Once Upon a Time in Lithuania     by Naomi Alexander Original language: English Country: Lithuania   Published by David Paul Books Pub. Date: May 2006 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 160 pages Dimensions: 300 x 240mm ISBN: 0954848217 List Price: £19.99 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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A lot of illustrated books are just a pastiche of recycled stock images with some quickly-jotted truisms and factoids mashed up to make the ‘accompanying copy’. Usually they quickly and deservedly reach their natural home on the tables of the remaindered book shop. This though is something very different and very different from most other works on the topic of Jewish Lithuania which are academic and hence emotionless. Although Once upon a time in Lithuania contains essays and maps and even an historical ‘timeline’, it’s essentially the visual and textual record of a single artist’s exploration of the Jewish past in Lithuania. Using her eyes and her excellent draughtmanship Alexander explores both the ruins of the past and its echoes in the present, like the former Jewish houses (including her grandparents’ one-time home) now inhabited by old people who happen not, through the historical circumstances, to be Jewish. Or the wooden synagogue, an abandoned space rocket where Jewish travellers strove in hectic prayer to reach other dimensions where G-d dwelt and the Tsar didn’t, one of the very few remaining and slowly rotting away in a field. Such images are almost unbearably poignant for Ashkenazi Jews because of our life-links to these places. Indeed there is a gazetteer of towns the artist visited and I found my grandmother’s hometown -- Luknik -- and discovered that is was half-Jewish in population at the time the bube grew up there and even that the place where she eventually lived most of her life as a ‘Registered Alien’, duly recording her visits out of the city to the police, was, apart from the obligatory stay in ‘der geto fun Vaytshapel’, was Chapeltown in Leeds itself a little ghetto dominated by Lithuanian Jews from nearby Loykuva… Of course anyone who is Lithuanian-descended and knows anything at all about this ‘alte haym’ (‘Old Country’) of North-Eastern Ashkenaz walks a harsh and stony path of memory in face of the stark fact; some 94% of Lithanian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Our very own world record, the ‘most-holocausted’ Jewish nation… I find one bare leaf for a book of celebration to put alongside the heavy sforim yizkor or ‘tomes of remembering’, that is that between the wars, from 1919-1939, Lithuania, as an independent nation, had borders that were open and, even as late as 1941, Jews were emigrating and thereby escaping that implacable percentage. In this way, alongside the previous Tsarist-era emigration, some, spores, seeds, fragments of the genius of the destroyed nation of Jewish Lithuania live on on other shores, and near other forests… One of those clever mushrooms, the artist Naomi Alexander, a careful and sensitive person, not one of our Saatchi-hatched Britart ego-monsters busy with empty slogans and dirty beds, has explored the territory of Jewish Lithuania, dare I say it, ‘for us’. Amongst drawings and washes are full-page colour plates of paintings. With ‘Forest near Nemencine, with lake, 2005’ for example Alexander has captured in an only semi-representational way the magical and potent colours of the Baltic woodland. However although undamaged natural landscapes are ever a trope of hope and renewal, of redemption even, in post-Romantic art here there is also the taste of ash on our lips as we gaze on the tree stacks in the land of Ponar, a place I think of as a Jewish Atlantis, a magical, ringing, clever world sunk beneath the waves in Europe’s darkest moment. Still lamenting aside (to paraphrase the psalmist ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem of the North [as Vilna, capital of Jewish Lithuania was called], let my right hand forget her cunning’,) what riches you have brought back for us Naomi, from the Old Country, even a simple image, in pen-and-wash, of the corner shop in the bube-shtetl (‘Grandma-town’) Luknik makes me think - did she go into that shop and looking just like the picture I have of her as a teenager?. 'Jews and non-Jews lived side by side in the shtetls of Lithuania. Jews roamed the farms and villages selling their wares. Even today one can see how people lived: the harsh, grinding poverty in the villages, the scattered homesteads and array of farms and the fine houses - and all around are forests, lakes and vast open spaces. p48