Letz

     On official maps the town was called Vilnius, its ancient name.  My ancestors lived there as far back as anyone can trace but maybe not all the way back to the13th century when the Jews first went there. 
     It was said that the town came about because of a dream of wolves.  Not a dream by the wolves themselves but by the Grand Duke Gediminas, who dreamed of an iron wolf howling on a hilltop.  The pagan priest he consulted told him that the wolf represented a castle and a city that would be the capital of the great Lithuania. 
     I suppose he was right; wolves always seem to know what is going on.  And so over the centuries the town flourished and grew; there was even an empire there once, covering parts of Eastern Europe.  And someone or other always seemed to be fighting about this little dot on a map…the Russians, the Hapsburgs, the Prussians, the French, the Germans.
     As though something valuable were hidden there.
     Well…maybe there was.

     By the time my family records begin, with Hym Yuda and the angel and all of that, Vilnius was part of Poland but even that was not always clear.  In any given year, it might have been in Lithuania or Ukraine or Poland or Russia; if the place was on the map, it was all over the map too.  But of course not to the people living there for whom it was simply their home.  
     The Jews called the area Vilna Gubernia if they meant the whole province, and Vilna if they meant the town itself.  My people lived in one little neighborhood there that they called Bissel Vilna which means “little Vilna.”  Or maybe sometimes just Bislvil as a shorthand.  And then during the war and the occupation and the destruction, their section was known to everyone as the Letz Ghetto for reasons that no one seems to remember.
     I guess they thought it was good to have lots of names for where you live, to make it harder for someone to take it away from you.
     They were wrong about that, of course.

     In any case, that was the way it went in this little dusty town on a shifting map, where the Jews of Vilna lived their lives and had their luscious language to comfort them, and their grand faith in irony to guide them, and above all their humor to sustain them.
     On chilly nights in Brooklyn, my mother told me the tales of my ancestors there and showed me the pictures she had, and kissed me off to sleep and dream.
     I don’t know. 
     Perhaps this was a place that did not really exist, could not exist.  I know that in the Middle Ages the word ‘letz” referred to a spirit who imitated and mocked humans just to torment them.  It is almost too perfect to imagine a ghetto named for one.  So there is some notion that Vilna itself was a fabulous city – like Chelm or Shnippishok or Hotzeplotz – a place in which to place rumors and tales of illumination.  A fabled town.  A town of lessons.

     I cannot judge this; I am many generations past these events.  I live on my own little world on a different map, and still slip off to sleep and dream.  All I know is that my mother told me these stories as though they actually happened.  And I chose to believe her.  After all, what can we hold onto during the next dusty shift of fate if not the tales of our mazel, of our good luck?

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