15

Vilna, Vilna, Our Native City

For years, a Jew with blue spectacles stood on Daytshe Street begging, “Take me across to the other side.” His plea was so heartrending that, rather than asking to be taken across the few cobblestones separating Gitke Toybe’s Lane from Yiddishe Street, he sounded like he needed to cross a deep and dangerous abyss. Maybe he was the first Jew in Vilna with a premonition about the Holocaust. Just the name of the street, Daytshe Gas, German Street, drove him from one side to the other. We could all see the little water pump and Yoshe’s kvass stall on the other side of the street, but through his dark spectacles, that Jew saw farther. Fate didn’t take him to the safer side. He ended up in the abyss at Ponar with everyone else.

When I think of that man, who can serve as a symbol of our fate, what comes to mind is the decimated beauty of Vilna.

I must confess in the name of the survivors, in the name of the small group of Vilna Jews who managed to travel to the other side and escape their native city when it was converted by the murderers into one bloody Daytshe Street; in the name of all those who escaped from the hellfire through ghettoes, through forests, through camps, combat zones, and battlefronts; in the name of them all, I must confess that we were in love with Vilna. To this very day that love pierces our hearts like a broken arrow that can’t be removed without taking part of us with it.

Vilna gave us every opportunity to dream exalted dreams about bringing happiness to the world, about creating a better future, about bringing all people closer to the beauty that surrounded us. Vilna possessed youthful joys that couldn’t be purchased with money. Because none of us had very much, the joys of Vilna were all the sweeter.

The Viliye River brought us greetings from vast, distant waters. We cooled our feverish fantasies in the Zakrete forest. From the Shishkin hills, we pined after distant, unknown worlds.

It’s not surprising that people walked through Vilna who couldn’t be seen anywhere else in the world. Take, for example, a Jew like Khaykl Lunski, the librarian at the Strashun Library. His gentle gaze reflected the naïveté of the hundreds of children who came to the library, like sheep to a spring, to imbibe knowledge. Or Gedalke the Cantor. For years, he stood in the courtyard next to the Great Synagogue and sang. He chose that spot so the echoes of prayers that were once sung with such flourish by Hershman, Sirota, and Koussevitzky, the greatest cantors of our time, would reach their highest expression in him.

Where else in the world could you find jokers like the guys in Vilna? The hucksters on Daytshe Street with their expressions, their jokes, and their ridiculing of the entire respectable world. They could convince a peasant to buy a tuxedo jacket to match a pair of striped pants. Only in Vilna could those oddballs have paraded around in all their outlandishness. Every Vilna Jew possessed their own peculiarities, so they could understand the fantasies of others. The Jews of Vilna didn’t only relish the tasty meals at Usian’s restaurant and Taleykinski’s peppered salami but also their own wild and expansive dreams.

On Yatkever Street, Kive the Locksmith tinkered with a lock shaped like a nightingale that sang when the door opened. The carpenters in the production cooperative on Troker Street tried to figure out how to make a sofa that would also work as a desk.

Siomke Kagan decided to translate Gypsy songs into Yiddish, so he went to Trok to live in the Gypsy camp and learn their language. Gedalke, the crazy cantor, didn’t sit around with his arms folded. During the winter, he would freeze religious melodies by singing them into a teapot of water in the synagogue courtyard so they wouldn’t be forgotten by springtime.

Our restlessness drove us to wander in search of traces of yesteryear’s snows in the summer shallows of the Narotshe Lake.

Was there anything the Jews of Vilna didn’t think of? Even about buying a plot of land in some corner of the world and creating a Jewish republic where everyone from the street cleaners to the president would speak Yiddish. A Jew created bills for that republic in a garret in Leyzer’s Courtyard on Yiddishe Street. He made sure to draw a Star of David at the center of each bill.

The criminal organization the Golden Flag spoke about loyalty and friendship in their constitution. “Our members should behave properly and not forget that even though we are who we are, we are still Jews.” There was a directive for the general treasury to provide dowries for poor brides. The organization bought all the tickets for Shriftzetser’s jubilee performance so their beloved actor would come away with funds.

It’s difficult to figure out where all that dreaming, all that yearning for better and more beautiful things, came from. We had very little. Few of us came from wealthy homes. And yet, hardworking youths strode through Vilna with clear and open faces. Far from feeling depressed, we were full of life and at peace with ourselves.

We should be careful not to idealize Vilna. We shouldn’t turn all the outlandish Vilna notions, the fantastic ideas and the perfectly crafted expressions into moral virtues. As well as light, there was plenty of shadow. There were poor, hopeless days. That hopelessness drove hundreds over the border to a great snow-covered land in search of a better life. Let us remember the pure souls who believed, with true Vilna faith, in the lofty slogans. Let us remember those who crossed the border with open hearts and naïve faith and who were murdered in prisons and camps. They were the forerunners of Ponar. They, the believers in a just world under the red flag, were the first to be murdered.

In Vilna, we lived a full-bodied Jewish life. Despite the alien surroundings, despite our poverty, despite the pressure from all sides, we contributed with creativity and enthusiasm to Jewish culture and to Jewish continuity.

Vilna left her mark on her inhabitants. The narrow Vilna alleys possessed a magic that inspired boundless effort. You find yourself walking down a vaulted street. You feel there is no way out. The old walls press in on you, trying to merge over your very head. Just when you are about to turn back, a little garden and the Vilenke, a happy rushing stream, opens up before you. You want to take off your shoes, roll your pant legs up to your knees, and stand on the shore with a fishing rod in hand.

Figure 3. “You find yourself walking down a vaulted street.” By Yosl Bergner from Avrom Karpinovitsh, Baym Vilner durkhhoyf (Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1967). Courtesy of the artist.

We were spread out through Vilna from one city gate to the other, from Lipuvke, Ruzele, and Novogorod, all the way up to Shnipishok. We, city folk, were drawn to Shnipishok. Crossing the Viliye over the Green Bridge always held the promise of entering another world. There were many interesting characters in Shnipishok to listen to your thoughts. You could also share a kiss and a first embrace beside a closed wooden gate in the summer moonlight.

Sometimes, in a foreign place, you get a hint of Vilna. You open a window and a chestnut tree, like the trees in Talyatnik Park, thrusts its disheveled crown towards you. It reminds you of your childhood, when people made ink from its shiny fruit. We no longer use the ink of our childhoods to write cheerful letters. We use it instead to extinguish our burning sorrow over our native city. Now, when we are so far from Vilna, so very far that there is no longer any place for longing, now everyone and everything appears more clearly. And when the string of memory is plucked, that world sings for us as though still pulsing, as though it hadn’t been taken from us forever.

We moved through Vilna with a longing for faraway places without names. We were content to lose ourselves in a feathery cloud and swim across the blue sky. We didn’t know that a day would come when we would be flung across the globe, forlorn and orphaned individuals from entire families, and that from all of Vilna, only a pale memory would remain. When we swam in the waters of the Viliye, when our dreams knocked up against every tree in Volokumpie, when we lay on the soft moss trying to capture a bit of sun in our squinting eyes, we didn’t know that one day all this would no longer bring us joy but instead, only sorrow.

We cut walking sticks and whittled secret youthful symbols into their fresh bark. We went out into the world in open shirts with buttons undone. How could we have known that the world of our youth would one day be soaked in the blood of those closest to us?

What remains of our memories of Vilna? They bind us to the city. Despite everything, we are still intoxicated by the perfumed poison of the Vilna forests, by the fresh snow on the Hill of the Crosses, by the quiet song of the Viliye. We are bound by one longing and one sadness.

May all of us, the last Jews of Vilna, throw a green bridge over everything that has disappeared, so that our children will one day be able to set foot there and understand our past lives, our past joys. About our suffering they know enough. May they taste the water from the spring in Pospieshk. May they cool their spirits in the hidden shadows of the trees in the Bernardine Garden.

And in years to come, may they continue to sing, “Vilna, Vilna, Our Native City,” the song of their mothers and fathers.