„Ant žodžių tilto“: žydų susitikimas su lietuvių kultūra tarpukario Lietuvoje

Santrauka

Did all the above efforts bear fruits? Did ethnic Lithuanian culture become part and parcel of the cultural world of most contemporary local Jews? To a certain extent the answer to that question is, most probably, in the negative. First and foremost, one has to remember that most of the aforementioned Lithuanian Dainas, proverbs and short stories translated into Hebrew were characterized by a primordial primitive nature representing an early stage of the human cultural development. Concentrating on the basic experience of the rural human existence alongside pagan-type mystic elements, it belonged to the realm of folklore which was considered as a “Low Culture”. This perception highly correlated with the common image of contemporary Lithuanian people as an undeveloped and uncivilized society. A typical expression of this still existing perception is the caption placed under a photo of a Lithuanian shepherd in the above mentioned Isaac Kissin’s anthology: “A typical Dzūkijen shepherd, never changing his dress, through winter and summer wearing the same garment and fur, always barefoot”. What could be considered as a legitimate anthropological description, turned in the present context into a judgmental saying of a colonialist character. Against this background it is understandable why local Jews, a mostly urban group with an inherent historical self perception as “the people of the book” could hardly cross the conscious and mental barriers that separated them from this type of culture. Thus, only the Zionists, who ideologically fostered such values as productivity and land farming could identify, though to a very limited extent, with certain relevant elements of this cultural world as show above. Thus, a careful examination of the Lithuanian works incorporated in the contemporary Zionist press and educational publications reveals that the main elements “borrowed” from these works were of the idyllic natural and human atmosphere of the countryside, while almost totally ignoring most real aspects of local daily life. Moreover, contemporary local cultural arena offered to the reading public a wide variety of options “imported” from Russian, Polish, German and other nearby societies, which the Lithuanian ethnic cultural experience and works had to compete with. Thus, for instance, on the shelves of the schools’ libraries local Jewish students could find the books of Lithuanian authors such as Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius and Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas next to the works of world famous writers such as Pearl Buck, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Alexander Kuprin and Erich Kästner, to mention but a few.  However, while almost any graduate of a Jewish school in interwar Warsaw or Cracow was able to quote by heart whole paragraphs of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz or Alexander Pushkin’s novel Yevgeny Onegin, Krėvė’s Šarūnas, Dainavos kunigaikštis remained, at best, a blurry memory from school days.