Off the Shelf: We Are Here by Ellen Cassedy

Read the begining of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust by Ellen Cassedy:

"A soft summer rain was falling as a white-haired woman made her way to the microphone. “Tayere talmidim!” she began. “Dear students!” Through the pattering of drops on my umbrella, I leaned forward to catch her words. The old woman’s name was Bluma, a flowery name that matched her flowered dress. She was a member of the all-but-vanished Jewish community in Vilnius, Lithuania, the city once known as the Jerusalem of the North. “How fortunate I am,” she said in a quavering voice. “I have lived long enough to see people coming back to Vilnius to study Yiddish.”

Seventy-five of us—students of all ages from all over the globe—huddled on the wooden benches that were clustered together on wet cobblestones. Around us, the damp walls of Vilnius University rose into the heavens. As the rain continued to fall, I shivered. It was a complicated place, this land of my ancestors—a place where Jewish culture had once flourished, and a place where Jews had been annihilated on a massive scale.

My reasons for being here were not simple. I had come to learn Yiddish and to connect myself with my roots—the Jewish ones, that is, on my mother’s side. (On my father’s side, my non-Jewish forebears hailed from Ireland, England, and Bavaria—hence my name, Cassedy, and my blue eyes and freckles.) But I had other goals, too. I wanted to investigate a troubling family story I’d stumbled upon in preparing for my trip. I had agreed to meet a haunted old man in my ancestral town. And I planned to examine how the people of this country—Jews and non-Jews alike—were confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. What had begun as a personal journey had broadened into a larger exploration. Investigating Lithuania’s effort to exhume the past, I hoped, would help me answer some important questions."

Ellen Cassedy has explored the world of the Lithuanian Holocaust for ten years. Her translations and articles have appeared in Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Forward, and Hadassah. 

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase We Are Here, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/We-Are-Here,674939.aspx.