Ellen Cassedy
Ellen Cassedyâ€™s longing to recover the Yiddish sheâ€™d lost with her motherâ€™s death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the â€œJerusalem of the North.â€ As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after heâ€™d left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. ,How does a nationâ€”how do successor generations, moral beingsâ€”overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These are the questions Cassedy confronts in ,We Are Here,, one womanâ€™s exploration of Lithuaniaâ€™s Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own familyâ€™s place in it. Digging through archives with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing natives, including an old man who wants to â€œspeak to a Jewâ€ before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupationâ€”Cassedy finds that itâ€™s not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them.
History,World War II,Holocaust,Nonfiction,War,World War II,Autobiography,Memoir,Biography,Autobiography,Literature,20th Century,Literature,Jewish,Biography Memoir,Historical
We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust