Kelionių po Žemaitijos štetlus reminiscencijos: nuo asmeninių įspūdžių iki atminties įpaminklinimo

ENThe article aims to reconstruct the journeys of two Jewish characters, Uriah Katzenelnbogen and Yakov David Kamzon, who became famous public figures and well- known authors, through the so-called ‘Medines of Zamet/Žemaitija’, based on their memories and reflections published in monumental works about Lithuanian Jewish history, and on excerpts from their creative work published in the interwar press or preserved among personal papers. At first glance, dtey were two completely unrelated journeys and travellers. Katzenelnbogen was a young man from Vilnius on his first independent trip around a region that was unknown to him, who sympathised with the Bund party. Kamzon was a shtet! born in Žemaitija, who made the aliya to Eretz Israel, and his short visit to his parents’ home in the late 1930s became his last journey to the homeland. The article discusses the binary concept of the region of Žemaitija and its inhabitants in the collective perception of Lithuanian Jews in the 20th century, and continues with a description of images of the region’s landscapes, people and society, and observations from the points of view of the travellers. Uriah Katzenelnbogen, a future publicist, translator, journalist and promoter of the idea of Lithuanian and Jewish coexistence via cultural exchange, observed the relationship between the two ethnic groups, Lithuanians and Jews, through their attitudes towards religion, and the poverty that determined their low position in the social hierarchy; and the different types of Jews in Zemaitijan shtetls, whose personal and families’ fates reflected the historical, political and cultural tendencies among East European Jews at the beginning of the 20th century; at the same time as responding to his own concept of the multiplicity of the Jewish identity.After returning to Vilnius in 1905, Katzenelnbogen established contact with the leaders of the local Belarusian and Polish political elites, and devoted himself to translating contemporary texts into Yiddish, thus seeking to introduce Jewish readers to the national ideas of other ethnic groups in the region at the time. In 1927, Katzenelnbogen emigrated to the United States of America, but he never entirely severed his ties with Lithuania. Growing up in Varniai, Yakov David Kamzon dreamt of the distant ancestral land of Israel; and while living in Jerusalem, the city of his dreams, he longed endlessly for his native shtetl He painted images of the Žemaitijan landscape with poetic tools, and also revealed his close bond with his birthplace, which turned out to be an integral part of his identity and a source of inspiration for his poetry. After becoming an established Hebrew poet in Palestine, Kamzon returned to Lithuania and his homeland several times in the 1930s. It is difficult to find the people mentioned in the poems about Kamzon’s homeland, but the reader can feel clearly that the native town was equated with his personal genius loci, to which an imperishable monument had to be built. The visit to Lithuania in 1937 was longer than he had planned, and became his last one.He engaged extensively in ethnographic research, photographing synagogues, typical Jewish figures and their activities, and Jewish public institutions in Lithuanian towns, starting with Žemaitijan towns, thanks to the mission he undertook after meeting some important people on his way. Unfortunately, most of the material he collected was lost during the Second World War, and he ended up in South Africa. The article ends with a presentation of how personal memories were included in memorial books to perpetuate Lithuania’s exterminated Jewish communities, and were published in New York and Tel Aviv in the 1950s; and how, due to historical circumstances, the impressions and reminiscences that were captured individually during two journeys and which are discussed in the article turned into a part of the collective Jewish memory about Lithuania and Lithuanian Jews. [From the publication]