Interview by Laima Vincė

 

 

 

Laima Vincė: Tell me about your Lithuanian heritage.

Jocelyn: My Lithuanian heritage is all on my father’s side. My father was born in a small village called Gelvonai in Central Lithuania. His parents emigrated to the United States in 1930 when he was three. His parents were peasant farmers. His father came first—having spent the first eight years of his life in the States where his parents took brief refuge as farm workers during the famines under the Russian Czar’s reign—returning to work again on a relative’s farm in Milford, Connecticut. He worked and saved up for three years to bring his wife and two children to America. My grandparents and my father lived in a Lithuanian and Polish immigrant community. When my father went to kindergarten, he couldn’t speak a word of English, so one of the neighbors, who was bilingual, pinned a note to his shirt that said “I don’t speak English.”

There used to be a lot of farms around Milford, Connecticut with one- or two-acre yards. My grandmother had a yard where she grew a large garden, and where she kept chickens. She would forage for mushrooms and the town locals laughed at her.

Laima Vincė: So,it was a miniature version of Lithuania inside Connecticut.

Jocelyn: It was totally Lithuania. They grew and preserved their own vegetables, grew potatoes and stored them in their root cellar, went to the docks for fresh fish and eels, and made their own sausages. The pork has to be so fresh that it bleeds, my grandmother would tell me. She claimed that she’d carry a fork to the butcher shop to make sure. They were Catholic and they went to the Catholic Church all the time. The children were expected to speak Lithuanian in the home. So, my mother’s side had no Lithuanian. My parents divorced when I was two. I was a weekend Lithuanian. I spent the weekends with my father, and he would take me to my grandparents’ house. It was really like going to another country. The house looked like a normal house in the front, but we would pull into the driveway and go into the backyard and there was the garden. My grandmother canned everything. When I was about ten she told me this story and laughed at herself. When World War II started, she thought it would be like World War I. So, she did what she did in Lithuania, which was to put food in jars and bury it in the yard. She told me she had found some bread that she had buried in the beginning of World War II. She brought it to show me. I was expecting homemade bread, but it was Wonderbread in a jar from World War II. I did ask them to teach me some of the language, but I learned only “how are you” and “fine.” You always had to answer “fine,” never “not fine.”

Laima Vincė: Tell me about your other side of the family.

Jocelyn: They were Irish and English with a little bit of Norwegian, some Dutch. Their family went way back in the United States, so they were not immigrants. My mother married my father and after her divorce she married a Sicilian immigrant.

Laima Vincė: You write about your rich childhood experience of growing up with your grandparents’ garden, foraging for mushrooms, living close to nature. As a writer, how has this part of Lithuanian culture made its way into your work?

Jocelyn: I’ve always been interested in nature writing. I started out being interested in fiction and writing fiction, but then I discovered nature writers like Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, and Scott Russel Sanders, as well as the classics, Emmerson, Thoreau. One of the very first pieces I published was about my grandmother’s garden. I used to be a backpacker. I liked the essay form for inquiry. My second publication was about how I would go backpacking with friends in the woods and I would purposely get lost in the woods and think about my grandmother. She would always tell me stories. She lived in a part of Lithuania where during World War I the Russians and the Prussians were fighting. She had to hide in the woods, and she told me stories about that. So, here I was, I’d get disoriented in the woods and lose my bearings, and I didn’t know what berries I could eat and meanwhile the irony was that my grandmother had survived in the forest. You could throw her anywhere, and she would know how to survive off the land, I wrote a piece called “Out of the Garden” because I had this sense that my grandmother had lived in this Eden as horrifying and war-torn as it was. She lived in the natural world in a way that I couldn’t. That seemed tragic to me. I was two generations away from her, but I had lost that ability. So, that was how her experience first seeped into my writing. In that essay I explored the discovery that I was only two generations removed from a woman who could survive alone in the forest with no gear—no compass, water purifier, or dried food—and I was constantly lost even with companions and a stuffed backpack.

Then I ran into the Lithuanian Canadian writer Antanas Sileika at AWP^[1] and then I met the Lithuanian American writer, Daiva Markelis. They both said to me, “Why aren’t you writing more about Lithuania?” I thought I was done, but Lithuania keeps seeping into my writing.

Laima Vincė: Even now?

Jocelyn: I’m still working on new questions and explorations about Lithuania as remembered by my grandmother and as experienced by me both as traveler and reader. My most recent publication about my Lithuanian heritage was five years ago. It was called “Mother Tongue.” It was again, inquiry. I had met my Lithuanian family. I still have cousins and other relatives over there. When I met my cousin, we were connected because our grandmothers were sisters. My grandmother lived into her late nineties, so I asked him if his grandmother was still living. He said, no, and he told me her tragic story. We didn’t know anything about them. My grandmother would write to them, so we knew they were very poor, very suppressed. I asked my cousin what happened to his grandmother, and he said, “She was beaten to death.”

Laima Vincė: Oh my goodness! By whom?

Jocelyn: By another old woman. When he said that, I burst out laughing. Both grandmothers, it turns out, were survivors of the Gulag, who by that time had been released. They were arguing over which one of them got to keep the excellent strip of bark they’d found, perfect for planting orchids, and the other woman killed her for that meagre find. I laughed when I heard the story, which is completely inappropriate. My cousin was appalled. I’d only just met him. I laughed because on my Irish side of the family we laugh at the unexpected. Your grandmother isn’t beaten to death in the United States of America. But I didn’t know then that she had been a prisoner in Siberia. I thought she was just killed on her farm. Her little son died of starvation and disease in Siberia at the age of ten. She returned and lived with an older son who had escaped. She lived on the outskirts of town in one of those awful Soviet block apartment houses. For some reason, because of whatever damage had been done, the two old women got into a fight, and she was killed.

Laima Vincė: That’s so tragic.

Jocelyn: It’s tragic. I wrote an essay about what kind of a human being I was to laugh at such a thing. It took me fifteen years to write because I really couldn’t figure out what kind of a person was I who would have laughed at such a story.

Laima Vincė: Could you have laughed from shock?

Jocelyn: It was shock, and the nature of Irish slapstick humor, when you laugh at the unexpected. If somebody fell, we would laugh. I guess this sense of being Lithuanian continues to feed my writing. It haunts me because I was so close to my grandmother. I loved my grandmother’s stories. I loved sitting in the garden, smelling all the fragrances. She would only tell me so many stories. At one point, when she was telling me about hiding in the forests from the Prussians and the Russians, she stopped and said, “You’re an American, you don’t understand.” It was always: You are an American, but then, you are a Lithuanian.

Laima Vincė: There was this push pull. Was there this sense that you were never fully invited into the family circle with a Lithuanian identity? You were brought in, and then pushed out.

Jocelyn: Exactly. I loved it. I found the culture beautiful. It’s probably why I backpacked. Why I loved being out in the natural world and why I loved nature writing. That part of being Lithuanian haunts me. And the other thing that haunts me is my stepfather, who was a World War II veteran. He went to Italy and that’s where he saw action. He came back to America and started a burlesque nightclub. All the veterans and their wives came to this nightclub and celebrated the end of the war. Once I learned years later about Siberia and that the reason why my grandmother’s sister and her other relatives were deported to Siberia was because one of their brothers was a partisan^[2] and he was caught and shot in the head and they were helping, and they had an American sister I felt guilty. I realized how like many Americans I didn’t know in essence that World War II hadn’t ended. The war had ended for some of us, but not for all of us. So, here we were, celebrating the end of World War II while some of my family was imprisoned in the Gulag in Siberia at exactly the same time. I felt this horrible guilt. I’d like to write about dancing on the graves of the family by being at the nightclub.

Laima Vincė: Did you grandmother ever get the chance to reconnect with her family in Lithuania?

Jocelyn:There were many letters from her sister—both during her exile and afterward. But her sister was killed before she herself died, and I don’t know if anyone else contacted her. Certainly, she never saw anyone from the family again. Then the Soviet Union dissolved a few years before my grandmother died, but by the time I found family, my grandmother had died. So, I never got to know how much she knew.

Laima Vincė: The family in Lithuania probably could not tell her much in their letters.During the Soviet occupation of Lithuania letters were censored. They probably couldn’t write much.

Jocelyn: The letters were censored. She showed me the letters from her sister with big black lines crossing out sentences. One time, she was reading one of her sisters’ letters to me, and she said, “This is how we get around the censors. Her sister wrote, ‘We live very well, just like Mrs. So and So.’ But we know that Mrs. So and So was an impoverished widow.”

Laima Vincė: They still had that context from back home. You yourself traveled to Lithuania in 2015 and you tried to learn Lithuania. Tell me about that experience.

Jocelyn: It was mind blowing. My second cousin and his wife met me at the airport and took me to the apartment I was renting in Vilnius and showed me all around. I had the best of both worlds: Daytime language emersion at the university and then they would take me out in the evenings. The language was so hard to learn. My only other foreign languages were French and Pig Latin.

Laima Vincė: Latin would help you learn Lithuanian.

Jocelyn: I only had studied Latin for a year as an undergraduate. It was such a language emersion that after a while I could get around on the street. I could go to a bookshop, a coffee shop, ask directions. I loved it. I guess I was there almost three weeks. The language was starting to percolate, but I had nothing to do with it when I got home. I thought I could speak some Lithuanian with my father, who was alive at the time and who still remembered it. But he spoke nineteenth century Lithuanian! He learned it from his parents.

Laima Vincė: He may have been speaking a dialect.

Jocelyn: He was probably speaking a dialect. My cousin came to the United States, and he met my father. He told me that when my father thought he was speaking Lithuanian he was actually speaking a combination of Lithuanian and Polish.

There are more factual questions about the family I’d like answered. There were some resentments towards my grandmother and grandfather. Some family wouldn’t meet me, I understand that. This one little branch of the family was happy to reconnect. A lot of it was that my grandmother had left. And they suffered, and many of them died. Who was I coming in.

Laima Vincė: How important is your Lithuanian identity to your identity as a writer?

Jocelyn: That is such a thought-provoking question. I feel as if in some way Lithuania is central to my writing because there’s always that tug. I kept my father’s Lithuanian last name, even when my mother remarried. So, I always had that glaring, in your face, Lithuanian last name that everybody asks about. My mother’s family didn’t have much of an ethnic identity because they were so American, so identity felt like my Lithuanian family and the Sicilians. The Sicilians had a similar eat what’s on the ground way of being. So, being Lithuanian always pulls at me and always makes me conscious. It makes me see the world in a different way. It makes me see American politics in a different way. My writing isn’t political on the face, but it has political undertones that I think are all informed by my frustration with knowing so much about a part of history that seems so thoroughly important to the world and to where we are right now that and yet most people don’t know about. Some leftist American friends feel I’m fascist. I sound nationalist and fascist to Americans because I’m talking about people who were thrown off their farms, deported to Siberia. I always want to say, “I get your leftist ideology, but what if some soldiers came into your house and beat you up and took all your food? How would you feel about that?” They’re buying into this Kulak thing, and my grandparents were certainly Kulaks. They didn’t have money, but they had their 20 acres, and they were self-sufficient, and that made them outliers. I like the work of Carolyn Forche because she’s the only American poet I can think of who puts all the oppressive regimes together and understands what connects them. She has a great book called Against Forgetting where she has Anti-Soviet poets and El Salvadorian poets in the same book together. That is so meaningful to me. There is some part of me where at some point my biggest dream would be to either write an essay or a chapter in a book that would crack through those misconceptions in a way that would make people who didn’t have the personal history feel the importance of understanding. I even have a friend who is of Lithuanian heritage who doesn’t write about Lithuania. This writer says, “Who cares about Lithuania. I don’t even care.” And I feel like, if you cared about Lithuania, you would see what is happening in the United States right now differently.

Laima Vincė: And you would see why Ukraine defending itself against Russia is not just about Ukraine, but about all of Europe, about defending democracy. It’s a much bigger picture.

Jocelyn: Absolutely. Ukraine to me feels like that domino, and if that domino falls the continuation of World War II is right there. I was watching TV the other day and Tommy Tuberville^[3] was saying, “Putin doesn’t need land. He has enough land.”

Laima Vincė: People like that don’t know what they’re talking about, but they’re given a platform. And the people who do know what they are talking about are not given a platform.

Jocelyn: Much of my writing so far has been about figuring out the family history, why I didn’t know this or that, how I was always kept at arm’s length.

Laima Vincė: Do you feel as though you are a displaced writer. Is there this idea of exile and displacement in your work. Half of you belongs to Lithuania and yet you grew up in the United States, and you have that childhood experience of that part of Lithuanian culture that lives close to nature, and you’re looking for pieces and trying to pull it all back together. Could you call yourself an exiled writer in some manner?

Jocelyn: I totally could. Exiled from close knowledge. Exiled in some sense from the family. The fact that my grandmother considered me an American. I think she might have told me more if not for that distance. I wish I had connected with the country earlier. Being in Lithuania was like being nowhere else. It was like coming home.

Laima Vincė: So, you did have that feeling of coming home?

Jocelyn: I did. I felt that in Vilnius, but even more so when my cousin took me to visit our family gravesites and the village where our grandmothers grew up. Their parents’ house was still standing. I was standing in front of a building that I had looked at in photographs all my life. I touched it. My cousin showed me the apples trees that grew on the land since he was a child, and they were the original apple trees. I touched them. I recognized it all from the photographs. My grandmother’s parents were buried there. We went to visit her brothers’ graves. Many of the houses in the village had been burned down by the Soviets.

Laima Vincė: So, it was a very tactile experiential homecoming. You had to put your body into that place. If you had not put your body into that place, who would you be now as a writer?

Jocelyn: Probably somebody longing to put my body into that place.

Laima Vincė: That is one feeling that comes up in almost every interview I’ve done — the need to go back and put your body into the place your family came from.

Jocelyn: I was also very envious of my cousin. He lived in a Soviet walk-up building, but he had tomato vines and bean vines growing up the windows. He had orchids everywhere. He could forage mushrooms. He had inherited all that. He warned me not to buy fruits and vegetables at the market that were not from Lithuania because other countries used pesticides, but in Lithuania they didn’t. So yes, there was that feeling of exile, longing, the need to touch.

Laima Vincė: As I’ve been conducting these interviews with North American writers of Lithuanian descent, I feel as though we are connecting as a community. As a writer, do you feel it’s a leap to group Canadian and American writers from all over this vast continent into this subgroup and say we’re Lithuanian North American writers and our work shares commonalities, our books could be grouped together and taught as a subject in a university course, we could be read as a group. Does that feel plausible to you?

Jocelyn: Absolutely. Better than plausible. I hadn’t thought of us as a community until I met Antanas Sileika and Daiva Markelis. Then I started attending the AABS^[4] conference and that very small group that started to coalesce because we were the writers and the literary people as opposed to the scientists and the political scientists at the conference. There was a common understanding. We share a deep understanding of the diabolical nature of Putin and the imperialism of Russia still. That seemed to be questioned everywhere else but at AABS it was a given, and you could have these conversations. It seemed like a different worldview. I feel that with Lidia Yuknavitch’s work. There is that something, that pull of the natural world. Among the writers there is a consciousness and a vein in the writers even if they are not writing about Lithuania per se.

Laima Vincė: Do you feel that same sense of community with North American Litvak writers? Or perhaps the possibility of community?

Jocelyn: I feel the possibility of community. I have read We are Here by Ellen Cassedy. I read that when it first came out and I was blown away because that was a whole new perspective. I at first found it jarring that she was referring to the Lithuanians and the Litvaks as separate people. I thought is it really that bifurcated? Then I learned from her, that yes, it was. When I stayed in Lithuania my little flat was in the old Jewish quarter. I would come downstairs every day and see in the lobby the pictures on the walls of the people who had been removed from there and murdered. What was visited upon that land in the name of foreign governments, and what was brought out of the people themselves, is horrific. I think for us to come together as a community would be so healing.

Laima Vincė: There is a strong sense of longing for the land in your work.

Jocelyn: There is this longing in me not just for the physical touch of Lithuania, but also for the language in my mouth. As much as I’ve forgotten the language that I’d learned, I still go back to the dictionaries I’d brought back with me from Lithuania so when I’m writing I’ll look up words that I want to use. There was an experience when I was first reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel On the Small Backs of Children and I read the Lithuanian words she was using, but she didn’t say they were Lithuanian, she said they were from Eastern Europe. She was using Lithuanian words, and names! I was just so excited. At first, I was mad, and I thought: Those words should be identified as Lithuanian and everyone should know about Lithuania but then I realized, ‘No, she did just the right thing to have the words just be.’ Those are the words that some of us would know. That is a longing too.

 

June 13, 2024
Yale, New Haven Connecticut

 

 

1. Associated Writing Programs

2. An anti-Soviet Armed resistance fighter. The partisans were active in Lithuania from 1944 to 1953.

3. United States senator for Alabama.

4. Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies.