By Anne Rabinovitch, translator.
The plane flies over the Tatras; behind me, Bratislava, Prague, and Budapest. A journey begun years ago. History has allowed me to make it. After Warsaw, I am in the unknown; emotions jostle in my memory. I no longer have any reference to reality. Only mythical references.
The tiny airport of Vilnius, where no one is waiting for me.
The Lithuanian customs officers examine the visas with astonishment. I have a dozen addresses in my bag. No memories, only scraps of a story. It is summer, the drought. The season when my father left with his mother and his sisters, in 1910.
My grandfather was already in Paris. In a few hours, I have crossed nearly a century.
Right away, the sensation of poverty, of filth, of abandonment. The yellow grass. “The harvest is burned,” the ambassador explains to me. My first encounter. “This is the first year that people have private property. They are all ruined.”
A pause, then:
“You have to stroll, to feel the city. It isn’t easy. It takes time. You’ll see, it is a very endearing place. A high seat of culture. Remember the Gaon of Vilna…”
That same evening, Dalia takes me walking through the silent streets. “I’m going to show you something,” she says. A park where people walk their dogs, the house of weddings. “Look at this staircase. It is made of Jewish tombstones.” I lean down; I recognize a few letters, effaced by footsteps. “Now, since independence, they are making an effort. You see, they are in the process of replacing them.” I notice a pile of sand and stone slabs.
“You know,” Saulius — the filmmaker who accompanied me to Belarus — will tell me later, “I know people who avoided these staircases for years.”
“What difference does it make?” exclaims Rachel, the guide of the Jewish museum housed in the premises of the former museum of the revolution. “What they did to human beings was worse.”
By chance, the following morning, I attend the inauguration of a monument erected in honor of a Japanese man who saved Jews during the war.
President Landsbergis is present, along with a few ministers. Emmanuelis Zingeris, president of the community and a member of parliament, gives the presentation speech. One of his friends, a Lithuanian businessman born in New York and living in London, serves as interpreter at a moment’s notice. He entrusts me with his attaché case during the ceremony and takes us to lunch after the officials have left, in one of the hotels of Vilnius.
During the meal he shows me Judith Friedlander’s book on the Lithuanian Jews in France, Vilna on Seine. I immediately find in it two pages about my family. He looks at me, stunned, and says to his friend Zingeris: “You see, I had suggested inviting the people written about in this book. My dream has already come true: Anne is here…”
He turns to me: “You look like a Lithuanian activist from the twenties… But one can tell you have not suffered persecution.”
I go to Ponar on a sunny afternoon. A lady from Vilnius, Lila, accompanies me; she tells her story, holding back her tears, she shows the photograph of her mother, her father, her little brother, shot during the massacre. She herself spent a year in the forest, with the partisans.
“Why did you come?” she asks me.
One of the pits burned recently; there is still smoke. The keeper explains that a group of Israelis passed through this morning, and a woman threw down her cigarette butt while it was still lit.
“The trees have grown over fifty years,” says Lila.
“It is now a real forest.”
I set off for Smorgon on the fourth day. Smorgon, my father’s native village, currently in Belarus. Now one needs a visa. I do not have one. Lila tried to discourage me. “There is nothing to see there. There are no more Jews, no more synagogues. It is of no interest whatsoever.” But Saulius, who is preparing a film on the Jews of Lithuania, offers to take me. A friend lends me her passport, in case of a check at the Belarusian border. “Don’t say a word. Above all, don’t say that you have no visa. We risk trouble. From one day to the next, everything can change. Good luck.”
After a long wait on the Lithuanian side, we crossed the barrier. A few kilometers of neutral zone, a sentry box with two Belarusian customs officers who make no attempt to stop our vehicle.
Smorgon like a Central Asian town, its wide, desolate streets. Saulius approaches a woman and questions her in Russian; she remembers the name Rabinovitch; she points out the street where they lived, the street where the Jews dwelt at the beginning of the century. “My mother has died, unfortunately; she could have told you a great deal.”
The cemetery is destroyed. A square, built upon the graves. We cross it.
In the restaurant of Smorgon’s only hotel, where only the sales representatives come from far-off republics to eat, the music has an Israeli sound.
“Of course,” explains Saulius, “in the seventies, all the composers were Jewish.”
On our way out we learn from a passerby that the Jewish cemetery of a neighboring village, Creiva, escaped the destructions of the sixties. We decide to go there.
On the square, the statue of Lenin has survived. “No one told them to take it down,” Saulius remarks.
A little farther on, a street that bears the name of a young man of 17, fallen in Afghanistan.
At Creiva, a hazel tree grows among the gravestones covered with grass and bushes, their inscriptions almost illegible.
A peasant passing by on a cart along the neighboring path explains that a Rabinovitch family lived in the village. Everyone left two months ago for Israel; the house is empty. A sister has stayed in Smorgon.
A few recent graves, the names engraved in Russian and in Yiddish. Night is falling, but we set off again for Smorgon, in the hope of finding this lady.
After a few fruitless attempts to telephone from the post office, we head toward the public housing estate where she lives.
A couple gets into the car to guide us. The man recounts that his brother died at Kaunas in January ’91, when the Russians stormed the Lithuanian television station.
Saulius explains to the family on the first floor what I am looking for. I cannot address them directly; I do not speak Russian.
The lady of the house, who bears the same name as I do, disappears to change her dress and prepare some coffee.
Her husband telephones a friend who possesses the archives of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They find no trace of my ancestors. Perhaps one of their uncles, who emigrated to Hadera as did many Jews of Belarus, because of the fallout from Chernobyl, will know something. “Hurry and write to him; he is very old…”
We exchange addresses. The father, who is a school principal, offers to take us to the old Jewish quarter, although it is now night. He shows us the little wooden houses whose construction is distinctive — the shutters, the front door, the base, the place where the mezuzah went, the oriental style of the windows.
“Are you bringing anything back?” the Belarusian customs officer asks at midnight, when we cross the border a second time, in the other direction.
“Nichevo” [nothing], answers Saulius. I keep silent; no one asks for my papers.
“What could I have answered?” he says to me now that we are driving through the neutral zone. “That we had brought back impressions? That I had a French spy in my car? All they care about is Russian vodka and gasoline, which is cheaper in Belarus.”
A silence, then:
“I hope you felt something,” he says.
I fell asleep at once, without taking any notes, without seeing the images again.
On 13 September, the day of the Baltic Jews, on the rue des Rosiers, I run by chance into Emmanuelis Zingeris, who has slipped away from a meeting of the European Parliament in Brussels to come and hear the poems of his brother Markas, translated into French.
He tells me that excerpts from my father’s play, L’Affaire Wittenberg (The Wittenberg Affair), are going to be published in an anthology in Lithuania. He considers the gathering of onlookers, amid the cars whose horns at moments drown out the voices of the actors; he exclaims: “It is a miracle,” he thanks the director with emotion: “Now that the borders have fallen, we all live under the same sky.”