Seven years ago, I stood in biting wind at the edge of an empty field in rural Lithuania, feeling defeated. The field was not actually empty, although it had appeared so when our car pulled up by the low fence that marked it off from the surrounding farmland. On our map, this was the location of the Jewish cemetery of Vieksniai, a shtetl nearly three hundred kilometres north-west of Vilnius, where my great-grandfather and possibly other members of his extended family were buried in the decades prior to 1940. What I had first taken to be rocks turned out to be the remains of headstones jutting out of stubbly mounds of grass at odd angles. On the few moss-covered stumps where it was possible to discern indented letters, they were mostly illegible. There was no clue as to the dates of the graves other than their relative state of decay.
I hadn’t anticipated that finding my great-grandfather’s grave would offer me anything as trite as “closure.” And yet, even while dismissing the religious and spiritual significance of ritual acts of mourning, I had, at several points during the long drive through the flat countryside, pictured myself performing some such act: placing a stone on the grave, tracing the letters of his name with my fingers, bowing my head to contemplate the date of death. Any such act would have been a way of marking the connection, however fragile, between this land, its past, and my own present.
As it was, the only tangible evidence of my association with the place where I stood was the road sign that spelt out a name that I had only ever heard spoken in its Yiddish pronunciation; a word that had peppered the adult conversations that, as a child, I had sensed were hinting at something unspeakable. We never probed the people for whom this word was such a casual part of their vocabulary; never asked them about what it named. Perhaps because of this, the name had taken on almost mythic dimensions, signifying something vast and shadowy that was somehow trivialised by its sudden physical manifestation as white letters on a green motorway sign.
Whose memories are we attending to by the acts of mourning, burying, marking and visiting graves, long after the people they contain have gone? My own experience of grief is of a profoundly lonely place; outwardly shared with others, but never really accessible, even to myself. In this state, the external markers created to punctuate the process of death and mourning can take the place of any real confrontation with the existential terror of what has happened, both masking and managing it. We may, as Ivan Illich says, have institutionalised death, with hospitals and death certificates and undertakers; but in doing so, we have lost sight of its human materiality. It was a relief, at such a time, not to have to deal with any of death’s manifestations myself; to outsource it to nameless clerks in ordinary offices and boxes on forms: Go here, sign this, show that, these tangible details displacing the brutal shock of a person becoming an absence.
To visit the graves of people whom we once held and were held by, is to place them again into this collective context. Our private grief is given a public outlet in these markers: the cemetery, the anniversary, the candles, the stones and the flowers. However, the more raw and intimate the grief for the person we have lost, the more emotionally alien the presence of the stone, the graveyard, the memorial notice. I never wanted to see these objects when the person they named was still so real in my mind. Yet when the dead person is not someone linked to us through embodied memory; when their connection to our life is woven from the fragile narrative thread of other people’s words, stories and images, these physical objects are the only thing that make this narrative solid.
Names of places become inextricably linked, in family stories and public records, to the lives and deaths of the people who happened to be born there. When the markers of these people’s deaths – markers which, unlike the houses they lived in and the roads they walked, bear their names – are part of the landscape of the present, they become part of the fabric linking the weavers of these narratives with their remembered past.
Six years after my trip to Lithuania, I am standing outside the Jewish cemetery in Essaouira, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The sea breeze carries a whiff of sewage and freshly grilled fish and, behind the walls of the cemetery, motorbikes and children’s shrieks are muffled by the mid-morning call of the muezzin. Essaouira, also known as Mogador, was a thriving port town from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, with a Jewish community that, at its height, made up forty percent of the town’s population. Now there are barely one hundred Jews left. Most Moroccan Jews left in the 1940s and 50s, emigrating to Israel, France or Canada. Today, the town has a slightly seedy bohemian vibe. Chic guest houses with blue painted balcony railings nestle amongst stalls selling mounds of spices and hand-woven blankets. My husband’s great-grandfather, so he has been told, is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Essaouira. The stocky woman in a neat green headscarf who opens the gate for us explains patiently, before going back to her post on a plastic white chair in the shade, that the grave we are looking for will not be in this part of the cemetery but in the other, older one, across the road. The graves in this cemetery all date from before the nineteenth century. A guard in uniform holds up the traffic for us as we cross the road and then opens the blue metal gate in the wall. A younger man inside the enclosure stands at a respectful distance while we pick our way between the headstones, looking for a familiar name. The paths are weed-free and well-trodden and several of the graves have shiny modern stones, the marble newly polished, with little cage-like structures for lighting candles. In the time that we are there a few other people come through the gate; family groups, peeling off layers of clothing in the confusing December sun as they squint into mobile phone screens and head confidently towards a particular spot in the sea of headstones. They recite psalms and take photographs, snatches of Hebrew, Aramaic, French and English carrying across to us as we improvise our own little ceremony, having finally identified the grave by the family name – the same as my own married surname – clearly engraved on the headstone.
The municipality of Essaouira, with grants from the Moroccan government and financial support from Jewish diasporic communities, maintains the cemetery. We visited similarly well-maintained, sign-posted and tastefully preserved sites around Morocco, including the much larger cemetery in Casablanca, several synagogues, holy sites of pilgrimage where Jewish sages were buried, and, around the corner from the Essaouira cemetery, the home and synagogue of Rabbi Chaim Pinto, revered as a saint by the Moroccan Jewish community. At each of these sites, local Muslim men or women greeted us warmly, volunteering information about the location and its historical inhabitants, often visibly pleased to hear us explain our reasons for our visit and my husband’s personal connection to their hometown. The signage and architecture of these places – places whose names were familiar to my husband from his parents’ childhood recollections – were a seamless part of the landscape we encountered as we wandered through the alleyways and tourist attractions of Casablanca, Marrakesh and Essaouira.
A few days after our visit to the site of the Jewish cemetery in Vieksniai, Lithuania, my grandfather’s childhood home, we are wandering around Vilnius, exploring the area referred to in our guidebook as “the Old Jewish Quarter.” The Jewish population of Vilnius, known as “The Jerusalem of the North,” constituted nearly forty percent of the city in the early twentieth century. The city was home to over a hundred synagogues, cultural institutions, several daily Yiddish newspapers, and the headquarters of the socialist Jewish labour movement, the Bund. The acclaimed Talmudic scholar, Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman, known as the Vilna Gaon, lived here in the eighteenth century. Our first destination is Zhydou Street (“Jew Street”) and the nearby Gaon Street, where we want to see the memorial to the Vilna Gaon. Emerging from a café on the main boulevard around the corner, we consult our map, but it is not clear whether we can get into Zhydou street from here. It looks like we might be able to access it via a courtyard behind one of the grand buildings on the boulevard, and indeed, when we go through the archway, we find that the courtyard leads into a little square. Zhydou street should be just on the other side of the square, but it is hard to make out the street sign opposite from where we’re standing. A woman is walking towards us, carrying a shopping bag, and we approach her. “Excuse me,” we say, “Do you know where Zhydou steet is?” We point to it on our map, just in case our pronunciation is wrong. She looks at the map, repeats it, “Zhydou,” looks up at us, shrugs, looks all around, and says, “I don’t remember.”
We thank her and continue a few steps in the direction we were heading, at which point the sign on the corner ahead of us becomes clearly visible: Zhydou Street. In this little maze of cobbled streets, flanked by beautiful old buildings, we find a wealth of historical evidence of the once flourishing Jewish cultural life of Vilnius. Within the space of a few metres, we see the statue of the Vilna Gaon, a plaque indicating where he lived, a plaque on a wall noting that an important Jewish study house once stood on this site, a plaque showing the layout of the ghetto, and a plaque commemorating the leaders of the ghetto uprising. More than ninety-five percent of Lithuania’s Jewish population were killed in the Holocaust. The text on the small plaques commemorating these events is only in Yiddish and Lithuanian. There is no way we would have found any of these places or understood what they were had we not purchased the guide to Jewish Vilnius from the Jewish museum the day before.
After failing to find any Jewish graves in the Jewish cemetery of Vieksniai, struggling to find the one remaining synagogue in Vilnius, and stumbling upon two sites of massacres of local Jews in the middle of the forested countryside, we have come to think of Lithuania as a country of absences and ghosts. The polite shrug of the woman we asked for directions has become a familiar expression of what increasingly feels like a collective amnesia afflicting Lithuanians when it comes to certain parts of their country’s history.
If I had found my great-grandfather’s grave in the Jewish cemetery of Vieksniai, would the grief and the anger submerged in the horrors of the decades between his life and mine have taken on more manageable contours? Was the failure to preserve the marker of his death a consequence of the brutal history of this part of Europe, or was it part of the erasure and dehumanization that led to this history? My personal biography is linked, by an interwoven mesh of accident and agency, to the lives of the unremarkable people who lived and worked in a small Lithuanian village, in the same way as my husband’s biography is linked to the lives of those who lived and worked in a Moroccan seaside town. Complex narratives of race, colonialism, migration, nationalism and personal aspiration explain the vast distance between our own lives and those of our ancestors. In visiting Lithuania and Morocco, I suppose we had some vague hope of making sense of these narratives, and on both these visits we attempted to give expression to these connections, and to the losses that shaped them, through the simple act of visiting markers in the ground.
If the individual acts of caring for these markers – the annual visits, the lighting of candles, the scrubbing of the mildew on headstones – are acts of remembrance that remind us of our links to our forebears and acknowledge that the process of grieving is never fully resolved, what is signified by the absence of these acts? Who is forgetting, and who is forgotten, when the places we inhabit in the present contain none of these markers? And is the failure to notice their absence perhaps itself an act of forgetting?
The Jewish cemetery of Vieksniai – or what used to be the Jewish cemetery of Vieksniai – lies on the outskirts of the village. A few metres beyond it is a well-tended and quite colourful Catholic cemetery, its neat rows of grave-stones and pots of flowers visible from the road as we drive past. This physical reminder of the lives and deaths of its non-Jewish residents is as much a part of the landscape of this village as the absence of any physical reminder of the lives and deaths of its Jewish residents. The experience of lighting a candle on his great-grandfather’s grave in Essaouira is now a part of my husband’s store of memories, as the experience of not finding my great-grandfather’s grave in Vieksniai is of mine. Yet he does not belong in the narrow, rose-water scented alleys of the mellah any more than I belong in the salt-herring scented square of the shtetl. And the narrative of genocide, in Lithuania as in so much of Europe, casts a dark shadow over these other narratives of migration, memory, and forgetting.
I am as wary of utopian ideals of a political future as I am of simplistic narratives of the past. Yet I couldn’t help seeing, in the gentle and matter-of-fact way the young Moroccan man in Marrakesh directed us to the nearby synagogue, hints of a possible model of Jewish-Muslim coexistence, in the same way as I couldn’t help seeing, in the indifferent shrug of the woman in Vilnius, echoes of its dystopian shadow.
For those of us whose family history has been marked by displacement, the choice of the stories we claim as our past, and how we imagine our place in them, is a personal one. Yet the choice of how to acknowledge the lives of those who once shared the landscape we inhabit – lives that might have been quietly lived, brutally ended, or abruptly uprooted – is a political one. And so there is a political dimension to the questions I am left with: Who is forgetting, and who is forgotten, when the places we inhabit in the present contain none of these markers? And is the failure to notice their absence perhaps a wilful act of forgetting?
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Judith Suissa is a recovering academic based in London, England. She has published widely in her academic field of philosophy of education. She left academia in 2023 to focus on her own writing and has been working on a memoir and a novella. Her writing explores themes of belonging, displacement, memory and migration. Her work has been published in The Jewish Literary Journal.