SUMMARY:

Today Lithuania’s Jewish heritage is considered an organic, important and renowned part of Lithuanian modern inclusive and “Europe-compatible” culture. The main framework for the return of Jewish memories today is provided by the paradigm of the “lost culture” and the recognition of the Holocaust. The article suggests another genealogy of reconciliation with the Lithuanian Jewish past, tracing tropes of memory about Lithuanian Jerusalem in writings of Lithuanian intellectuals of pre- and post-Holocost generations. The author reconstructs the trajectory of “realistic” description, stigmatization, rejection, marginalization, etc. of the Litvaks’ presence and their culture. Then she examines the rediscovery of Lithuanian Jerusalem by Lithuanian post-war intellectual emigration, whose memory was heavily influenced by the world historiography and literature and devoid both of the original Lithuanian tradition of representing the Jewish past as well as of their actual experience in Lithuania. The author concludes that “our common past”, though politically useful and successful a project, still relies on tropes of memory and representation borrowed mostly from the West. The gap between the “acquired” popular memory of Lithuanian Jewish culture and individual Jewish and non-Jewish memories in Lithuania broadens.