure. The content highlights four major aspects of the fundamental changes that have affected the entire legal system: the Post-Soviet country’s complex historical heritage; socio-political and other conditions in the process of adopting new (rule of law) standards; international legal influences on the national legal order over the past 30 years; and finally, the search for entirely new national legal models. Over a period of 30 years since gaining its independence from the Soviet Union, Lithuania has undergone unique social changes. The state restarted its independent journey burdened by the complicated heritage of the Soviet legal system. Some major reforms have taken place swiftly, while others have required years of thorough analysis of societal needs and the search for optimal examples in other states. The legal system is now substantially different, with some elements being entirely new, and others adapted to present needs.