29/07/2024
A MINIATURE LITHUANIA INSIDE CONNECTICUT:
exclusive interview with Lithuanian-American writer and editor Jocelyn Bartkevicius conducted by Laima Vince.
“My father was born in a small village called Gelvonai in Central Lithuania. His parents emigrated to the United States in 1930 when he was three. [...] My parents divorced when I was two. I was a weekend Lithuanian. I spent the weekends with my father, and he would take me to my grandparents’ house. It was really like going to another country. [...] there was the garden. My grandmother canned everything. When I was about ten she told me this story and laughed at herself. When World War II started, she thought it would be like World War I. So, she did what she did in Lithuania, which was to put food in jars and bury it in the yard. She told me she had found some bread that she had buried in the beginning of World War II.”
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“I loved my grandmother’s stories. I loved sitting in the garden, smelling all the fragrances. She would only tell me so many stories. At one point, when she was telling me about hiding in the forests from the Prussians and the Russians, she stopped and said, “You’re an American, you don’t understand.” It was always: You are an American, but then, you are a Lithuanian.”
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“The letters were censored. She [grandmother] showed me the letters from her sister with big black lines crossing out sentences. One time, she was reading one of her sisters’ letters to me, and she said, “This is how we get around the censors. Her sister wrote, ‘We live very well, just like Mrs. So and So.’ But we know that Mrs. So and So was an impoverished widow.”
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Don't miss the full interview: https://rb.gy/7qg1ud
Vilnius Review is an online journal of Lithuanian literature in translation.