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[speaking foreign language]

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[speaking foreign language]

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[speaking foreign language]

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[speaking foreign language]

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[speaking foreign language]

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[speaking foreign language]

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My name Migle Anusauskaite.

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I was born in Kaunas in Lithuania,

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but I\'ve been living here in Vilnius for 15 years already.

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I\'m working at the Judaica Research Center

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of National Library.

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How I came to know Yiddish was through languages in general.

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I studied some Jadis for my masters

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and then I started learning some Chinese, some Hebrew,

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and my Hebrew teacher asked me to join

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Judaica Research Center,

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and I\'ve been working there for a couple of years already.

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[keypad beeping]

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During that time, I came to know more and more Yiddish.

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In faith I\'m Yiddish, and books and documents.

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I have many documents in Yiddish.

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Hand-written documents, printed documents.

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Practically now I\'m fully converted to Yiddish.

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My main work is with Yiddish right now,

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and to learn this language better,

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I went to a couple of summer programs.

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I went to Vilnius summer program two years ago,

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then last year, I went to Paris,

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and now just a couple of weeks ago,

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I came back from YIVO summer program in New York.

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And YIVO, Institute for Jewish Research

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was actually established here in Vilnius in 1925,

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but moved to New York during the war, of course.

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Many things were established in Vilnius at that time.

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Many Jewish culture was blooming in the inter-war period.

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It was, Yiddish in particular,

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it\'s a kind of secular culture connected more to it,

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but you can see the newspapers, the flyers,

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the theater performances.

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People were not only talking it, they were using it for art,

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for expression, for political purposes.

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And it was there, Vilnius was very very Jewish,

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before the war, around 40% of the population in Vilnius

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was Jewish.

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Jews were here for centuries.

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And now you can\'t see that.

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You can\'t really feel that

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when you don\'t know what to look for.

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And when you go to the city, to the city center,

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the small beautiful streets with fancy boutiques

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and expensive hotels, you don\'t know

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that at that exact place, was the ghetto.

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And when you do know it,

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when I came to know it, I can\'t see it with the same eyes.

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There are signs of Jewish culture,

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but you have to know where to look for.

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And also I think that more and more people,

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young people probably know what to look for

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and they\'re interested in that

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and understand that the Jewish culture

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is part of our history in general.

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It\'s not just some different part of history.

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It\'s our history.

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And there are people who are learning Yiddish

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and probably I\'m biased because now I meet

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more and more people who are interested

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in Jewish history and culture.

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But I think also, I kind of play a part in that

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because I talk to my friends a lot about my work,

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about most interesting aspects of my work.

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For example, the most interesting aspect of my work,

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I think, are the autobiographies of Jewish youth,

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inter-war period.

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YIVO, the same YIVO, made three contests

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for young people, from 16 to 22 years old,

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to write their autobiographies anonymously.

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They can write whatever they want

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and as sincere as possible,

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and just send it to YIVO.

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They can win prizes and YIVO-collected material

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about the life and people.

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I read them and they are so touching

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and some of them, a handful of them,

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include their own poetry.

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Very general poetry that we\'d write, teenage poetry,

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about the longing, about loneliness,

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about wanting to escape and wanting to find someone

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who understands you, and such images,

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like moon, birds, blood, and youth, and collectivity also.

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And YIVO specifically asked not to include,

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don\'t try literary works,

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don\'t include anything like that.

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We\'re not grading you for that.

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But they could not avoid including poetry

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because poetry was so important to their lives in general.

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At that time, in Jewish culture in Vilnius,

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poetry wasn\'t just some leisure activity

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that you can read a couple of verses before sleep.

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It was a very vibrant part of the culture.

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It was connected to theater,

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connected to perform, people were reading poetry

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and the audience was packed.

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Everyone was writing or reading or reciting it.

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And the most famous group at that time

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was called Yung-Vilne.

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It was established in the \'30s.

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It was kind of a socialist-leaning humanist organization,

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but they remained quite individual,

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the people who were part of the organization.

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Such people as Chaim Grade, Shmerke Kaczerginski,

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Leyzer Volf, and also Avrom Sutzkever.

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who\'s most known right now as Yiddish poet of that group.

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But at the beginning, then,

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he wasn\'t at first even accepted to the group

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because his poetry was too much,

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not very socialist, not very humanist.

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He was born that far from Vilnius in 1913,

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but his early childhood, he spent in Siberia

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and he loved nature there.

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He loved the snow,

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and this love of nature stayed with him,

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even though his most known works in Vilna Ghetto

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as the testimonies of Vilna Ghetto poetic testimonies

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and later he continued writing about the war

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and his poetry and prose acquired

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a more collective dimension.

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In general, to write in ghetto, to write poetry,

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it was a rebellious act, right?

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It was to show the human spirit surviving.

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It\'s a testimony.

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And he continued doing that

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and he believed in the power of poetry,

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the power of words.

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That you can, you can survive with words.

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For example, when he escaped from the ghetto,

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with his wife and Shmerke Kaczerginski,

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he had to walk through the minefield.

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And he didn\'t know where to step.

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So, when he was walking, he recited poetry in his head,

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and he started to step to the rhythm of the poetry

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because he believed the poetry would save his life,

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and it did.

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And put it in his writing later.

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And he talked about this memory.

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Before the war, before the occupation, German occupation,

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just in 1940, it was last meeting of Yung Vilne.

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They didn\'t know it was the last,

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but the political situation was unstable.

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The German occupation was just around the corner,

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basically, here in Vilnius.

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And they met for the last time,

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and they recited poetry, they read their works,

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and Sutskever chose to read one particular poem

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that depicted, that wasn\'t political at all.

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He was talking about nature, how everything is connected,

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how everything is important,

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and how you can see this underlying principle

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in all the things.

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This thought, because his work survived,

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and later, and also pantheistic,

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it survived in his later works

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and his later poetry,

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and you can see the whole line

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starting from that poem in his work in general.

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[speaking foreign language]

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