On (Maybe) Going to Lithuania When There is (Maybe) Going to be a War in the Baltic States…
Tools:
Prudence, a healthy sense of self-preservation, and travel insurance.
The Story:
While our trip to Europe isn’t in jeopardy, and there are many places that we’ll be visiting as I suss out our family’s story, I’ve been most excited about going to Lithuania, as that’s where my family had lived for at least five generations before coming to the US. (Though it was Russia at the time.) With war looming in Ukraine, though, that part of our trip now seems uncertain. While Lithuania is the one Baltic state that doesn’t share a border with Ukraine, European news is suggesting that rather than a full scale war, Russia will more likely wage one of disruption, including cyber attacks and fuel shortages across the Baltic states. This means it’s possible I won’t get to follow in the footsteps of my ancestors who fled Russian aggression because of, well, Russian aggression.
The great thing about writing nonfiction is that the story tells itself, and all I have to do is note the ways in which history folds back in on itself.
The terrible thing about writing nonfiction is how unflinchingly I have to look at that history, and that folding back.
I believe that if writing nonfiction doesn’t change how you see the world, you’re probably not engaging deeply enough with the material. This project has lead to some fundamental rethinking of how I see the past and what I believe the future holds. One of the things about not really knowing my own family history is that it meant I also didn’t know the history of European Jews. I thought we’d emigrated mostly for financial opportunity, and that we’d lived a settled life in wherever we’d come from (since, when I first started asking, all anyone knew was that it was either Lithuania or Latvia). But the truth is that it’s a history of constantly being either expelled from a home or fleeing it to avoid antisemitic violence.
Today, the Washington Post ran an article about the plans to help Ukrainian Jews escape if war does come. It says, in part,
But most of his former Jewish community members fled the fighting, with some heading immediately to Israel and others resettling elsewhere in Ukraine, mostly in and around Kyiv. Jewish relief agencies converted a youth summer camp near the capital into a refugee center for families that often arrived with little more than a suitcase, Branovsky said.
Several the agencies, including IFCJ, the Jewish Agency and the New York-based Joint Distribution Committee, worked to resettle the families. They provided food, clothing and, later, money for rent. With the Passover holiday falling in the early days of the crisis, one group delivered 53,000 boxes of matzoh around the country.
Almost eight years later, the families are still struggling to rebuild their lives hundreds of miles from areas their families have lived for generations, said Vishedski, who now goes by the title of chief rabbi for Jewish Community of Refugees from Donbas and Crimea.
I grew up in a time and place where we were taught to see ourselves, and Jews around the world, as safe, as if the end of the Holocaust marked an end to our danger. After all, the world had seen and been horrified, and remembering would keep them from allowing such a thing to happen again. Only, of course, it hasn’t. Stalin killed more Jews than Hitler; Ethiopian Jews had to be airlifted to Israel in the 1990s; synagogues in the US and around the world face increasing violence; the ADL reports that antisemitism as at near-historical levels in the United States right now.
I’ve come to see one of the fundamental questions to ask about whether or not I’m an Appalachian Jew, or just a Jew who happens to have been born in Appalachia, is “Could I be expelled or driven out by violence?” And I don’t know the answer to that. Currently, there is no legal mechanism to expel Jews from all or part of the United States, but the fragility of our republic—and the blatant antisemitism of many who seek to seize control of it—make this previously unthinkable scenario seem at least possible (though I’m not saying probable).
My family has now lived in West Virginia for seven generations. By the local reckoning that you’re not “from around here” until you have a parent buried and a child born in the region, we’ve been Appalachians since my great-grandfather’s generation.
My research suggests that may be the longest we have ever been allowed to live in one place.
Will I get to walk the streets that Joseph and Sheva Baila walked before they fled for America? I hope so. But when I started this project, I saw that part of the research as some kind of return to an ancestral home. I now understand it was never that. And coming to understand that makes me wonder if I’ve been too quick to feel at home here.