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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2008.07.17 09.36 |
 Lietuviškas tautinis šokis?
The argument, seen as a compromise to Darius Udrys’s suggestion of having a Litvak (or other Ashkenazi) dance group perform a dance at Šokių šventė, is that if said dance group were to download “our” music and learn “our” dances, they would be more than welcome to dance at “our” šventė.
Making this claim ignores the fact that Litvak dances are already “our” dances, if we imagine ourselves as Lithuanians. In fact, I hold it out as a source of shame that—inviting a Litvak group notwithstanding—the organizers of Šokių šventė have never seen it fit to include dances emerging from the immense (and culturally fecund) Jewish community of Lithuania.
And if the response then turns to a lack of cultural specificity in the other dances, I present the following two pieces of evidence:
1. Even if we assume that Litvak dances—regardless of who is dancing them—have “no place” in a Lithuanian Folk Dance Festival (an offensive assumption, but whatever), what on earth place does the “Virginia Reel” have at such a Festival?
At the 1976 Šokių šventė, as I have pointed out before, the dancers danced the “Virginia Reel.” This is a simple historical fact. Trying to make a claim for it as a “Lithuanian folk dance,” seems a bit far fetched, even as Lithuanian boosters are wont to make claims for the presence of Lithuanians in John Smith’s Jamestown colony.
Of course, the dancers danced the “Virginia Reel” to celebrate the bicentennial of the US. I was a babe then, so I have no idea how the dance went down or if there were even sarcastic, farcical attempts to fold the dance into any kind of Lithuanian tradition. But it stands there, as a big, stinking, sweaty counterexample to the propriety of having “non-Lithuanian” dances at Šventė. When the dance comes from a group we like (atavistic Scotch-Irish), we do their dances. When it’s a group we don’t...
2. Yet even the dances that are classified as “Lithuanian folk dances” have cultural specificity to them affixed to minority groups within Lithuania already. Here I point to the always popular “Pempel, pempel.” Any glance at any version of the lyrics will confound a speaker of Lithuanian. It looks like Lithuanian, some words are intelligible, but others are not at all.
The lyrics are, of course, in Samogitian, not standard Lithuanian, and the song is a Samogitian song. And for anyone who begins to argue that “žemaičiai — lietuviai,” I encourage you to read up on Antanas Kontrimas, the figurehead of the movement to get Samogitian listed as an official minority nationality in Lithuania.
So it’s ok to dance “Pempel, pempel,” a dance of questionable and dubious “Lithuanianness,” but not ok to dance a “Litvak” dance. It is ok to dance a dance with lyrics that are in the vicinity of incomprehensible, because somehow the minority community of Samogitians has been welcomed under the Lithuanian umbrella. But because a noxious history of anti-Semitism has not granted the same to the community of Jews living within the same area, their dances do not count as “Lithuanian.”
It’s actually funny—as a child, I relished “Pempel, pempel” precisely because of its stark cultural otherness. It was the one song we sang at stovykla that I could not understand, so I got extra interested in it and fascinated by it. Ironically, I always looked at it as the “token” Samogitian song in our dainorėliai in exactly the same way that I always looked at “Shalom Chaverim” as the token Hebrew song that we would sing at our school Christmas pageants.
To repeat, then: saying that any dance group that would learn “our” dances was welcome to dance is a canard, because it never stops to consider what sort of political damage we are doing by deciding what is “ours” and what is not “ours.” It is precisely over this incuriousness that the current mess erupted. Udrys aggressively suggested we abandon that laziness and spend some time to reconsider what is “ours,” but the atavistic cultural wing of JAVLB freaked out. “Ours” is what JAVLB (and its ŠŠRK) say it is, even if that arbitrarily includes the “Virginia Reel” and “Pempel, pempel.”
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2008.07.11 12.34 |
 Well, it’s a good thing I decided to wait until after Šokių šventė to weigh in on the Seimas’s passing a nearly certainly unconstitutional dual citizenship law, since President Valdas Adamkus just vetoed it. About the veto I do not have much to say, since the article I read is only filled with Regina Narušienės over the top histrionics and descent into self-parody. Having her complain about people who are beholden to a “pasenusis mentalitetas” absolutely made my day.
But still, some value exists in looking at what the new law proposed. It basically took to heart the Constitutional Court’s rulings about the unconstitutionality of citizenship based on ethnic criteria by not granting dual citizenship to “ethnic” Lithuanians (who may still be eligible to get Lithuanian citizenship after forfeiting their other citizenship). And that was a good step. The quicker the precedent forms that divorces the ethnic nation from the republican state, the better.
But the new law had a sort of twist that has a very good justification with a nefarious politics behind it. The first time I heard about the Constitutional Court’s decision about stopping dual citizenship, someone suggested to me that it was somehow based on the fact that Lithuanians were panicked about the “lines around the block in NYC” of people petitioning for Lithuanian passports. In other words, they feared a massive return of an exiled Jewish community to the Lithuanian public (and political) sphere.
So whether or not it is true that there exists a paranoia about a Jewish population with political power, the new law limited dual citizenship only to people (and their descendants) who could prove that they fled Lithuania after the Soviets invaded in 1940, as opposed to earlier, when, of course, masses of Jews and others were fleeing Central Europe as Hitler’s influence grew larger in nations like Lithuania (for more, read Eidintas).
On the one hand, it makes sense to give dual citizenship to those who fled their nation and had their citizenship stripped by a USSR that claimed that their nation no longer existed (and, thus, that the automatic USSR citizenship all Lithuanian citizens received was invalid). I may not have existed had my grandparents not fled, but certainly my mother would have reproduced, and those children would have been Lithuanian citizens, had it not been for WWII.
On the other hand, the Soviet invasion begs to be understood in historical context, which this post-1940 distinction completely ignores. Contexts like how Lithuania colluded with the USSR to ensure its autonomy against Poland. Contexts like how Vilnius’s being the capital of Lithuania is in large part the result of the secret protocols in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Contexts like these demonstrate that WWII did not begin (in Lithuania) with the marching of the Soviets in 1940, but, rather, began far earlier, with a political climate that threatened the continued autonomy of the Lithuanian Republic as it felt pressure from two different spheres of influence (German and Soviet). Can you really blame a Jewish family in Kaunas for wanting to get the hell out of the increasingly noxious environment in 1938? Yet that family would have been ineligible for dual citizenship.
So by drawing the political line over dual citizenship, the Seimas still managed to underhandedly effect an ethnic agenda. As a result, I am glad to see that Adamkus chose to veto the law. Plus, it keeps the conflict within the realm of the legislative for a while longer. The more finesse this gets at the legislative, the better, since it will hopefully only grow in constitutionality (though I doubt it).
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2008.06.29 21.54 |
Well, who but a Nazi would deny that Karl Marx was a German because he was a Jew?—Mr. Wilson, The Stranger
.jpg "Image") I leave for Šokių šventė on Wednesday, making this post the likely last peep from me before then. I start with a quote from the interesting but not spectacular Nazi hunter movie, The Stranger, a 1946 production starring both Orson Welles and Edward G. Robinson. Robinson plays Wilson, a G-Man who is tasked with finding the whereabouts of Franz Kindler, the mastermind behind the Final Solution, who disappeared without any trace of his identity (other than knowledge of what his all-consuming hobby was and that one other Nazi knew who he was, his underling).
Welles plays Kindler, who has refashioned himself as a history teacher at a private school in Connecticut. Charles Rankin he's now called, and he marries at the start of the movie a daughter of a Supreme Court justice. Wilson gets in with the family, and then he gets invited to a dinner with them all.
Here Rankin explains that democracy is not in the German blood. Lines like “All men are created equal” and “liberté, égalité, fraternité” have no German counterpart. Rankin’s young brother in law then offers Marx as a counterexample. Rankin immediately retorts that Marx was no German; he was a Jew. This quick retort is the only thing that keeps Wilson on Rankin’s tail as a potential Kindler.
And I think the line is a good lead into this pre-Šokių šventė post. It was not even half a year ago that Darius Udrys turned JAVLB upside down by suggesting that a Litvak dance group perform a Litvak dance at šventė. Litvaks, of course, have been vital contributors to Lithuanian culture for over 500 years, yet for the organizers of šventė, including them would have threatened the “Lithuanianness” of the event.
The complainers built up shields against claims of anti-Semitism by offering the farcical argument that allowing Litvak dances would then mean that they should allow dances from remote cultures such as those on Zanzibar. In other words, the Litvak is so wholly Other to the Lithuanian, that her cultural contribution is equivalent to that of an African villager a half a world away.
The Litvak, by being a Jew, has no right to a claim on Lithuanian culture (though, of course, Catholics, Lutherans, atheists, etc., do, right?). The Litvak is not Lithuanian, the thinking goes. She is a Litvak, and that is it. Closed are the doors to Šokių šventė to these anomalies. They are not Lithuanians, so they should not have opportunities to perform their cultural dances in our cultural fair. Let them learn our dances and dance them, if they like. But their culture is out of bounds.
And, well, now we know how Ashkenazi Emanuel Goldenberg reacts to that: Only a Nazi would deny that a Litvak is a Lithuanian because she is a Jew.
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Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2008.06.30 10.50 )
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Part of stressing about a trip to Europe these days is trying to milk the most value out of the terribly weakened dollar, which limps even in comparison to the wee litukas. I have wondered for a very long time what the most economical means of converting money might be, so today I ran some numbers and did some research in a 
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