by David Smiedt
The men had far fewer accoutrement options. White or checked pants for summer, grey for winter. Drawstring mandatory. Up top it was a choice of long-sleeved linen shirts with grandpa collars or long-sleeved linen shirts with grandpa collars. According to one photograph at the restaurant, however, there also seemed to be a penchant for patent-leather knee-high boots as worn by the swishy chorus boys in amateur musical productions of The Sound of Music.
Glancing at the menu, the time-space continuum folded in on itself and I found myself in the kitchen of my childhood face to face with a nemesis. Beef tongue. For reasons I am yet to fully comprehend, this dish was a favourite component of cold cut platters. After stripping off the skin, this muscle was then boiled until it became a glutinous remembrance of tenderness, at which point it was sliced into rounds. An uncooked beef tongue is an experience I wouldn’t wish on an Australian Idol judge. This is because it looks precisely like what it is: a baby pink expanse of flesh that runs to a foot long and bears pockmarks that would make John Laws’ complexion resemble Scarlett Johansson’s. Yet there it remained, a Sunday afternoon staple along with the pickled herring, chopped liver and borscht which bridged continents and generations. In fact, aside from the general preface to our lives being set in Lithuania, our only specific connection to our heritage came in the form of food. Here, however, the tongue was served hot after being marinated in milk. Perhaps not. Ditto the local take on haggis, which included a pig’s bladder stuffed with minced meat.
Because of an undoubtedly privileged upbringing in which meat was steak and chops were tops, the more budget-friendly animal bits rarely made it to our table. Tongue excepted as it was apparently a treat. I, therefore, came to share a philosophy once espoused by the comedian Bill Cosby, who declared: ‘I won’t eat any part of an animal where their food isn’t finished and I won’t eat any part of an animal where their food is finished.’
Scanning the menu for a more conservative option, I noticed the restaurant had filled rapidly due to a passing storm. Since I was seated alone at a table for four, I asked a middle-aged couple and their truculent teenage son if they would like to share. After all, I could have done with the company and they would no longer have had to stand around waiting. They responded with the horrified shock usually reserved for statements like, ‘I saw a video of your mom on the internet.’ Fortunately, the perpetual Lionel Richie and Phil Collins soundtrack drowned out the subsequent awkwardness. God help the Lithuanian dining public when restaurateurs discover Nora bloody Jones. I settled on the vodka-marinated pork neck which arrived aflame a few minutes later. Accompanied by what was an apparently traditional salad featuring preservative-coated rings of canned pineapple squatting over a melange of green sliminess which seemed to have been the by-product of a bulimic hippo.
Filled with heartburn and regret at having been suckered by a ‘if they don’t know what good Lithuanian food is, they won’t be able to tell ours is crap’ tourist trap, I made my way back to the hotel determined to try my luck en route with the quintessential experience of modern Lithuania: the mall. Many travel writers eschew these retail cavalcades. They write them off as generic, hermetically sealed blights bereft of local character. Certainly, they have a point in that wandering through the 4.5-hectare Akropolis centre in Kaunas, I could have been in Toronto or Taipei. Still, to dismiss such a location altogether is to miss an opportunity to see what is grabbing this nation of second-generation free-market shoppers by the wallet.
In the middle of the glass and concrete altar to consumerism stands a three-storey replica of a traditional Lithuanian farmhouse. Complete with a pitched red tile roof, walls the colour of churned butter and white wooden window frames. Inside is a coffee shop. On the second floor, however, is a popular fine dining establishment – naturally decorated in a style I like to call twee-folk. Here you can gaze beyond the rustic prints on the walls and out into budget chain stores like Imitz and Prozad, where Chloé via China knockoffs vie for the attention of impossibly thin young women in Rock & Republic denim who nonchalantly rifle through the racks while chatting on their mobile phones.
The cotton which had so enthralled these shoppers’ parents after years of itchy communist polyester that breathed like a one-lunged asthmatic is now the ‘if I must’ choice. They want cashmere, they want organza, they want fur. But most of all, they want what Absolutely Fabulous’ Edina Monsoon might describe as ‘Gaultier, Gucci, Givenchy – names, sweetie, names’. Conspicuous affluence is the must-have accessory and its attendant symbols hang like high-end charms on a gaudy bracelet. The distinctive Fendi logo designed by Karl Lagerfeld peppers handbags while the famous Burberry check finds its way onto everything from caps to sneakers. Louis Vuitton’s signature ‘L’ and ‘V’ motif is sprayed over both the real deal and obvious fakes. Those without the litas do the next best thing and head to the nail salon where one’s talons can be emblazoned with Chanel’s intertwined Cs or a spangly D&G.
At the same time, this game of commercial global catchup was clearly still being run as the Akropolis had its fair share of stores the likes of which I had not seen in years. Case in point a ‘jeanery’ which, in addition to the obvious denim, also sold t-shirts screaming ‘Bring Back The ’80s’ and ‘Led Zeppelin’ to customers who hadn’t been around for either.
There was also a betting shop where the odds of dozens of sporting events around Europe and beyond were written up across a series of eight whiteboards. Those charged with this responsibility were harried young men with small hands and cramped wrists who scuttled continuously to a back office for numerical updates. At one point the thrum was frozen as a news item broke on a wall-mounted television set. Apparently, one of the country’s star basketballers had injured an ankle during the warm-up and would not be able to take part in that day’s game. Cue a flurry of recalculation in which it seemed at least a dozen ratios – who the first scorer would be; how much the team would win by; would the fallen point guard do his standard Lithuanian greeting to camera from the bench? – were amended. Did I mention this game was to be played in California?
My favourite store was another technological throwback. Once upon a time before desktop computers – or at least those with more memory than a calculator – business types who sought diversion from their daily chores festooned their desks with what became known as executive toys. In the Akropolis centre was their swansong. Here you could buy replica muskets, pistols and daggers for that business renegade who liked to send a clear message of muted violence to his underlings. There were also digital clocks encased in perspex pyramids, a bulls and bears domino set for the stockbrokers and faux antique telephones. If these options were too tame, there were always replica helmets of the Vikings and Teutonic knights. Both of whom had had a red-hot go at Lithuania over the years. Intoxicated by this cocktail of kitsch, I sat down on a nearby bench to jot down some facts. Up until the mid-nineties, a lone chap scribbling into a notebook might have garnered suspicion in Lithuania. Now, however, I merely had people sneering in my direction as if I was the world’s worst secret policeman.
The food court, however, made the executive toy store look like Tiffany & Co. Designed to resemble a cross between Moorish battlements and a medieval village, this vision in papier-mâché and plasterboard featured banquettes separated by tanks filled with African cichlids. Between the KFC and the Pizza Hut were two solariums and a bowling alley decorated in the zany fluoro paint and ultraviolet light that renders everyone’s teeth the colour of peanut butter. Amid the shrunken turrets and turning windmills of the beer hall concession, clay figurines perpetuated acts of extreme violence upon one another while clearly mortified waitresses had to feign cheeriness and cleavage in their roles as ale wenches. Imagine walking through a modest casino whose owners ran out of money three months before opening but decided to make a go of it anyway and you’ll get a sense of the décor. Apparently, however, management had secured one hell of a deal on plastic ivy, which ran from crenellated crannies like the pubic ha
ir of 1970s centrefolds.
And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, an icy blast of air alerted me to the piéce de résistance: a disco ice rink rimmed by a self-serve buffet that had aspirations to roadside diner grandeur. Here, by candlelight and a Donna Summer soundtrack, couples could (and did) enjoy an intimate dinner for two while taking in the contused spectacle that is the inevitable result of steel blades, uncontrollable momentum and a surface that generates its own speed. For all its lameness, I liked the escapist innocence of the place. I liked that it was where awkward teens held hands during the ‘couples only’ numbers. I liked that older siblings coached younger ones in the art of maintaining speed or travelling backwards.
I liked it even more considering that my next destination echoed with pain too immense to articulate and the ghosts of such milestones that would never be reached.
7
Smiedt nothings
After many years of being stranded on a desert island, a man is finally rescued. Before being taken home, he decides to give his saviours a tour of the island. They are duly impressed when the castaway shows them an ornate and imposing synagogue constructed entirely of palms and coconut husks. Asked why he had crafted such an elaborate structure, he explained that he was a religious man and that nothing mattered more to him than the practice of Judaism. A few minutes later, the rescuers were astounded to discover another impressive synagogue which the man had obviously built over many years. ‘What’s this building?’ they asked the castaway. ‘That,’ he replied with the barest trace of malice, ‘is the synagogue I don’t go to.’
My visit to the Akropolis in Kaunas was not strictly necessary. It was a tarry. A stall. I had delayed leaving because of where I knew I was going next. Two hours from the city lies the hamlet of Naumestis or Naishtot. Small enough to war-rent neither bold nor capitalised typography on a map, it was from this market town that my great-grandfather, Solomon Hershl Smiedt, set out for South Africa around 1892. Within two years, he had sent for his wife Sheina Reich. They had six children, one of whom was my grandfather Louis. Louis’ second son, Sydney Ronald, was my dad.
I’ve never been one for genealogy. Fortunately, a cousin of mine in Melbourne is and a few months before travelling to Lithuania, Paul Epstein presented me with a dossier decades in the making. Thanks to the dedication of Paul and his brother Herbert, I now had a series of sullen photographs of my grandfather and grandmother which led me to believe I came from a long line of the chronically constipated. More importantly, I could pinpoint the spot where the roots of my family tree penetrated Lithuanian soil.
As I mentioned earlier, my maternal grandfather was loath to talk about his life before South Africa. Similarly, I can’t recall my father ever going into specifics about his lineage. It seemed enough that we came from Lithuania, which for almost the entirety of his life was part of the Soviet Union. While Australian children were told not to waste food because there were children starving in Africa, we were already in Africa. Therefore, one of the few meagre concessions to our collective past was that these children were ‘starving in Russia’.
As far as my dad was concerned, we came from the small town of Kroonstad in the Orange Free State province of South Africa. This is most probably because my grandfather had died when my dad was sixteen and consequently had fewer years in which to relate his own father’s tales of a Lithuanian childhood. Unsubstantiated hypotheses aside, I know two things are certain. The first is that the word ‘Naishtot’ was never spoken around our table. The second is that my entire visual notion of life in Lithuania came courtesy of Robert F Boyle, production designer for the 1971 hit musical Fiddler On The Roof. Now, I had a name on a map, a hired car and the niggling fear that I wouldn’t feel what I was supposed to once I got there. For in going to where my forebears lived, I would also encounter where they died.
In a nadir example of irony, Jewish children like myself, who were living a life of ludicrous privilege under the apartheid regime, were rigorously schooled in the hatefulness of the Holocaust in which innocent people were brutally discriminated against because of their race. While it would be glib and untrue to suggest one might ever become inured to the oesophagus-constricting photographs of stripped and skeletal Semites put to death for their blood, repeated exposure to these images plateaus out to a muted solemnity. We learned that no words had yet been formulated to adequately convey the consequences and degradation of this extermination. Every byword for horror and synonym for pain was a trite impostor. We ingested this just as we were schooled not to notice when camp survivors who addressed us over lunch pocketed the bread rolls.
I find myself hamstrung at the notion of writing about the Holocaust. The fear, of course, is that even sixty years on, the event still turns dark superlatives into facile platitudes. Shortly before leaving for Lithuania, I caught a production of Alan Bennett’s marvellous play The History Boys, in which a group of students grapple with this very dilemma. One quotes Wittgenstein, saying, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ Another says, ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’
Jews had been a part of Lithuanian life since 1323 when Gediminas invited them to live in his new capital Vilnius, where he employed these literate migrants as tax collectors and financial advisers. In 1388, the Grand Duke Vytautas granted Jews religious freedom, clarified their legal rights and exempted synagogues and cemeteries from taxation. By 1445, they were enjoying free trade and government positions as customs inspectors. Despite the odd expulsion and monotheistic brouhaha, Jews prospered in Lithuania until the end of the eighteenth century when the Russians arrived.
Aside from restricting Jewish settlement to a million-square-kilometre swathe of land known as the Pale of Settlement, Tzar Nicholas I decided Jews should no longer be exempt from military service. And just to show ’em who was boss, Semitic conscripts were harvested at a younger age than those of differing ethnicity and could be indentured for up to thirty years. When it became apparent that this tactic was not winning over more converts to the Russian Orthodox faith, conscription periods for Jews were reduced to the standard six years. Lucky us. In addition to the raids of rape, plunder and murder known as pogroms – which were particularly numerous between 1881 and 1884 – a quota system was introduced for Jews in schools and Tzar Alexander III confined Jews to small towns and villages, many of which became battlegrounds in World War I. Again, lucky us.
Once the mustard gas had cleared, ethnic tensions within Lithuania were put on hold in the name of autonomy. Citizens from a host of backgrounds banded together to form a militia which did much to safeguard the establishment of the independent state which was declared on 16 February 1918. Despite Poland swiping territory in the west while Germany did likewise in the east, the newly sovereign nation temporarily found its feet.
The period of stability proved to be a Petri dish in which ancient suspicions and prejudices festered. Although the Versailles Treaty had explicitly specified the right of Lithuanian Jews to national autonomy, the Jewish National Council – which was empowered to regulate religious and social issues plus impose taxes – didn’t last long enough to fulfil such any such roles.
Amid a burgeoning miasma of anti-Semitism, the Jewish Kehilla (council) was rescinded while nationalist president Antanas Smetona, who was in power from 1926 to 1940, derided Jews as ‘active communists’ and ‘dishonest traders’. Despite having to roll with the punches, metaphorical and otherwise, Jews became a presence of undeniable significance in Lithuania – not least because of the fact that we went forth and multiplied. Before World War II, there were Jewish populations of over 1000 in more than 300 rural outposts. A dozen regional centres had communities in excess of 20,000. And then there was Vilnius. By some estimates, almost half of the city’s population of 450,000 didn’t mix meat and milk. Centuries before Israel’s founding father David Ben Gurion ob
served that for every two Jews there are three opinions, this fractious dynamic was being played out in Vilnius. Nowhere was it more apparent than among the pious, who schismed along monotheistic fault lines and viciously condemned all but their own doctrines.
Known as the ‘Jerusalem of the North’, Vilnius attracted some of the most eminent Jewish scholars of the day to its many yeshivas (biblical colleges). Probably the most famous is Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, who went by the stage name of the Vilna Gaon.
Born in Vilnius in 1720, he was a freakish child who had memorised the bible by the age of three. Within eight more years he had committed the entire Talmud – an extensive record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, customs and history – to memory. As a twenty-year-old, he sat in judgment over complex ethical and interpretive dilemmas that had rabbis thrice his age at bearded loggerheads.
The Gaon’s spiritual hunger ran parallel to a secular thirst and his writings on trigonometry, geometry, algebra, astronomy, geography and medicine were consulted by scholars throughout Europe. His critical examination of texts, religious and otherwise, fitted neatly into a perception of Lithuanian Jewry (known as Litvaks) as being both learned and cynical in equal measure. In the eyes of other Semitic communities, Litvak piety was often viewed as being somewhat questionable. Much like the man on the island with his two synagogues, the Gaon had no hesitation in taking sides when it came to Lithuania’s myriad kabba-listic cabals.