The Image and Memory of Lithuania in American and South African Fiction

Abstract

Despite the temporal and physical distance from the land of their ancestors, descendants of Lithuanian Jews hold on to their Litvak identity and the memory of ancestral Lithuania. American and South African literatures in particular abound in allusions to Lithuania, as these two countries were the principal points of destination for Lithuanian Jews from the end of the nineteenth century till the 1920s. Lithuania remembered by the first generation American immigrants Abraham Cahan and Ezra Brudno contains few signs of recognizable Lithuanianness. The autobiography of their peer Goldie Stone, on the other hand, paints a picture of a familiar Lithuania and tells a story of a surprisingly positive symbiosis between Litvaks and Lithuanians. The contrasting images and memories of Lithuania were conditioned by the authors’ differing choices for acculturation, as well as their different ideological agendas as writers. Stone can be seen as a harbinger of the trend of nostalgic remembrance among East European Jews, which became distinct in the 1950s. The same trend manifested itself among South African Litvaks as demonstrated by the texts of Rose Zwi and Dan Jacobson written between the early 1950s and the late 1990s. However, in South African English Literature, the discourse of nostalgia competes with the discourse of traumatic remembrance and the practice of therapeutic writing.