Donatas Januta: Reply to Olga Zabludoff re Holocaust in Lithuania

History 101: Double standards, red herrings, and one-way streets will not lead to understanding or reconciliation

Donatas Januta

My dear Olga, in the past you were so generous in trying to give me lessons in what you called Logic 101, but it turns out that when History 101 was being taught you must have skipped class.  In discussing the Jewish monopoly in commerce and the trades and crafts in Lithuania, you say that it was the Lithuanians’ own choice not to go into those occupations, that they were free to select those occupations if they had so wanted.  I am surprised how you disregard basic historical facts – even after Tautietis pointed you in the right direction in his comment to your Nov. 18th posting.

While serfdom began to disappear in much of Western Europe during the Rennaisance, in Lithuania serfs were freed only in 1861. My great-grandparents were born serfs. Serfdom under the Russian empire was no different than slavery in the US South before the Civil War. A serf was tied to the landowner’s estate where he was forced to live and work. Serfs were bought and sold like cattle. If a serf escaped from the estate, the landowner got the government’s help to catch him and bring him back. The stories in Russian literature of landowners winning or losing their serfs over a game of cards are based on real life of that time.

The majority of Lithuanians, well over 90%, were peasant serfs. The landowners in Lithuania at that time were often foreigners – Polish, German, Russian, and some Polonized or Russianized Lithuanians. The urban dwellers, the “freemen”, who were the ones free to choose their occupations, consisted mostly of Jews, with Poles, Russians and some Germans, depending on which part of Lithuania you were in.

The emancipation of serfs in 1861 did not free them. The large landowner estates were left intact, and the former serfs still remained impoverished and tied to the land because other opportunities remained closed to them. Landowners were and spoke mostly Polish or Russian, government officials spoke only Russian. After unsuccessful Lithuanian uprisings against the Russians in 1830 and 1831, whose activists were executed or exiled to Siberia: “The rebels’ landholdings were parceled out to court favorites and other Russians in a far-reaching colonization process that led to a large Russian influx. .” (The Jews of Lithuania, Masha Greenbaum, p. 176).  Russian was declared the official language of the country. 

Available education to Lithuanians was limited – books and newspapers in the Lithuanian language were prohibited until 1904. Of the few Lithuanians who were fortunate enough to get an education – in Kiev, St. Petersburg, or Moscow – they could not get a position in Lithuania. Tautietis gave you the example of Dr. Basanavičius (1851-1927), known as Lithuania’s patriarch, who after obtaining his medical degree had to spend his most productive years in Bulgaria. One of my great-uncles ended up being a judge - in Odessa, where he had gone to be allowed to practice law.

My parents were the first generation of Lithuanians in several hundred years who had opportunities to leave the land, to obtain an education, to freely choose a profession, a craft, or a career in commerce. My grandparents – who worked the land their entire lives - encouraged and urged their sons and daughters to pursue education, so that they could leave the hard life of being a subsistence farmer, an opportunity that they themselves had been denied. So, Olga, do explain to me how the Lithuanians themselves “chose” not to go into the fields where Jews ended up having monopolies in Lithuania.

But let's continue with History 101.  You quote from your uncle’s letters about the economic hardship his family was experiencing in Lithuania during the world-wide great depression. You also quote some selected parts from Schoenburg & Schoenburg’s Lithuanian Jewish Communities. Let me quote some other parts from Schoenburg & Schoenburg which relate to the Jewish economic condition in Lithuania in the latter part of the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries.  

 “One important manifestation was the phenomenal Jewish birth rate coupled with a relatively low infant mortality rate, which resulted in a large natural increase in the Jewish population.” (p. 29) “Within the Pale, the population [of Jews] was increasing so fast that Jewish competition among themselves was intense, resulting in less compensation and shoddier goods. * * * Job creation by new enterprises was insufficient to keep up with the rapidly increasing Jewish population. * * * The poorest portion of the Pale of Settlement was Lithuania.” (p. 31).

As a result of such economic pressures, many Jews emigrated, but so did many Lithuanians – including four of my great-uncles – because Lithuanian peasant farmers, the former serfs, were even poorer than the Jews. Nonetheless, in 1918, after much struggle, Lithuania gained its independence, and, as I noted above, that was the first time in several hundred years that Lithuanians had a free choice of occupations and began entering trades, professions and commerce. But, at that time, when Jews constituted about 7% of Lithuania’s population, “almost 90 percent of all Lithuanian trade was in Jewish hands.” (The Jews of Lithuania, Masha Greenbaum, p. 271).

So what do you think happened then?  Economic competition is what happened. As Schoenburg and Schoenburg state above, the economic competition within the Jewish community itself was already intense, and as Lithuanians, who had previously been denied the opportunity, began entering occupations previously occupied exclusively by Jews, the economic condition of the Jews did not improve.   And, to make things harder for everyone, it was happening in the middle of a world-wide depression. Yes, the government assisted in the establishment of farm cooperatives and related enterprises, just as the US government also has a department of agriculture with farm subsidies and the like.

I hope that the above History 101 lesson answers your question  “when were the Lithuanian people not allowed to have a hand in their country’s economy or barred from any particular occupations.”

I do not understand at all why you feel that my statement that I am disappointed in Lithuania’s vote against Palestinian membership in UNESCO is “ultra-nationalist”.  In essence, my comment was that I was disappointed that Lithuania in voting against the Palestinians chose political expediency over their previously stated consistent policy of support for self-determination for all peoples. And you say this also displays my “negative attitude toward Israel.” Not true. It only displays my difference of opinion from yours regarding one particular policy of Israel.  Are we required to agree with all of Israel’s policies to avoid being considered anti-semitic? When even Jews themselves don’t agree with all of Israel’s policies, are you saying that I need to be more Jewish than Jews themselves?

I did not speculate that Dovid Katz was removed from his position because he doesn’t speak Lithuanian. Quite the contrary. I expressly stated that we did not know why his contract was not renewed, and in reply to Bertin’s assertion, I merely mentioned several other possibilities.  Professor Šarunas Liekis, former director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute where Katz was employed, however, has stated: “When his contract ended it was not renewed for professional reasons, the same reasons it was not renewed at Oxford.” (Jerusalem Post, Nov. 27, 2011).

As for Katz not knowing the Lithuanian language, Katz himself made that issue fair game by posturing himself as a self-appointed expert on present day Lithuania and present day Lithuanians, when he has no credentials, neither academic nor real world experience, on which to claim that.

Olga, your explanations to my two comments under your December 16th posting are just plain silly.

So what if, as you say, “Lithuanian Jews had been living and dancing in Lithuania for 700 years”?   That just shows how distinct and separate Jews kept themselves from the Lithuanians among whom they lived, since during all those 700 years of dancing in Lithuania, Jews did not invite Lithuanian goyim to dance with them. And we can find a clue to that in your Schoenburg and Schoenburg, where the authors write:  “The Jews felt superior to the ethnic peasant population . . .” (p. 41).

Writing about post World War I Lithuania, Masha Greenbaum writes: “Lithuanian Jewry was one of the least assimilated Jewish collectives in Europe. Jews in Lithuania displayed an unflinching will for autonomy and a united front in the struggle for [their own] cultural identity.” (p. 232)   Jews and Lithuanians communicated in separate languages, worshipped separate religions, had separate schools, differed radically in dress and appearance, they did not share any customs or traditions, did not share social activities, did not share a culture and definitely did not dance together.   Jews did not intermix with Lithuanians other than in the marketplace, and Litvak culture is a totally separate and distinct culture from ethnic Lithuanian culture.  

A few years ago, a self-promoting publicist in Los Angeles suggested that some unnamed, and as far as one can tell non-existent, Yiddish dancers be invited to a Lithuanian folk dance festival. He was told that the purpose of that dance festival was to promote Lithuanian ethnic culture, not other cultures. Immediately followed a damning story in The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, complete with quotes and a large photo of that publicist, and quoting Efraim Zuroff who referred to the Lithuanian diaspora of my generation as being descendants of war criminals.

But that whole story, as I said before, is a total “red herring”, because no Yiddish dance group had asked to participate in the Lithuanian folk dance festival, just as no Yiddish group had ever invited any Lithuanian folk dancers to any Yiddish celebrations.  Lithuanians understand and respect Litvaks’ desire to retain their Yiddish culture as a separate and distinct culture in its own right, and we, the inferior “ethnic peasant population”,  would like the same consideration in return.   But you and Zuroff & Co. think that we are asking too much, even calling our request an anti-semitic act.   There's that double standard again. 

Your and Zuroff & Co.’s repeated argument that there can be no Soviet genocide in Lithuania, i.e., no genocide other than the genocide of the Jews, because that would be equating the two – that argument is even sillier and is simply intellectual dishonesty. It’s like telling a person who was raped that you can’t put rapists in prison because we are putting murderers in prison, and if you put rapists there as well it will diminish the crime of the murderers. Yet the rapist and the murderer are both criminals.  And genocide is genocide, whether it is against Jews, Armenians, Cambodians, Rwandans, Ukrainians or Lithuanians - "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group",

And as far as what you speculate that Zuroff or Bertin may or may not have meant when they spoke, their own words themselves speak very clearly.    They are both applying a double standard and for them it's strictly a one-way street:  it’s permissible to prohibit Holocaust denial, but it is not permissible to prohibit denying the tragedies of the 50 years of the Soviet occupation; it’s permissible for Israel to search the world for every last geriatric prison guard, but it is not permissible for Lithuania to question the actions of Jewish bandits who robbed, tortured and murdered innocent villagers.

As I said before, Olga, to successfully embrace Lithuanian and Jewish history and find understanding and reconciliation, you won’t find it on Zuroff’s one-way street.