Download or read book Twice Born World Stories of Lithuania written by Wendall Mayo and published by . This book was released on 2023-01-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Collection from Wendell Mayo, author of In Lithuanian Wood, and The Cucumber King of Kédainia? Wendell Mayo captures the fractured, mournful soul of modern Lithuania like no other writer. In his new book, Twice-Born World: Stories of Lithuania, he resurrects themes from In Lithuanian Wood and The Cucumber King of Kédainiai: grief, loneliness, the impossibility of communication, the inexplicability of desire. In this volume, the themes are even more sharply delineated, with desire playing a more prominent role. Mayo's characters, like Lithuania herself, long to connect to a more youthful, hopeful version of the past. As always, Mayo masterfully combines elements of the absurd with deeply poetic language. Every story in Twice-Born World is a gem. I couldn't put this book down.--Daiva Markelis, author of White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life "In Twice-Born World, Wendell Mayo manages the seemingly impossible--to make his stories both steeped in post-Soviet Lithuanian sensibilities while also making them feel universal. These are characters in the midst of transition, characters who frequently tell stories that mesmerize, as if stories might make sense of this beguiling new world. The effect is startling as Mayo seamlessly slides through space and time and perspective, offering subtle commentary on the geopolitics of the 1980s, all of which feels particularly acute in 2018. A necessary companion to Mayo's In Lithuanian Wood, and a stunning collection by a master of the short story."--Brad Felver, author of The Dogs of Detroit Twice-Born World transports readers to a Baltic sphere of post-Soviet nostalgia and struggle, of boozy, clumsy, and erotic East-West encounters, of overheard park-bench conversations, and of knee-capped Lenin statues. In this clear-eyed yet hope-filled collection, Wendell Mayo welcomes us to his Lithuania: a topsy-turvy place of rainfall, blue skies, everyday poetry, sinking despair, and limitless possibility."--Julija Sukys, author of Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter's Reckoning "Wendell Mayo's heart-wrenching new collection about contemporary Lithuania proves yet again that he is one of the living masters of the short story form. Mayo employs a dazzling array of voices, creates a host of unforgettable characters, both Lithuanian and American, and keeps at his ready a sympathetic and encyclopedic knowledge of Lithuanian history; in the process, he weaves tenacious tales about men and women snared by political circumstances, but even more so by the unruly instincts of their own hearts. Yet finally, miraculously, in the end, every story in the book manages to be about the act of storytelling itself: its magic, its elusiveness, and its biological power. Mayo has never written so convincingly and so well."--John Vanderslice, author of Island Fog Fiction.
Download or read book The Cucumber King of K dainiai written by Wendell Mayo and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Characters in Wendell Mayo's collection, THE CUCUMBER KING OF KEDAINIAI, are one of a kind. A Lithuanian mafia boss strives to achieve world domination with black market cucumbers. A starving Russian artist discovers he can profit by selling paint-by-numbers portraits of former General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Two spiders re-enact the Cold War years in the bathtub of an abandoned Soviet sanatorium. A woman is interrogated by former-KGB police about the whereabouts of an American she's never met. A man trades a bag of cold fried pike for clues about his Lithuanian ancestors. The concluding narrative, "The Universal Store," assembles all in a kind of marketplace of the heart, where the new realities of an Eastern Europe adapting to change since the fall of the Berlin Wall emerge. These stories by turn are not only dark, comical, surreal but feel terribly true."
Download or read book We Are Here written by Ellen Cassedy and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book White Field Black Sheep written by Daiva Markelis and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Her parents never really explained what a D.P. was. Years later Daiva Markelis learned that “displaced person” was the designation bestowed upon European refugees like her mom and dad who fled communist Lithuania after the war. Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, though, Markelis had only heard the name T.P., since her folks pronounced the D as a T: “In first grade we had learned about the Plains Indians, who had lived in tent-like dwellings made of wood and buffalo skin called teepees. In my childish confusion, I thought that perhaps my parents weren’t Lithuanian at all, but Cherokee. I went around telling people that I was the child of teepees.” So begins this touching and affectionate memoir about growing up as a daughter of Lithuanian immigrants. Markelis was raised during the 1960s and 1970s in a household where Lithuanian was the first language. White Field, Black Sheep derives much of its charm from this collision of old world and new: a tough but cultured generation that can’t quite understand the ways of America and a younger one weaned on Barbie dolls and The Brady Bunch, Hostess cupcakes and comic books, The Monkees and Captain Kangaroo. Throughout, Markelis recalls the amusing contortions of language and identity that animated her childhood. She also humorously recollects the touchstones of her youth, from her First Communion to her first game of Twister. Ultimately, she revisits the troubles that surfaced in the wake of her assimilation into American culture: the constricting expectations of her family and community, her problems with alcoholism and depression, and her sometimes contentious but always loving relationship with her mother. Deftly recreating the emotional world of adolescence, but overlaying it with the hard-won understanding of adulthood, White Field, Black Sheep is a poignant and moving memoir—a lively tale of this Lithuanian-American life.
Download or read book The Last Book Smuggler written by Birute Putrius and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Part folktale, part thriller, THE LAST BOOK SMUGGLER tells the story of Ada and her grandfather Viktoras, an old book smuggler tired of his forty-year battle to keep his language alive despite the attempts of the Russian Empire to destroy it. Into their world steps Jonas, a young man in love with Ada and ready to join the underground book smugglers. But there is a traitor in their midst who must stop them or lose everything. Based on the author's grandfather, who was a book smuggler, the novel deftly captures the politics and dangers of the times while bringing to life an engaging and quirky family, with an element of the supernatural."--Amazon.com.
Download or read book Our People written by Ruta Vanagaite and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-03-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A famous Nazi hunter and a descendent of Nazi collaborators team up on a journey to uncover Lithuania’s Holocaust secrets. This remarkable book traces the quest for the truth about the Holocaust in Lithuania by two ostensible enemies: Rūta a descendant of the perpetrators, Efraim a descendant of the victims. Rūta Vanagaitė, a successful Lithuanian writer, was motivated by her recent discoveries that some of her relatives had played a role in the mass murder of Jews and that Lithuanian officials had tried to hide the complicity of local collaborators. Efraim Zuroff, a noted Israeli Nazi hunter, had both professional and personal motivations. He had worked for years to bring Lithuanian war criminals to justice and to compel local authorities to tell the truth about the Holocaust in their country. The facts that his maternal grandparents were born in Lithuania and that he was named for a great-uncle who was murdered with his family in Vilnius with the active help of Lithuanians made his search personal as well. Our People exposes the significant role in implementing the Final Solution played by local political leaders and the prewar Lithuanian administration that remained in place during the Nazi occupation. It also tackles the sensitive issue of the motivation of thousands of ordinary Lithuanians who were complicit in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. At the heart of the book, these are the issues that Rūta and Efraim discuss, debate, and analyze as they crisscross the country to visit dozens of Holocaust mass murder sites in Lithuania and neighboring Belarus. This book follows them on their remarkable journey as they search for neglected graves, interview eyewitnesses, and uncover hints of the rich life that had existed in hundreds of Jewish communities throughout Lithuania.
Download or read book The Twice born written by Twice-Born and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Two Worlds written by David Daiches and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreword by David Daiches with an additional essay, ‘Promised Lands’. In this captivating autobiography of his childhood and student years David Daiches recalls a unique period between the two world wars. There was something very special about the Scottish-Jewish interchange in those years. It has had its counterparts in other cultures yet few have been captured so vividly or with such insight peculiar to the very young. Daiches was one of the sons of Edinburgh’s chief Rabbi. In their home, a quiet dark hub of foreign faith, memories of light and festivity predominated. Illustrious visitors from every corner of the globe would call on the distinguished Rabbi and the sons of the house would argue cheerfully with these itinerant scholars and diplomats. School was Scottish, Presbyterian, with its characteristics smell of wood, chalk, ink and schoolbag leather. Daiches did not play games, sing hymns, wear the ubiquitous school shorts or socialise after school yet not only did he survive these tribulations, he excelled. ‘The two cultures of my childhood . . . I was equally at home in both. That was my good fortune and I have never ceased to be grateful for it.’ ‘Promised Lands’ is a moving memoir of the author’s father and a timely meditation on exile, pluralism and synthesis, and on the need to welcome and also to balance the vital cultural differences which show us what we are and how we all belong to the imagined community of Scotland.
Download or read book Pan Tadeusz Or the Last Foray in Lithuania A Story of Life Among Polish Gentlefolk in the Years 1811 and 1812 written by Adam Mickiewicz and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chariton Review 41 1 written by Truman State University Press and published by Truman State University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-30 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chariton Review Spring/Summer 2018
Download or read book Soviet and Post Soviet Lithuania Generational Experiences written by Laima Zilinskiene and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the impact on different generations of Lithuanians of the fifty-year Soviet modernisation project which was implemented in Lithuania from 1940 to 1991. It reveals the specific characteristics of ‘the last Soviet generation’, born in the 1970s, and sets this generation apart from those who were born earlier and later. It analyses changes in attitudes, choices and relationships in a variety of social spheres and contexts and the adaptation skills which were required during the late Soviet and post-Soviet transformation processes. Overall, it presents a great deal of detail on the social experiences of different generations in late Soviet and post-Soviet society.
Download or read book Twice Alive written by Forrest Gander and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exciting new book about renewal by the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry In the searing poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, the Pulitzer Prize–winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations. While conducting fieldwork with a celebrated mycologist, Gander links human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens. Throughout Twice Alive, Gander addresses personal and ecological trauma—several poems focus on the devastation wrought by wildfires in California where he lives—but his tone is overwhelmingly celebratory. Twice Alive is a book charged with exultation and tenderness.
Download or read book 1939 written by Šarūnas Liekis and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2010 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This gripping and well-documented account of the history of the town of Vilnius and its surrounding region from the Polish ultimatum of March 1938, which forced Lithuania to open diplomatic relations with Poland, to the incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union in June 1940 is set against the evolution of Lithuania's relations with her neighbours during this crucial period. It is a major contribution to the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the subsequent evolution of Nazi Soviet relations. Prof. Liekis presents a remarkable history based on archival sources never before utilized in any English-language study. In revealing the geopolitical, ideological, economic, social and ethnic dimensions of an immense tragedy in the heart of Europe, the author provides a new perspective on the unraveling of a society and nation during the initial days of World War II as prelude to the most violent period in European history."--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Lithuanian Chicago written by Justin G. Riskus and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2013 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, there are more than 100,000 Lithuanians in Chicago, making the city home to the greatest concentration of Lithuanians outside of the country itself. Their presence in Chicago began in 1834 and drastically increased during the 20th century as immigrants and their descendants sought work in the stockyards and other industries. Lithuanians in Chicago were dedicated to celebrating and preserving their unique culture, evident in its churches, schools, museums, and community centers in neighborhoods such as Bridgeport and Marquette Park. They also maintained ties to the homeland and played an important role in Lithuania's struggles for independence throughout the 20th century. Many prominent Lithuanian Americans are from the "City of the Big Shoulders," including football great Dick Butkus, actor John C. Reilly, and director Robert Zemeckis. The former president of Lithuania, Valdas Adamkus, was a resident of Chicagoland for nearly 50 years.
Download or read book Twice Born written by Elizabeth Oakes and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Twice born an autobiography written by Alfred Ernest Knight and published by . This book was released on 1890 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Lithuanians in Michigan written by Marius K. Grazulis and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2009-03-11 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lithuanians in Michigan Marius Grazulis recounts the history of an immigrant group that has struggled to maintain its identity. Grazulis estimates that about 20 percent of the 1.6 million Lithuanians who immigrated to the United States arrived on American shores between 1860 and 1918. While first-wave immigrants stayed mostly on the east coast, by 1920 about one-third of newly immigrated Lithuanians lived in Michigan, working in heavy industry and mining. With remarkable detail, Grazulis traces the ways these groups have maintained their ethnic identity in Michigan in the face of changing demographics in their neighborhoods and changing interests among their children, along with the challenges posed by newly arriving "modern" Lithuanian immigrants, who did not read the same books, sing the same songs, celebrate the same holidays, or even speak the same language that previous waves of Lithuanian immigrants had preserved in America. Anyone interested in immigrant history will find Lithuanians in Michigan simultaneously familiar, fascinating, and moving.
