#where would they have learned yiddish if not through their jewish ancestry?

[spacelazarwolf]

My family was Jewish and immigrated from Eastern Europe pre-WW2, but then assimilated and converted to Christianity. It's on my dad's side, if that matters. I'm in this weird place where I would like to connect with my ancestry, but I don't want to be appropriative and claim a religion I don't have. Am I welcome to visit local synagogues if I don't currently have the intention of converting? If so, are there any particular holidays/feasts/services that are more closed to the public?

i answered an ask like this a while ago and linked it in my faq but for some reason the link is broken so i'll try to tell you what i told them.

if your intention isn't to convert but just to connect with your ancestry, i highly recommend connecting through food and language. get some cookbooks (or if anyone in your family still has recipes your ancestors used to make, even better) and incorporate some dishes into your usual rotation. look into learning yiddish (i'm assuming your family was ashkenazi since they were in eastern europe) or at least learning some of the basics. i also highly recommend lighting yahrzeit candles on days like tisha b'av and yom kippur to commemorate your family. you can usually get them at the grocery store or online.

you can definitely reach out to your local synagogue and ask the rabbi if they have any advice for you or if they would be comfortable with you attending some services. if you're not interested in converting, they might not be comfortable with you consistently attending services and holidays, but you never know. the things i'd stay away from are highly ritualistic and sacred things like saying prayers in hebrew, lighting shabbat candles, tefillin, tallit, things like that. those are generally considered to be a closed part of judaism.

[colorful-dragon97]

Ok so… Hi! I’ve been wondering ab this for a long time and I didn’t know how to get a true answer about this.

(Sorry if at some point i used some terminology that was not right, I’m welcome to receive any for of criticism.)

(Second disclaimer: this is out of genuine curiosity. If anyone feels like answering me on here or through DM’s, you are more than welcome to do so)

So… basically, my family on my dad’s side is mainly composed by jewish people. My grandfather, my dad’s dad, was jewish and raised as such but he never transmitted those traditions to my dad. He was raised mostly christian since his mom (and the whole town he was from) was very catholic. It’s worth noting tho that my dad did grew up around jewish people, to the point where he picked up a couple of yiddish words and some recipes of traditional jewish dishes.

As my dad grew older, he realized that his religious beliefs really aligned with those of judaism and started to identify as such. Whenever someone who is jewish would hear his surname or hear him say something in yiddish, they would include him in conversations and he would feel part of the community.

While that’s my dad’s deal, mine is a bit different.

I grew up saying words in yiddish (even thou i found out like 5 years ago that they were yiddish words) and my dad always made sure that I knew about my ancestry.

I never thought too much ab it until a couple years ago when my dad started to re-connect w that part of his upbringing. I started to learn alongside him and I found it very interesting. Ngl i started to feel connected with it on a more cultural level, as in community-wise. I liked their traditions, history, and their sense of community that I’ve experienced a couple of times in my life; all of this made me very happy.

The thing is that… idk if I’m allowed to “reclaim” the jewish label just bc of these feelings and bc of my ancestry. Also, it’s worth to mention that I’m an atheist. I don’t have a strong sense of religious faith…

So, can I reclaim it? Or… not.

I repeat, this is out of genuine doubt, if I used any h*rmful language or terminology, I apologize. Not only this is the first time I talk ab it w someone other than my dad but also english is my second language)

[zamancollective]

Nationalist Mythologies and the False Friendship of Nostalgia

By Mirushe Zylali

Additional Writing by Sophie Levy

What is a mythology?

Through mythology, one locates oneself within history and creates a sense of continuity between the past, present, and future.

The impulse to place oneself in a historical continuum is understandable, especially within postcolonial contexts. For Europeans, myths provide a basis of identity for the nation-state. For Euro-colonized peoples, a desire to return to a pre-colonial body politic often becomes integral to liberation movements, and later, becomes a method of garnering mass popular support for a burgeoning post-imperialist nation-state. Postcolonial mythologies are often manifestations of an emotionally-tinged hunger for a life that does not ache of colonialism.

Mythology has a vital role in legitimizing the construction of modern ethnonationalist states and their respective languages, cultures, and propaganda systems.  When “British India” was cleaved in two, Pakistan adopted an alphabetic script based on Arabic, while India adopted a script based on Sanskrit, though similarities abound between spoken dialects in the subcontinent’s northern regions. To this day, India’s far-right Hindu nationalists are working to incorporate more words derived from Vedic Sanskrit into modern Hindi, while nationalist Pakistanis do the same with Islamic terminology derived from Arabic.

In his construction of the Albanian nation-state, Enver Hoxha outlawed religion and claimed that modern Albanians descended from ancient Illyrian tribes. Modern Turks assert that they are heirs to the Ottoman Empire established by Byzantine tribes over 700 years ago. During WWII, German Nazis even claimed to be descended from Aryans, somehow also insisting upon their origins in the lost city of Atlantis, and repurposed the swastika, a Hindu symbol, to this aim. Later in the twentieth century, Iranian nationalist groups would adopt a link to this “superior” Aryan race in order to incite violence against ethnic minorities within Iran, such as Jews and Kurds. Saddam Hussein insisted upon modern Iraqis’ link to the people and culture of ancient Babylonia in building his autocratic government - just as the Pahlavi Shahs of Iran belabored their connection to Darius’ pre-Islamic empire.

Evidently, it has been a nation-building tactic of autocratic regimes across Europe and Asia to emphasize links between a current population and an ancient culture or mythology. Here, I take time to deconstruct why this method is somewhat futile.

Iraqis, for instance, cannot claim direct historical continuity with Babylonia because its religion-and the way of life it spurred- has not been maintained since the fall of Babylon in 539. Since then, cultural diffusion, conquest, and the shifting borders of empires have made Iraq a thoroughly Arab nation-state, notwithstanding the presence of non-Arab ethnic minorities.

Victors often write what history survives. What records exist of the processes of the Persian and Arab conquerors who altered the culture of ancient Mesopotamia? One could infer that those attempting to keep up the ‘old ways’ would have been brutalized or disenfranchised by their new conquerors. Neither the ethnic composition nor the historical legacy of ancient life in present-day Iraq is continuous with those who live there today, and the recovery of such a culture would be nearly impossible. But why would anyone want to undertake such a task in the first place?

the Eagle of Saladin - often used as a symbol of Ba’athist ideology.

Let us follow the logic of this desire for belonging. A branch of my mother’s family hails from Al-Andalus. What would an ‘un-exiling’ of ourselves look like? With very few Spanish Jews left in Spain, and others having fled to places such as Turkey, Greece, the Americas, the Balkans, and Morocco, which of them can lay a true claim to the “authentic” ancestry that would provide a basis for such a social movement? Do I learn from the Jews of Tangier, Fez, and southern Spain, who would have fallen within the borders of the Umayyad Empire? No. Their cultures, changed by hundreds of years of innovation, diffusion, and empire, may barely resemble our ancestors’ shared Andalusian moment. I can enjoy camaraderie with them for what we share, but to claim a singular flashpoint of origin for all of us, thus suggesting that we share a contemporary ‘sameness’ and deny such unique facets of our respective cultures would do a deep disservice to all of us.

Often intentionally, mythos functions to create ‘out’ groups and ‘Others’, consolidating power for the in-group as they build a new state. The Other can even be transformed into an inhuman creature. The Kurd, at times racialized as white for the purposes of the Iraqi, Syrian, or Turkish imagination, becomes a foreign interloper, even as Muslim Kurds may discriminate against Ezidis, Kurdish Jews, and Kurdish Christians for similar reasons. Within the imagination of the previously-colonized subject, the Jew can stand in as a figure of corrupting European influence, or the Jew can stand in as the backward Other not yet converted to the dominant religion or way of life of whichever empire. The same goes for Christians in southwestern Asia who maintain knowledge of spoken and written Coptic or Syriac. Often, by the logic of Muslim Arab in-groups, Arab Jews aren’t not Arabs. Rather, they just aren’t the right type of Arab. It is difficult to build a pluralistic nationalist movement; just look at the Ba’athist party.

European Zionists explored the idea of land-bound, Jewish nationalism as early as the 1800s. The Haskalah, or “Jewish Enlightenment” that began in the eighteenth century, had already kick-started the initiative to revitalize Hebrew as the lingua franca of the Jewish world. Zionists then harnessed Hebrew’s potential for Jewish unification in their development of a formalized national consciousness.

It is not a coincidence that Zionism’s genesis resembles that of other European nationalisms. Today, its proponents often overlook the fact that Zionists thinkers and leaders formed pragmatic alliances with European colonialists in an effort to solve the Jewish Question or gain a reputation as a “modernized” people. Though a historical and religious Jewish connection to Israel/Palestine cannot be denied, Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, was just as willing to establish a “Jewish Nation-State” in what is modern-day Ghana or Argentina. He was desperate to secure any place to use as a safe haven for Jews.  Even as he cast Jews as Oriental Others in the eyes of gentile Europeans, he was playing by the rules of Western colonialists as if he were one of them.

Zionism, then, is a complicated nationalism in that it has to reconcile an orientalized, ancient Jewish mythology with a “modernized” European character. This cognitive dissonance within the Zionist national consciousness has visibly influenced the vocabulary of mainstream modern Hebrew, as developed by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. On one hand, Hebrew’s newfound role in early Zionist settlements as a more broadly and colloquially-spoken language represents the revival of an ancient language, culture, and peoplehood. It centralized a scattered nation in the name of a mythologized history, repurposing the words of a holy language for use in secular contexts - paralleling the incorporation of Qur’anic vocabulary into Modern Standard Arabic.

Yet, if modern Hebrew is meant to be “authentic,” why is the word for tea ‘teh’ and not ‘shai’ as it is in other Semitic languages like Arabic and Aramaic? Why is the word for banana ‘banana’ and not ‘muuza’ as it would be in Arabic? In the same vein, why does the mode of Hebrew pronunciation taught in Israeli schools sideline the guttural sounds of quf, ayin, and het originally spoken by Jews in ancient Tiberias, opting instead for a more European flair?

Most of the loanwords that exist in Modern Hebrew come from Germanic languages. Of course, it is understandable that the introduction of vocabulary not previously existent in biblical or rabbinic Hebrew could be pulled from English, which was already a lingua franca during Hebrew’s revival in a nationalist context. However, such influence does call for further inquiry where existing, foundational verbiage with Semitic origins was discarded and replaced with European terminology.

These small details in the modern Hebraic lexicon reveal much about the sentiments and convictions of European Zionist nation-builders. Firstly, the disposal of selected nouns with Semitic roots arguably reflects a latent desire to separate this artificially monolithic conception of the “Jewish people” from southwestern Asian languages-  languages perceived to not be Jewish. The same goes for the systematic labeling of Mizrahi accents as “incorrect” in professional contexts in Israel. Yemeni immigrants, for instance, have faced and continue to face ridicule and discrimination because of their accents. Ironically, however, Yemenite Jews are generally thought to pronounce liturgical Hebrew most similarly to the ancient Tiberian inflection. Does this mean that all Jews who are not Yemenite have “inauthentic” pronunciations? Of course not. What it does mean is that Arabic, for example, is not an un-Jewish language. The accent that many Mizrahim are discriminated against for having is not a “corruption” of anything.

Secondly, modern Hebrew’s European loanwords and inflection indicate that Zionist leaders seeking to revitalize Hebrew as a “universal” language for Jews heavily prioritized the comfort of Ashkenazi Jews in their adjustment to life in the Holy Land. Of course, learning Hebrew was still very difficult for Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim (read: women) who hadn’t been exposed to the study of rabbinic or biblical Hebrew in the heder, but leaders like Ben Yehuda clearly geared this ancient Semitic language to be as accessible to Europeans as possible in its revival. Had there been a genuine effort to make Hebrew a language for Jewish ‘olim hailing from across the globe, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian-speaking Mizrahim would have been consulted much more.

Lastly, Hebrew’s Germanic loanwords and smoothed-out modern pronunciation made it a more palatable language in the eyes of European colonialists, with whom Israel’s founding parties sought to form pragmatic alliances. The more similar Hebrew could be to European languages while still retaining its own mythologized, ancient character, the more British proponents of settler-colonialism could perhaps be willing to lend a hand to Jewish settlers. And so goes the balancing act between the orientalized nostalgia and modern European appeal of Hebrew.

"Vote for the Zionist list (No. 6), all who believe in the rebirth of our land through Hebrew labor." From the Zionist List in Russia, 1917

Zionists are quick to point out that since a majority of Israelis are Mizrahim, the growth of the Yishuv and Israel’s eventual establishment could not have been functionally settler-colonialist in character, to which I say: What is the Turkish, Iraqi, Persian, and Syrian treatment of Kurds? What is the North African Arab treatment of Imazighen? These, too, are essentially colonial projects which seek to supplant indigenous peoples by relying on idealized ancient mythologies and constructions of “authenticity”. A common source of discomfort for progressive critics of Zionism is the prevalence of conservative viewpoints held by Mizrahi Jews inside and outside of Israel, but the idea of colonized peoples colonizing other peoples should not be a revolutionary or difficult one to reconcile and accept.

Israel may not have taken on the character of a settler-colonial project had the Zionists of old integrated with Palestinian and Samaritan society. Palestinians’ apprehensive or negative reactions to early European Zionist settlers were understandable, considering Zionist collaboration with British Imperial forces. The reactionary right-wing politics of the majority of Mizrahim in Israel is, too, understandable considering their alternatives. The State of Israel has always propped itself up on the rejection and effective demonization of Arabness, so racism against Mizrahim based on accent, physical features, or culture resembling that of gentile Arabs comes as no surprise. Rather than facing social immobility and expendability as a source of cheap labor, conservative Israeli Mizrahim align themselves with Israel’s hybrid mythologized / Europeanized national consciousness, rejecting Arabness because doing so simply benefits their survival in a state established by European Zionists.

Mizrahim live in a time of nesting doll diasporas. In their 2019 song “Hana Mash Hu Al Yaman,” the Yemeni-Israeli sisters of the band A-WA lament a common traumatic thread connecting Mizrahi families in Israel:

“I came to you fleeing

You saw me as primitive.

I came to you as a last resort.”

What does decolonization look like, in a literal sense? Mizrahim living in Israel cannot go back to the countries which initially tried to stamp them out. Why would the current generation want to learn their grandparents’ forgotten Arabic, Darija, Turkish, or Farsi - or dig up their grandparents’ buried memories? To do so is like pressing one’s tongue against a tooth stripped of enamel. Many Israelis are also of mixed heritage. An Israeli friend’s family hosts Tunisian, Arab Iraqi, and Syrian-Turkish Jews. Which nation-state should she return to? For which mythology should she feel nostalgia? People have always migrated. Issues arise when territorial and cultural dominance- not pluralism- becomes the collective goal of populations.

Discarding nationalist mythologies altogether can help afford modern populations some clarity. Mizrahi liberation is inextricably linked with Palestinian liberation, Kurdish liberation, Yazidi liberation, and all other liberations of oppressed indigenous peoples and ethnoreligious minorities. Even within the construct of ‘Mizrahi’ as a label for MENA Jews, Arab Iraqi Jews may hold harmful attitudes towards Kurdish Jews hailing from within Iraqi borders. My close friend, who is a Kurdish Jew, recounts to me the almost Ba’athist undertones of a conversation she had with an Arab Iraqi Jew, whose nostalgia for Iraq was based on a desire for inclusion within Arab supremacist power structures. Nostalgia is a reactionary, false friend. Seeking acceptance within the monolithic ideologies of Pan-Arabism, Pan-Turkism, Pan-Iranism or Zionism is not a solution in the long term, nor is clinging to conservatism under nationalist governments.

Ceding space or resources to other colonized peoples does not mean that there will be insufficient space or resources for you. It is the overlap of these spaces that becomes a vital standpoint for reconciliation. Solidarity begins with truthfully baring the histories witnessed by multiple populations, and remaining able to acknowledge them simultaneously. The nation-state’s mythology does not allow for admission to the atrocities of the Farhud; the Algerian War of Independence; Deir Yassin; the Aleppo Riots. It is up to the people to shift their collective consciousness toward empathy and mutual recognition.

Mirushe Zylali is a junior at Mount Holyoke College double majoring in Studio Art and Religion. Through poetry, nonfiction work, and printmaking, they are interested in examining who remains within cultural memory, and how the Other is constructed in service of the nationalism of post-colonial states. 

[baltics4engbergs]

Thursday: A Jewish History Tour of Vilnius

OK, be ready -- I am sure this will be my longest post. 

On Thursday morning, my dad and I had an appointment with Daniel Gurevich of Jerulita Tours, for a day-long tour to begin at 10 a.m. We were getting going that morning--serving breakfast of thick yogurt with jam, hearty bread left by Jurgita, and nectarines – and Daniel let us know he’d be ten minutes late.  That was fine.  It turned out that those extra minutes let us get a bit more prepared because we’d be heading out into a very rainy day. Not the best weather for a walking tour, but, luckily, Daniel sort of switched up the order of the tour, and we did a driving part first. I had found Daniel’s company online before we left and he seemed reasonably priced and I ran his tour past a woman who I’ve been working with on our family genealogy, who had done some touring in the Baltics.  She thought he seemed solid, so we scheduled the tour. Of course, since we’d had an hour and a half with Nathalie at the Tolerance Center the night before, we had some background information, but Daniel’s insights really added nuance to what Nathalie had said, given that his age, religiosity, and life history were very different and impacted his message. Daniel first took us, in his sparkly dark blue Prius, up to the hill of the Three Crosses (Plikasis kalnas) and from that vantage, even in the diminishing rain and mist, we could see an excellent vista of the city, and he was able to point to many important secular and religious buildings, charting the historical progression of the city before our eyes.  He also pointed out the historical walls of the city and the “barbican,” the barrier/barricade wall of the city.  He identified the Gediminas Tower, built by the Grand Duke of Lithuania who was the founder of the city  in the year 1322.  Daniel was able to point out the opera and ballet theater to me, which I was interested in, and the location of our apartment and the location of the old synagogue, the current synagogue, the presidential palace (their president is a woman, in her second term – and we learned that when a president is elected, he or she must leave her or his political party, to affect impartiality). When we were atop that hill, the rain really abated, and we learned about Daniel’s biography, and his family history and ties to Lithuania.  His grandmother was a Holocaust survivor from Kaunas, another major Jewish city in Lithuania, and she actually escaped to Kazakhstan by train the day of the invasion (June 22, 1941), which was the day after her high school graduation and party.  Her parents died of illness during the travel, but she was taken in as a household employee by a family there, and stayed through the war, and then made her way back to Lithuania, looking for surviving relatives.  We learned that Daniel himself – who is a few years younger than me and has two sons who go to the public school that is the Jewish school, in which only 50% of the children are Jewish (and I am not sure even how many of the those fulfill the more orthodox definition of “Jewish”)—lived in Israel for a while at the age of 18, as did his parents, but he came back after they had returned because he missed his home country of Lithuania. His father started Jerulita tours twenty years ago. From the top of the hill, we drove down, went to a gas station for some coffee (figuring out both the bathroom and the espresso machine’s buttons proved almost too challenging for us, haha), and then we went to the Paneriai memorial, which memorializes the 70,000 Jewish people killed in the forest of Ponary, starting in 1941.  For whatever it’s worth, by the time we got to the outskirts of Vilnius where the Ponary forest is, the weather had improved and it was sunny and warm.  The ground was wet, as was the whole forest.  So, the story of Ponary is this: Jews from the small ghetto in Vilnius started to be taken to the forest by truck in July, 1941, a mere few weeks after the Germans entered Lithuania. The Germans didn’t have a large number of soldiers in Vilnius to carry out the shooting of the Jews, given the large numbers they needed to eliminate, so they used local Lithuanians to do some of the shooting, and since anti-Semitism had long existed, and had been further  fostered by the Germans and their propaganda, the Lithuanians were fine with playing this role.  There are many political complexities here, regarding Russian control versus German control and who the ethnic Lithuanians preferred, but I will leave that out for now.  Suffice to say, most of the Jews killed in the forest were killed by Lithuanians who were working with and on behalf of the German military.  These Lithuanians never had to pay any price for this role and were integrated back into the society after the war and some people knew—and some did not know—who had served in this way. So, the reason Ponary was chosen was because the Russians has already been in this forest excavating these huge pits for fuel oil tanks, but they never got to that point in their project.  So, when a Nazi was charged with the role of finding a suitable place for the shootings of the Jews, this site was chosen because it was somewhat remote and had these huge pits, seven of them.  Now, the forest is really close to people’s houses, like suburban houses, which were there in the early 1940s, so, given that on average it took 1.5 bullets to kill a person, and there were 100,000 people killed in the forest (70,000 Jews and 30,000 others), it is likely that nearby people heard gunfire regularly in 1941 and again in 1943.  Not many killings happened there in 1942. Jews (and, as I mentioned, thousands of non-Jews, too) were taken into forest, lined up on the edge of a pit, and shot, then the bodies would tumble into the pit, be sprinkled with lime, and then another group would follow. A few people apparently were merely wounded and escaped – about 60 people.  Some of these people returned to Vilnius and told of what was happening.  In 1941, no one believed them, that this was even possible. By 1943, the Nazis realized there were too many bodies in these mass graves, so around eighty Jews were enlisted to exhume the corpses and arrange to burn them, using the wood from the trees in the forest, building pyramids of wood, bodies, wood, bodies, wood, etc. In one pit, there had been 26,000 bodies.  Apparently, when Germany was defeated and this area was entered, the forest was very thin and brown.  There had been so much traffic into there between 1941 and 1943 and so many of the trees had been cut down to be used for the fires.  Now, what I show in the pictures of this area is relatively new growth trees. So, as you can see, I can tell this story about what happened in this forest and to the Jews of Vilnius matter-of-factly, I guess you’d say, but it is just inconceivable, something of fiction, that this actually happened, like really happened.  The way that people can villainize, motivated by centuries-old xenophobia, their very own neighbors, to the degree that happened in the Holocaust is really something we still to this day find brain-bendingly befuddling. Relatedly, how people can not even believe what is happening to their own community, is just a testament to another aspect of the human condition.  So, here are the two Janus faces of the condition: we believe that people will, in the end, be good and that people cannot possibly be as evil as we imagine in a nightmare, but, the fact is, that people really can be, even with the smallest push, be just as evil as the nightmares that just seem too awful. So, this whole trip we’re on now was of course organized around a conference I have to go to in London next week.  But, Eric and I had long wanted to visit the Baltics, and I was motivated in the early trip-planning stages to learn more about my Lithuanian ancestry. On my dad’s side, I have four great-grandparents, three of whom were born in the Litvak region (Lithuanian Jewish), which was part of the Russian Pale of Settlement, the regions where Jews were pushed into during the period of Russian control.  My dad’s Grandpa Sam is the one about whom I’d been able to find out the most, followed by his wife, my great-grandma Celia (for whom Cece is named).  So, Grandpa Sam was one of seven children, which included two sets of twins.  He was a twin, and then there was another set of boy twins.  With some professional genealogical help, I was able to determine that one of Sam’s brothers, Yudel, survived the war, as did his wife, and are buried in Vilnius – more on that later.  But, the other siblings, we do not know their fate.  They are not listed in the Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial and research center in Israel) database and we have not found evidence of them elsewhere from after the war.  They might have left Lithuania somehow, or they might have died before the war, in the ghetto, or from a gunshot wound in a pit in the Ponary forest.  We just do not at this point know. My Grandma Celia’s family was from one hour from Vilnius, in a town that is now in Belarus: Radun.  The Jews of Radun were also shot in a forest outside town.  I was unaware before this day-tour that early in the efforts to exterminate Jews, bullets were used, but of course, given the huge numbers of Jews that needed to be exterminated, shooting them just didn’t turn out to be efficient.  So, this is why other options were employed after the Germans had dealt with the Baltic Jews; I am sure you all know what these “other options” were. Anyway, back to what we did yesterday: we also visit Snipiskis, which was called Snipishok in Yiddish, which is a part of Vilnius, on the other side of the river from the Old Town, which was a little village of Jewish people.  The houses that stand now in Snipiskis, interspersed with new highrise apartment buildings and office towers, are over a hundred years old.  Grandpa Sam’s family was from Snipiskis, so it was really emotionally resonant to see these homes, though we don’t know his family’s precise address. We finally got to do a walking tour of the Jewish quarters of the city when the sun was out.  It was really interesting, of course, but not as emotionally impactful as the earlier parts of the day.  Seriously, I absorbed so much information yesterday that it was pretty exhausting.  It was really meaningful to be with my dad for this whole Vilnius aspect of our trip, as learning about his grandfather’s home city and about the Jewish community there is something he never imagined he’d do. We ended our day by driving out to the only cemetery that still exists that has graves from the post-WWII period, because we knew Yudel and Riveka Bengis were buried there, as he died in 1962 and she died in 1974. But, the cemetery manager was not there, so we were out of luck, as we could not look through all 6700 plots for the Hebrew letters spelling “Bengis.”  But, we retuned to the graveyard this morning, so I will tell more about this in my next post. Our day with Daniel was so full, and as I said, so full of information – my head was kind of spinning and I could not calibrate really the gravity of all of the horror that happened in the sites in which I was standing with the easy, comfortable experience I was having being able to tour those sites, thousands of miles away from my own safe home in the U.S., a trip that the privileges that have come down my ancestral line to me – descending from diasporic individual travelers like my Grandpa Sam in 1911—made possible. To quickly tie this long post up, we all went to Bistro 18 for dinner and it was so, so delicious.  I ate a massive bowl of asparagus risotto that was probably an unsafe temperature for my innards to digest, but it was so good and I was famished.  The kids were catered to with “long noodles” (i.e. spaghetti) and fruit and juice.  All of us had something we really loved.  When we were leaving, the rain came back with a vengeance, so we ducked into an alcove on the old street we were on, and there opened a door! We were welcomed into a little shop, the proprietor of which was a woman about my age, and it was, of all things, a custom-clothing children’s shop with everything designed and made in Lithuania, and there were Brio trains and Legos there for kids to play with.  During the torrential downpour, we stayed there, talking to this amazing entrepreneurial woman, and we even bought a few of her awesome kids’ pieces.  What serendipity. After, my dad and Alia went out for some beers and I went home – trying to get ready for bed, but quickly realized that the dryer I was so happy to see really is more of a time-suck that a convenience-offerer.  So, I stayed up until 1, and then slept very little because while Cece has ceased being a chatterbox night-owl, she’s been a nagging-coughing night-owl, so we did what we could do –cuddling, milk, teaspoons of jam—to try to quell her cough and all get some shut-eye.