We Are Here

Ellen Cassedys longing to recover the Yiddish shed lost with her mothers death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the Jerusalem of the North. As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after hed 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 nationhow do successor generations, moral beingsovercome 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 womans exploration of Lithuanias Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own familys 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 speak to a Jew before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupationCassedy finds that its not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them.