Legacy Of A Lithuanian Grandmother

What comes to mind when you think of the word great grandma? Homemade treats? Someone that spoils you? As you will discover in this personal account, great grandma can mean all those things and moretough, hardworking, faithful, and highly protective. This book is about a great grandmothers lifefrom her birth in remote Vaznikiai Village in Lithuania in 1891 to traveling to Baltimore under an assumed name in 1912, to marrying another immigrant from a different social economic class in 1914, to the difficult circumstances that she and her siblings faced in building new lives in the United States. Her story is probably very similar to immigrants from her day but has somehow been forgotten. Through old letters, interviews, and genealogical documents, Iewa Dobaites or Grandma Evas life is recalled and her legacy to her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren becomes clear.

Are you interested in learning about the everyday lives of people who lived through the American Revolution, Civil War, Westward Expansion, World War II, and the modern era? Using letters, diaries, wills, and other primary documentation shared by my grandmother and her grandmother, this is a collection of family stories that span from 1700 to 1998 with the surnames of: Stone, Hankins, Campbell, Ford, and Simpson. Their stories invite you to view historical events in a more personal manner than a textbook and gives the reader a sense of connection to the past.

Once regarded as a vibrant centre of intellectual, cultural and spiritual Jewish life, Lithuania was home to 240,000 Jews prior to the Nazi invasion of 1941. By war's end, less than 20,000 remained. Today, approximately 4,000 Jews reside there, among them 108 survivors from the camps and ghettos and a further 70 from the Partisans and Red Army. Against a backdrop of ongoing Holocaust dismissal and a recent surge in anti-Semitic sentiment, Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania presents the history and experiences of a group of elderly Holocaust survivors in modern-day Vilnius. Using their stories and memories, their places of significance as well as biographical objects, Shivaun Woolfson considers the complexities surrounding Holocaust memory and legacy in a post-Soviet era Lithuania. The book also incorporates interdisciplinary elements of anthropology, psychology and ethnography, and is informed at its heart by a spiritual approach that marks it out from other more conventional historical treatments of the subject. Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania includes 20 images, comes with comprehensive online resources and weaves together story, artefact, monument and landscape to provide a multidimensional history of the Lithuanian Jewish experience during and after the Holocaust.

This book highlights the Holocaust-related research of the historian, archeologist, and professor, Rabbi Richard A. Freund. Richard was a pioneering force in non-invasive archaeology, wherein geophysical techniques adapted from the oil and gas industry are used at Holocaust sites to collect data used in concert with testimony and archival research to write or rewrite the history of the Holocaust. The chapters’ authors span the breath of Holocaust studies and science, and include geophysicists who are experts in applying geophysical techniques in a historical context, geographers skilled in mapping and spatial analysis, filmmakers and film students, archaeologists that focus on the Holocaust, and academics specializing in Judaic studies, Jewish life and the Holocaust. It is comprehensive but non-technical and is a resource for anyone interested in melding science with history and uncovering the often lost or hidden aspects of the Holocaust.

August 8, 1944, the war in Europe is bleeding to a close. The scion of a prominent New York family, US Army Lt. Col. Jacob Jay Rosenthal discovers six paintings, the works of great masters, in the bunker of a battle-battered mansion of a Nazi colonel in Frth, Germany. Deftly, he smuggles two of them to a Swiss bank vault, the others to New York City as hes deployed home. Three generations of Rosenthals commit themselves to finding the rightful owners, victims or heirs. Prophetically, Jay shunned restitution by governments, knowing that legitimate claimants would face the deceptions and ineptness of sputtering bureaucracies. The Rosenthals encounter illicit trading networks of ex-Nazis, tax-evading free-trade zone systems, and legal barriers and technicalities lobbied into place by a few great American and European museums. The Rosenthal weltanschaung never curdles, even as Jays daughter-in-law is murdered by hired German gangsters. Another family member dies mysteriously as her small plane hits a mountain near Nice, France, each having come close to finding the rightful owners. As Jacobs legacy seems a lost cause, his grandsons swampy deal to sell the billion-dollar collection suddenly disintegrates and for the right reasons. Set in New York City, the Hamptons, Monte Carlo, and Paris, the realities of illicit trade in Nazi-confiscated art coagulate into a corroborated denial of justice.

Ausra Paulauskiene's book Lost and Found: The Discovery of Lithuania in American Fiction targets American as well as European scholars in the fields of literature, ethnic studies and immigration. The author discovers obscure texts on Lithuania and alerts Western and Eastern academia to their significance as well as the reasons for their neglect. For the first time, Abraham Cahan's autobiography The Education of Abraham Cahan and Ezra Brudno's autobiographical novel The Fugitive receive an extensive coverage, while Goldie Stone's My Caravan of Years and Margaret Seebach's That Man Donaleitis (sic) receive their first scholarly consideration ever. The author argues that misrepresentations, misattributions and exclusions of Lithuanian legacy in the U.S. were produced by major political events of the twentieth century.

Preface As a genealogist who spent several years researching ancestors, I wanted to do more. I did not want just to gather family names. I wanted to weave together all the records, papers, memories, history, photos, and random facts into a book, one that summarizes my research, tells a meaningful story, and shares a legacy. As you read this book, you will come to understand why I chose my Lithuanian grandmother as my main character. The Invincible Heart is an historical novel based on the life of Jadvyga Vaitkute and her homeland. Be filled with admiration for the Lithuanian people as you relive the victories and devastating defeats in this chronicle of their country. Travel with Jadvyga while she experiences the horrors of life in steerage when courageously making her unforgettable journey to America in 1901. Discover how political unrest, terror, raging fires, epidemics, threats of imprisonment, and the relentless iron rule of Russia affect the heart of this young Lithuanian and her homeland. My journey while writing this book was full of surprises. I learned not only about the process of writing and publishing a manuscript but also about my family. This was one of the most emotional and rewarding journeys I have ever taken. Shortly after I began writing, my husband was diagnosed with a rare aggressive cancer. He died before the book was published. During the months of his illness I was so thankful that I could look to my grandmother's example for strength and face difficult times with courage and grace. The research and the writing changed me. I now am more grounded in the knowledge of my past, and in my day-to-day activities I recognize evidence that the blood of my Lithuanian ancestors runs through my veins. My grandparents had seven children. One of them, my father Philip John Krausman, is still alive as of this writing. He will be 100 years old in May 2016. He is healthy, and his mind is quite alert. I am so thankful for the hours I spent with him recording stories of his childhood and early years. His sister Ida died in 2015 at the age of 107, but not without leaving almost twenty pages of well-written memories that were distributed at her funeral. This is an historical novel. As you read it, try to put yourself in the setting and experience the time and place. Perhaps you will be as affected and changed as I was while composing the chronicle. Phyllis J. Edwards February 14, 2016 Newark, Delaware

Appearing on the world stage in 1918, Lithuania suffered numerous invasions, border changes and large scale population displacements.The successive occupations of Stalin in 1940 and Hitler in 1941, mass deportations to the Gulag and the elimination of the Jewish community in the Holocaust gave the horrors of World War II a special ferocity. Moreover, the fighting continued after 1945 with the anti-Soviet insurrection, crushed through mass deportations and forced collectivization in 1948-1951. At no point, however, did the process of national consolidation take a pause, making Lithuania an improbably representative case study of successful nation-building in this troubled region. As postwar reconstruction gained pace, ethnic Lithuanians from the countryside – the only community to remain after the war in significant numbers – were mobilized to work in the cities. They streamed into factory and university alike, creating a modern urban society, with new elites who had a surprising degree of freedom to promote national culture. This book describes how the national cultural elites constructed a Soviet Lithuanian identity against a backdrop of forced modernization in the fifties and sixties, and how they subsequently took it apart by evoking the memory of traumatic displacement in the seventies and eighties, later emerging as prominent leaders of the popular movement against Soviet rule.