Sara Manobla

(I got this book free from Librarything's Early Reviewers in exchange for a review.)

I admit I was a bit disappointed in this book. I just didn't find it very interesting, and it seemed to be too much Lithuania and too little Holocaust. The author talked about her efforts about forming ties between Communist Lithuania and the West, including forming a nonprofit organization called Lithuania Link, and there wasn't nearly as much there about Holocaust remembrance as the book description made it out to be. However, there isn't a lot out there about the Holocaust in Lithuania (which had a higher death rate than any other nation in Europe; 95% of Lithuania's Jews were killed), particularly about what happened after the war, so I can recommend it on those grounds.… (more)

The subtitle of this book is very accurate. It is not so much a book about the distinguished Jewish/Yiddish Litvak cultural tradition n pre-World War II Lithuania, nor the destruction of that culture by the Nazis and the Lithuanian collaborators, though both these are discussed, it is chiefly about how Jews descended from the Jewish LItvak tradition and modern post-Soviet Lithuanians have come together to respond to their sometimes contested understanding of the past. The author worked with the group Lothiania LInk which assisted Lithuania and Zagare in particular after the fall of Communism, but has also worked to promote recognition in contemporary Lithuania of both the Litvak culture and the role of some Lithuanians in its destruction. On the whole, itnis a positive book culminating in a ceremony in Zagare which unveiled a monument in the town square which recorded the destruction of the town's Jews (and the Lithuanian part in it) much ,ore openly than other commemorations (which tend to be in the isolated sits where most of the massacres took place, and o downplay the Liithuania aid to the Nazis.) The most awkward issue is the Lithuanian doctrine of the "double genocide" --of Jews by Nazis and Lithuanians (and many other Eastern Europeans) by the Soviets, which many contemporary Jews see as a way to devalue the unique suffering of the Jews. The author does try to be fair-minded about this and concede there was genuine suffering of Lithuanians at others at the hands of the Soviet regime, though she argues it was a matter of working people to death for economic reasons, not ethnic ones. I think this is not entirely accurate. It is of course true that the Soviets (like the Nazis) made extensive use of slave labor, but their victims were often chosen for ethnic or political reasons, and by no means all were merely worked to death --many were simply shot, as in the notorious Katyn massacre of Polish officers, which was clearly not economically motivated but intended to destroy potential supporters of Polish independence. It is just to say the Soviets never attempted to exterminate every Lithuanian or every Pole or every member of other nationalities, but they were quite prepared to exterminate those who resisted Soviet domination. On the eastern front, there were few good moral choices aside from the handful of Tolstoyans honored in this book for rescuing Jews. If one was not a pacifist, the options were fighting for the Nazis or fighting for the Soviets. That Lithuanians who had just been conquered by the Soviets chose to fight alongside the Nazis, and Jews who ha just escaped the Nazi/Lithuania holocaust chose to fight for the Soviets, were both fighting beside people who were committing unspeakable atrocities, but there really was not other viable option at the time.… (more)