We typed the first issue of The Chronicle onto thin onion skin paper,” recalls Sister Gerarda, a softspoken diminutive nun who worked closely with Tamkevičius in his inner circle for years. “Then,” she giggled, covering her mouth with the palm of her hand, “we folded the thin paper into a small triangle and sewed it into the intimate triangle of a lady’s panties.

The literary debuts of 2021 tell us that the role of the charismatic author is becoming more prominent. The poems have a strong focus on expressing the author’s worldview and thought process but are not necessarily bold or experimental. The variety of meaning has been limited, while the themes common to all these books can be summarized thusly: long live sensitivity, and long live attempts to reach for the light.

My father took us to church on Sundays, but he was actually a pagan. He told us that his God was Perkūnas. He was born on a farm in Lithuania in 1918. He taught us that spirituality lived inside nature. I took that belief into the field with me. My mother was a nurse. She instilled in me the urgency of receiving an education, which was something she brought with her from her upbringing in Lithuania.

When I visited Lithuania a few years ago, I made a pilgrimage of visiting massacre sights and the few synagogues that remain. I’m working on a sequence of poems in acknowledgement of these wrongs. At the same time, I am translating letters sent from family in Lithuania to my grandparents referencing family deportations to work camps in Siberia. The world is so full of suffering, suffering that we needlessly impose upon each other.

Claudia had known Aras for only a short time before they were married. They planned to spend the summer in Germany and return to Vilnius to complete their last year of medical school. The summer of 1988, after the wedding, Greta, Claudia, Aras, and his best man, Leonas, also a medical student, boarded a train out of the Soviet Union. The train stopped in Braunschweig, a stop away from the family’s home. Aras announced he was stepping out briefly to use the restroom in the station. He never returned.

Irena taught me an enormous life lesson: Tolerance is more than just words. Tolerance is the ability to accept another, even when it hurts <...> with Irena’s passing, I have come to understand that true tolerance means finding ways to work constructively for the common good. It means letting go of the grips of one’s ego. Irena always found a way to harvest the best in each person, to inspire people to work together.