"THE WORLD WAS OURS" - A DOCUMENTARY LOVE LETTER TO VILNA -

Showing at the Cornwall free librry at 3 PM on Sunday August 12th, 2007.

Masha Leon, for The Jewish Daily Forward

 

After 15 years of research, travel and tender loving commitment, Mira Jedwabnik Van Doren's premiered her documentary film tribute to her birth city, Vilna, at New York's Center for Jewish History. Titled "The World Was Ours," the film premiered November 7. "More than any other Jewish community in Eastern Europe, Vilna was commonly recognized as the capital of Eastern European Jewry," Carl Rheins, executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, told the overflow crowd (extra chairs had to be set up in the center's atrium). "It was certainly the pre-eminent center of Yiddish cultural and intellectual life - and the birthplace of the YIVO Institute."

The film focuses on the vibrant, multifaceted, political, religious and social sectors of Vilna's 70,000 pre-World War II Jews. Unlike their counterparts in Warsaw, the intelligentsia in Vilna spoke Yiddish. As you watch the extraordinary archival film clips, stills and "talking heads" (this columnist included), you cannot help but experience angst, anger and painful regret at what was so brutally lost. Yet, despite the known fate of Vilna's Jews, Van Doren presents the city's prewar glory as an uplifting, joyous ode to the creativity and resilience of a community that traced its roots in Vilna back to the 1300s where by the 1500s Jews had full rights. According to legend, when Napoleon passed through Vilna he labeled it "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." The Vilna Gaon (Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, 1720-1797) defied tradition and encouraged Jews to study secular subjects. The film touts the good - 25% of ViIna's university student body was Jewish - and the bad, a horrific 1919 pogrom. The film also underscores that while Vilna's Jews, trapped in the ghetto, were being decimated by hunger, illness and execution, there was a remarkable resilience and resistance: The library remained open seven days a week; there were concerts, lectures and plays that even some high-ranking Nazis attended!

The film's advisory committee included, among others, late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz and Yitzhak Arad, retired brigadier general and chairman of the board of Yad Vashem. The post-screening discussion included Van Doren (who had left Vilna at the age of 10); Vilna-born Benjamin Harshav, Jacob and Hilda Blaustein professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at Yale University; Vilna-born William Begel, president of Begell House, Inc., publishers, and, also from Vilna, Samuel Bak, an internationally recognized painter who post-liberation fashioned a visual testimony to a world that was shattered.

 

 

Though born in Warsaw, I consider Vilna my second "birth" city. Following the trauma of Warsaw's bombardment and the city's occupation by the Germans, my mother and I reached Vilna in 1940 where we were reunited with my father. For a brief moment in 1940-1941, Vilna offered a haven and Yiddishkeit. In my mind I can still walk the streets of Vilna, smell the spring blossoms on the chestnut trees that lined Slowackiego en route to the YIVO where my father worked, almost taste the Realgymnazium's blended attar of ink, wood and hard-boiled eggs. People find it hard to believe that Vilna schools taught foreign languages, mathematics, science, literature and other academic subjects in Yiddish! Shortly after arriving in Vilna, I celebrated a birthday. In a photograph taken that day, sitting at the party table is Bialystok-born 7-year old Leo Melamed (ne Leybl Melamdovitch), who is currently chairman emeritus of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Of the 23 children in the photo, Leo and I, along with three others, are the only survivors; the rest perished after the June 1941 occupation by the Nazis.

 

In a clip in Van Doren's film, I recount my parents and I going in to see the movie "Marie Antoinette" staring Norma Shearer and Tyrone Power. (Van Doren would not tell me how she managed to get an original poster of that 1938 film, which she includes in the documentary). When we entered the theater, the Lithuanians were in power. When we came out, Russian tanks were rolling down the streets and people were rushing about carrying loaves of bread, sacks of potatoes, onions, etc. Hoarding had begun. Were it not for a visa to Japan that my mother was able to obtain from the Japanese consul general, Chiune Sugihara, we most likely would have ended up in the slaughter pits in Ponary forest outside Vilna.

 

When it comes to wide-arc documentaries about Jewish life in pre-1939 Poland, Josh Waletzky's 1980 opus, "Image Before My Eyes," is, according to Forward publisher Samuel Norich, "the gold standard." Van Doren's documentary love letter to a single city - Vilna - warrants similar accolades.

 

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