From Russia with Lunch (15 page)

The cotton which had so enthralled these shoppers' parents after years of itchy communist polyester that breathed like a one-lunged asthmatic is now the ‘if I must' choice. They want cashmere, they want organza, they want fur. But most of all, they want what
Absolutely Fabulous
' Edina Monsoon might describe as ‘Gaultier, Gucci, Givenchy – names, sweetie, names'. Conspicuous affluence is the must-have accessory and its attendant symbols hang like high-end charms on a gaudy bracelet. The distinctive Fendi logo designed by Karl Lagerfeld peppers handbags while the famous Burberry check finds its way onto everything from caps to sneakers. Louis Vuitton's signature ‘L' and ‘V' motif is sprayed over both the real deal and obvious fakes. Those without the litas do the next best thing and head to the nail salon where one's talons can be emblazoned with Chanel's intertwined Cs or a spangly D&G.

At the same time, this game of commercial global catchup was clearly still being run as the Akropolis had its fair share of stores the likes of which I had not seen in years. Case in point a ‘jeanery' which, in addition to the obvious denim, also sold t-shirts screaming ‘Bring Back The '80s' and ‘Led Zeppelin' to customers who hadn't been around for either.

There was also a betting shop where the odds of dozens of sporting events around Europe and beyond were written up across a series of eight whiteboards. Those charged with this responsibility were harried young men with small hands and cramped wrists who scuttled continuously to a back office for numerical updates. At one point the thrum was frozen as a news item broke on a wall-mounted television set. Apparently, one of the country's star basketballers had injured an ankle during the warm-up and would not be able to take part in that day's game. Cue a flurry of recalculation in which it seemed at least a dozen ratios – who the first scorer would be; how much the team would win by; would the fallen point guard do his standard Lithuanian greeting to camera from the bench? – were amended. Did I mention this game was to be played in California?

My favourite store was another technological throwback. Once upon a time before desktop computers – or at least those with more memory than a calculator – business types who sought diversion from their daily chores festooned their desks with what became known as executive toys. In the Akropolis centre was their swansong. Here you could buy replica muskets, pistols and daggers for that business renegade who liked to send a clear message of muted violence to his underlings. There were also digital clocks encased in perspex pyramids, a bulls and bears domino set for the stockbrokers and faux antique telephones. If these options were too tame, there were always replica helmets of the Vikings and Teutonic knights. Both of whom had had a red-hot go at Lithuania over the years. Intoxicated by this cocktail of kitsch, I sat down on a nearby bench to jot down some facts. Up until the mid-nineties, a lone chap scribbling into a notebook might have garnered suspicion in Lithuania. Now, however, I merely had people sneering in my direction as if I was the world's worst secret policeman.

The food court, however, made the executive toy store look like Tiffany & Co. Designed to resemble a cross between Moorish battlements and a medieval village, this vision in papier-mâché and plasterboard featured banquettes separated by tanks filled with African cichlids. Between the KFC and the Pizza Hut were two solariums and a bowling alley decorated in the zany fluoro paint and ultraviolet light that renders everyone's teeth the colour of peanut butter. Amid the shrunken turrets and turning windmills of the beer hall concession, clay figurines perpetuated acts of extreme violence upon one another while clearly mortified waitresses had to feign cheeriness and cleavage in their roles as ale wenches. Imagine walking through a modest casino whose owners ran out of money three months before opening but decided to make a go of it anyway and you'll get a sense of the décor. Apparently, however, management had secured one hell of a deal on plastic ivy, which ran from crenellated crannies like the pubic hair of 1970s centrefolds.

And just when I thought it couldn't get any better, an icy blast of air alerted me to the piéce de résistance: a disco ice rink rimmed by a self-serve buffet that had aspirations to roadside diner grandeur. Here, by candlelight and a Donna Summer soundtrack, couples could (and did) enjoy an intimate dinner for two while taking in the contused spectacle that is the inevitable result of steel blades, uncontrollable momentum and a surface that generates its own speed. For all its lameness, I liked the escapist innocence of the place. I liked that it was where awkward teens held hands during the ‘couples only' numbers. I liked that older siblings coached younger ones in the art of maintaining speed or travelling backwards.

I liked it even more considering that my next destination echoed with pain too immense to articulate and the ghosts of such milestones that would never be reached.

7

Smiedt nothings

After many years of being stranded on a desert island, a man is finally rescued. Before being taken home, he decides to give his saviours a tour of the island. They are duly impressed when the castaway shows them an ornate and imposing synagogue constructed entirely of palms and coconut husks. Asked why he had crafted such an elaborate structure, he explained that he was a religious man and that nothing mattered more to him than the practice of Judaism. A few minutes later, the rescuers were astounded to discover another impressive synagogue which the man had obviously built over many years. ‘What's this building?' they asked the castaway. ‘That,' he replied with the barest trace of malice, ‘is the synagogue I don't go to.'

My visit to the Akropolis in Kaunas was not strictly necessary. It was a tarry. A stall. I had delayed leaving because of where I knew I was going next. Two hours from the city lies the hamlet of Naumestis or Naishtot. Small enough to war-rent neither bold nor capitalised typography on a map, it was from this market town that my great-grandfather, Solomon Hershl Smiedt, set out for South Africa around 1892. Within two years, he had sent for his wife Sheina Reich. They had six children, one of whom was my grandfather Louis. Louis' second son, Sydney Ronald, was my dad.

I've never been one for genealogy. Fortunately, a cousin of mine in Melbourne is and a few months before travelling to Lithuania, Paul Epstein presented me with a dossier decades in the making. Thanks to the dedication of Paul and his brother Herbert, I now had a series of sullen photographs of my grandfather and grandmother which led me to believe I came from a long line of the chronically constipated. More importantly, I could pinpoint the spot where the roots of my family tree penetrated Lithuanian soil.

As I mentioned earlier, my maternal grandfather was loath to talk about his life before South Africa. Similarly, I can't recall my father ever going into specifics about his lineage. It seemed enough that we came from Lithuania, which for almost the entirety of his life was part of the Soviet Union. While Australian children were told not to waste food because there were children starving in Africa, we were already in Africa. Therefore, one of the few meagre concessions to our collective past was that these children were ‘starving in Russia'.

As far as my dad was concerned, we came from the small town of Kroonstad in the Orange Free State province of South Africa. This is most probably because my grandfather had died when my dad was sixteen and consequently had fewer years in which to relate his own father's tales of a Lithuanian childhood. Unsubstantiated hypotheses aside, I know two things are certain. The first is that the word ‘Naishtot' was never spoken around our table. The second is that my entire visual notion of life in Lithuania came courtesy of Robert F Boyle, production designer for the 1971 hit musical
Fiddler On The Roof.
Now, I had a name on a map, a hired car and the niggling fear that I wouldn't feel what I was supposed to once I got there. For in going to where my forebears lived, I would also encounter where they died.

In a nadir example of irony, Jewish children like myself, who were living a life of ludicrous privilege under the apartheid regime, were rigorously schooled in the hatefulness of the Holocaust in which innocent people were brutally discriminated against because of their race. While it would be glib and untrue to suggest one might ever become inured to the oesophagus-constricting photographs of stripped and skeletal Semites put to death for their blood, repeated exposure to these images plateaus out to a muted solemnity. We learned that no words had yet been formulated to adequately convey the consequences and degradation of this extermination. Every byword for horror and synonym for pain was a trite impostor. We ingested this just as we were schooled not to notice when camp survivors who addressed us over lunch pocketed the bread rolls.

I find myself hamstrung at the notion of writing about the Holocaust. The fear, of course, is that even sixty years on, the event still turns dark superlatives into facile platitudes. Shortly before leaving for Lithuania, I caught a production of Alan Bennett's marvellous play
The History Boys
, in which a group of students grapple with this very dilemma. One quotes Wittgenstein, saying, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.' Another says, ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.'

Jews had been a part of Lithuanian life since 1323 when Gediminas invited them to live in his new capital Vilnius, where he employed these literate migrants as tax collectors and financial advisers. In 1388, the Grand Duke Vytautas granted Jews religious freedom, clarified their legal rights and exempted synagogues and cemeteries from taxation. By 1445, they were enjoying free trade and government positions as customs inspectors. Despite the odd expulsion and monotheistic brouhaha, Jews prospered in Lithuania until the end of the eighteenth century when the Russians arrived.

Aside from restricting Jewish settlement to a million-square-kilometre swathe of land known as the Pale of Settlement, Tzar Nicholas I decided Jews should no longer be exempt from military service. And just to show 'em who was boss, Semitic conscripts were harvested at a younger age than those of differing ethnicity and could be indentured for up to thirty years. When it became apparent that this tactic was not winning over more converts to the Russian Orthodox faith, conscription periods for Jews were reduced to the standard six years. Lucky us. In addition to the raids of rape, plunder and murder known as pogroms – which were particularly numerous between 1881 and 1884 – a quota system was introduced for Jews in schools and Tzar Alexander III confined Jews to small towns and villages, many of which became battlegrounds in World War I. Again, lucky us.

Once the mustard gas had cleared, ethnic tensions within Lithuania were put on hold in the name of autonomy. Citizens from a host of backgrounds banded together to form a militia which did much to safeguard the establishment of the independent state which was declared on 16 February 1918. Despite Poland swiping territory in the west while Germany did likewise in the east, the newly sovereign nation temporarily found its feet.

The period of stability proved to be a Petri dish in which ancient suspicions and prejudices festered. Although the Versailles Treaty had explicitly specified the right of Lithuanian Jews to national autonomy, the Jewish National Council – which was empowered to regulate religious and social issues plus impose taxes – didn't last long enough to fulfil such any such roles.

Amid a burgeoning miasma of anti-Semitism, the Jewish Kehilla (council) was rescinded while nationalist president Antanas Smetona, who was in power from 1926 to 1940, derided Jews as ‘active communists' and ‘dishonest traders'. Despite having to roll with the punches, metaphorical and otherwise, Jews became a presence of undeniable significance in Lithuania – not least because of the fact that we went forth and multiplied. Before World War II, there were Jewish populations of over 1000 in more than 300 rural outposts. A dozen regional centres had communities in excess of 20,000. And then there was Vilnius. By some estimates, almost half of the city's population of 450,000 didn't mix meat and milk. Centuries before Israel's founding father David Ben Gurion observed that for every two Jews there are three opinions, this fractious dynamic was being played out in Vilnius. Nowhere was it more apparent than among the pious, who schismed along monotheistic fault lines and viciously condemned all but their own doctrines.

Known as the ‘Jerusalem of the North', Vilnius attracted some of the most eminent Jewish scholars of the day to its many
yeshivas
(biblical colleges). Probably the most famous is Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, who went by the stage name of the Vilna Gaon.

Born in Vilnius in 1720, he was a freakish child who had memorised the bible by the age of three. Within eight more years he had committed the entire Talmud – an extensive record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, customs and history – to memory. As a twenty-year-old, he sat in judgment over complex ethical and interpretive dilemmas that had rabbis thrice his age at bearded loggerheads.

The Gaon's spiritual hunger ran parallel to a secular thirst and his writings on trigonometry, geometry, algebra, astronomy, geography and medicine were consulted by scholars throughout Europe. His critical examination of texts, religious and otherwise, fitted neatly into a perception of Lithuanian Jewry (known as Litvaks) as being both learned and cynical in equal measure. In the eyes of other Semitic communities, Litvak piety was often viewed as being somewhat questionable. Much like the man on the island with his two synagogues, the Gaon had no hesitation in taking sides when it came to Lithuania's myriad kabba-listic cabals.

Even with such enmity, scriptural study flourished among the masses. However, although Lithuanian Jews were acknowledged by world Jewry as being dedicated scholars, their devotion was doubted as not quite kosher. Along with their accumulated knowledge, the Litvak character was shot through with a scepticism that appeared to the unquestioning pious as truculence. Imagine embarking on an analysis of the minutiae of a sacred text then having your every opinion responded to with, ‘But why?' or ‘Who says?' and you'll get some idea of what it was like to discuss theology with a Lithuanian Jew.

Political debate was as intense as that fomented by religion. The Jewish Socialist movement had its genesis in Lithuania. Working first in Hebrew and later in Yiddish, scholars took it upon themselves to set out ideology for thousands of Jews who were virtual serfs and could not read the original Polish and Russian in which socialism's seminal texts were initially published. At odds with traditional Judaism, socialism had at its core a revolutionary ethos plus a rampant desire for secular independence. Its primary mouthpiece was the Bund, an abbreviation for the General Jewish Labour Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia. Aiming to boost the self-confidence of workers and secure school instruction in Yiddish, the language of the masses, the Bund was all about the here and now. The growing Zionist movemement, however, was all about the there (Israel) and soon (Please G-d).

In addition to the myriad organisations which split then divided on themselves once more like fringing on a prayer shawl, Lithuanian Jewry – especially in the larger urban centres – also spawned a community infrastructure so comprehensive that it would be replicated in almost every nation in which they made new lives. In Vilnius, for example, there were eighty-five Semitic institutions covering commerce, sports and charities. Even musicians and dentists had their own unions. Meanwhile, the cultural bodies engendered by this community twitched with a febrile vitality. Blessed, cursed or both with the ability to articulate fatalistic humour against a backdrop of muted maudlinness, Lithuanian Jewry produced artists, writers and musicians who gained worldwide acclaim.

Although he was born in Russia, artist Marc Chagall is claimed by Lithuanians as one of their own, as are pioneering film director Sergei Eisenstein and LL Zamen-hof, the man who invented Esperanto. In truth, however, it was the creative descendants of Lithuanian Jews whose brooding cultural baggage and brittle cynicism garnered global acclaim. This rollcall includes Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer and Al Jolson. There are also the Three Stooges, talk show host Maury Povich, whose stock-in-trade is the live-to-air paternity test, and pop singer Pink, so there goes the high-culture theory.

Although the intellectual dynamism of cities such as Vilnius and Kaunas has been established, there is still some conjecture about the extent to which it spread to towns like my ancestral stomping ground Naishtot. What is certain is that the Jewish communities in these towns were not as divided as those in the cities as their survival and welfare often depended on cohesion. Towns such as these were known as
shtetls,
from a diminutive form of the German word for city. Author Leo Rosten described the Jews who lived in such hamlets as ‘poor folk, fundamentalist in faith, earthy, superstitious, stubbornly resisting secularism or change'. Working primarily for themselves as dairymen, cobblers, tailors, butchers, fishmongers and shopkeepers, they were, according to Rosten, convinced they were living in a temporary exile which would pass when the Messiah restored a glorious Israel to the Jews. With movement restricted to the Pale of Settlement, Rosten contends that Jews were forbidden from owning land and barred – with exceptions – from universities and all but the most menial government jobs. So removed was
shtetl
life from that of the main cities that routine urban amenities were described by the author of
The Jews in America,
Ruth Gay, as being ‘as legendary as Babylon or Nineveh'.

The
shtetls
were divided along religious lines with Jews and gentiles living beside one another. Periods of peaceful, if separate, coexistence were interspersed with those in which racism ran rife. Jews who were spat on or beaten counted themselves fortunate to have survived their encounter with vodka-fuelled miscreants or apparently pious Cossacks. All the while, such incidents were written off as ‘minor' by authorities.

In response Rosten believes the Jews produced ‘an independent style of life and thought, an original gallery of human types, fresh and rueful modes of humour, irony, lyricism, paradox – all unlike anything, I think, in history'. While Rosten could probably be accused of blowing his own
shofar
to some degree, he makes a valid point. The isolated nature of these settlements and the conditions which bound Jews together in them conspired to create a series of repositories for Semitic culture and worship where these two dimensions of life fused into a singular entity.

Rosten was not alone in romanticising traditional village life with observations such as ‘it was a world isolated from time, medieval in texture, living on the daily edge of fear. And it was a triumph of human endurance, a crucible which flamed and a brilliant and unexpected florescence of scholarship and literature.' Such schmaltzy remembrances have long been attacked by those seeking to produce a more authentic depiction of
shtetl
life. Writers such as Maurice Samuel had little time for bittersweet reminiscences. He notes: