Ellen Cassedy's longing to recover the Yiddish she'd lost with her
mother's death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the "Jerusalem of
the North." As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years
after he'd left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about
his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made
an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey
broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country,
Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move
forward into the future. How does a nation--how do successor
generations, moral beings--overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the
bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These
are the questions Cassedy confronts in "We Are Here," one woman's
exploration of Lithuania's Jewish history combined with a personal
exploration of her own family's place in it. Digging through archives
with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing
natives, including an old man who wants to "speak to a Jew" before he
dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that
endured both Nazi and Soviet occupation-Cassedy finds that it's not just
the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them.
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.
