{"id":3357,"date":"2012-06-30T11:23:13","date_gmt":"2012-06-30T15:23:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=3357"},"modified":"2012-06-30T11:27:03","modified_gmt":"2012-06-30T15:27:03","slug":"cnf-conversations-an-interview-with-ellen-cassedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/julijasukys.com\/?p=3357","title":{"rendered":"CNF Conversations: An Interview with Ellen Cassedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust. University of Nebraska Press, 2012. <\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust\u00a0tells the story of Ellen Cassedy\u2019s personal journey into the Jewish heartland of Lithuania \u2013 the land of her Jewish forebears \u2013 and then expands into an exploration of how Lithuania today is engaging with its complex 20th-century history.\u00a0 Probing the terrain of memory and moral dilemmas, the book shines a spotlight on fragile efforts toward mutual understanding and carries a cautious message of hope.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Ellen Cassedy <\/strong>has explored the world of the Lithuanian Holocaust for ten years. \u00a0She is a former columnist for the <\/em>Philadelphia Daily News. Her articles have appeared in <\/em>Huffington Post<\/a>,\u00a0Haaretz<\/a>,\u00a0Jewish Journal<\/a>,\u00a0Hadassah<\/a>,\u00a0The Jewish Forward<\/a>,\u00a0Jewish Telegraphic Agency<\/a>,\u00a0Lilith<\/a>,\u00a0Bridges<\/a>,\u00a0Utne Reader<\/a>,\u00a0Polin<\/a>, and<\/em> Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies<\/a>. She is a frequent speaker about Jewish and Lithuanian issues, and a regular contributor to <\/em>VilNews<\/a>, the international web magazine based in Vilnius, Lithuania. She lives near Washington, DC.<\/em><\/p>\n


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Julija \u0160ukys: The frame for your book is a trip to Vilnius to study Yiddish at a well-known summer program there. Tell me a little bit about your relationship to the Yiddish language. How much Yiddish did you speak or understand before arriving in Vilnius? How did your relationship to the language change over the summer? How much Yiddish did you encounter in Lithuania?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ellen Cassedy: <\/strong>My mother used to sprinkle Yiddish words into conversation like a spice. At the window on a rainy day:\u00a0\u201cA pliukhe!<\/em> (a downpour.)\u201d In the kitchen: \u201cHand me that shisl <\/em>(bowl).\u201d On the telephone:\u00a0 \u201cThe woman\u2019s a makhsheyfe<\/em> (a witch).\u201d After she died, I missed those homey syllables. I began studying Yiddish as a kind of memorial to her, a way to hold on to my Jewish heritage.<\/p>\n

By the time I arrived at the summer program run by the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, I\u2019d progressed far enough to be placed in the second-to-highest level \u2013 where I held on by my fingernails! Spending several hours a day in class and doing hours of homework every night was a mekhaye<\/em> \u2013 a great pleasure.<\/p>\n

Within a few weeks, I became able to conduct interviews in Yiddish \u2013 with a Holocaust survivor from my ancestral town of Roki\u0161kis, with the leader of the Jewish community in the city of \u0160iauliai, where my family members had been imprisoned in the Shavl ghetto. And occasionally I\u2019d encounter a Yiddish-speaker on the beautiful streets of the Old City in Vilnius.<\/p>\n

The Yiddish scenes that I weave through the book serve as resting places for both me and the reader \u2013 places of laughter and love.<\/p>\n

The central focus of this book is the Holocaust bystander. You seek to consider the role of the bystander in a nuanced way and struggle to understand what it meant to be a non-Jewish witness to the Holocaust.\u00a0 In the end you arrive at a kind of reconciliation or entente in your understanding of the opposing forces and tragedies that were at play in Lithuania during World War II. Tell me a little bit about how you came to take this path.<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the brink of my journey to Lithuania, I learned there was an old man in my ancestral town who wanted to speak with a Jew before he died. In 1941, when he was 17, he watched as the Jews of the Roki\u0161kis region were rounded up and marched off into the forest to be shot. Those memories had tormented him all his life.\u00a0 He wanted to tell what he knew, and he wanted a Jew to hear his tale. Would I be that Jew?<\/p>\n

The time I spent with this haunted witness \u2013 and with numerous other Lithuanians who shared with me their family stories of the Holocaust \u2013 showed me that \u201cbystanders\u201d are not an undifferentiated mass. We need to look closely enough to understand each person as an individual. And our goal must be to create the kind of society where it is easier to stand up<\/em> than to stand by<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I\u2019m giving too much away by saying that you discover that your uncle was a member of the ghetto police force in the Shavl Ghetto. The ghetto police forces were and are, of course, extremely problematic \u2013 they are both victims and oppressors. You cite Primo Levi\u2019s term \u201cthe gray zone\u201d to describe the moral space that people like Efroyim Gens (head of the Shavl Ghetto Police) and his brother Jakob Gens (head of the Vilna Ghetto Police) inhabit. To what extent should we, from our perspective, suspend our judgment of those in the gray zone? What conclusions have you come to about people like your uncle and the Genses? Do your uncle and the Genses belong in the same category?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever stop wondering about my uncle and the complex truths he embodies. I\u2019m less interested than I used to be in assigning people to one category or another. Maybe, when it comes to people like my uncle and the Genses (who had more power than my uncle did, but still faced inhuman and impossible choices), the answers are less important than the questions we continue to ask ourselves. Maybe it\u2019s the moral attention we pay that will help to prevent future genocides.<\/p>\n

Timothy Snyder\u2019s book Bloodlands<\/em> caused a firestorm when it appeared in 2010, because some historians and other readers considered that he equated Nazi crimes with Stalinist ones, thereby minimizing or excusing the former. He was accused of \u201cHolocaust obfuscation,\u201d among other things. By contrast, you, like Snyder, seem to view Nazism and Stalinism and the ways in which those eras are remembered in Lithuania as interconnected. Wartime and postwar Lithuania itself is portrayed in your book as a kind of gray zone. Is this a fair characterization of your position? Could you expand?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I learned a great deal from Bloodlands<\/em>, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the cataclysms of the 20th\u00a0century. To examine both Nazi and Stalinist crimes, to explore the connections \u2013 that\u2019s a basic job for a historian.<\/p>\n

The term \u201cgray zone\u201d doesn\u2019t mean we turn away from morality. When we see things going wrong, we must speak up loud and clear.\u00a0Bloodlands<\/em> can help us do that.<\/p>\n

In Lithuania, it was hard for me to open up to \u201cthe Other,\u201d to hold in my head the reality of non-Jewish suffering alongside Jewish suffering. Hard \u2013 but essential, especially for those of us in the successor generations. Can we honor our diverse heritages without perpetuating the fears and hatreds of the past? Can we appeal to one another not as victims, bystanders, or collaborators, but as fellow beings with the capacity for moral choice? Those are the questions I hope my readers will ask themselves.<\/p>\n

My final question is about the Lithuanian language and the ways in which you had to use mediators to \u201caccess\u201d Lithuanian narratives and memories of the Holocaust. With the exception of Yiddish speakers, you interviewed most of your Lithuanian contacts in English or through translators, and employed third-party intervention to collect and work through archival sources. What risks does working through mediators in this way bring with it? How do you account for or deal with what necessarily gets lost, censored or simplified in translation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

By the time I left Lithuania, I had a Lithuanian vocabulary of about 60 words \u2013 pitiful!\u00a0 I don\u2019t know Russian, German, or Hebrew, either \u2013all of which came into play in the writing of my book. But I\u2019ve always been intrigued by what happens when people from different cultures, using different languages, make the effort to communicate. My experiences with translators and interpreters turned out to be utterly fascinating encounters in themselves. I make sure the reader gets to meet Regina, Hirsh, Emil, Natasha, and others who helped me make sense of what I was seeing and hearing.<\/p>\n

When you think about it, aren\u2019t we always<\/em> mediating, always<\/em> translating \u2013 no matter who we\u2019re talking to, no matter what languages are involved? Reaching out and attempting to understand, even when it\u2019s a challenge \u2013 in the end, that\u2019s exactly what We Are Here<\/em> is about.<\/p>\n

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