Laima Vincė Sruoginis was born in 1966 in Teaneck, NJ. She happens to be the granddaughter of Anicetas Simutis, the long-time Lithuanian consul general for the United States, who served Lithuania as a diplomat for 65 years throughout the years of the Soviet occupation and who also became Lithuania’s first ambassador to the United Nations. Raised in a Lithuanian expat family in the suburbs of New York, Laima Vincė holds degrees from Rutgers University, the University of New Hampshire, Columbia University, and Vilnius University, where she received her PhD in Humanities in 2022. As a scholar, Vincė focuses on memory, postmemory, historical trauma, and diaspora literature. She teaches creative writing and English and American literature. Vincė translates Lithuanian literature into English and is the editor of three English anthologies of Lithuanian literature. Vincė herself has authored over twenty books, with her output ranging from academic work and non-fiction essays to novels, poems, and plays. She also paints. Last but not least, Vincė is the mother of three children and splits her time between Vilnius and New York.
In other words, Laima Vincė Sruoginis is a very busy woman. I’m lucky she found the time to meet with me for a conversation at Mint Vinetu, the Lithuanian capital’s premier location for hot drinks and preloved books, a charming place that has generated a cult following among Lithuanian poets and angsty teenagers. Our conversation will be focused on Vincė’s life and her Lithuanian American identity as well as her most recent books: the academic volume titled Heritage, Connection, Writing. Conversations with North American Lithuanian Diaspora Writers published this year by Peter Lang and Vincė’s 2025 independently published novel That Unspoken Word, based on the diary and poems of a Lithuanian Jewish poet Matilda Olkinaitė (1922–1941).
Laima, thank you so much for sitting down for an interview – Vilnius Review has published many of your own conversations with writers, so it’s exciting to finally have you sit, so to say, at the opposite side of the table for us. But first things first. When I was reaching out to you, I was under the impression that you only visit Lithuania occasionally. I’m happy to know you’ve been living here for quite a while now!
Quietly, yes.
When did you relocate?
I’ve had my apartment in Vilnius for fifteen years. I first came to Lithuania to live while it was still occupied by the Soviet Union – that was in 1988. I came as a student and I was able to stay for a year because I had a Soviet student visa. I was able to renew the visa once to stay a few more months, but no longer. It was very tricky back then with having permission to stay, especially if you were doing things like translating for Sąjūdis.
Then I lived in Lithuania as a Fulbright scholar, and I taught at Vilnius University and Vytautas Magnus University – that was ’95, ’96, ’97. I came with my husband (who is now an ex-husband) and our two sons. And then I came back as a Fulbright scholar with my three children from 2007 to 2010. I was then invited to teach at the American International School of Vilnius, so I stayed two more years and I taught there.
You know, I was here when I was writing my dissertation and during my postdoctoral studies, so I try to stay in Lithuania as much as I can. But there’s all sorts of life realities – sometimes you run out of money, so you have to go abroad to work somewhere and make some money to be able to live. I’ve gone abroad and taught in Hong Kong for two years and in Beijing. And there are times that I need to spend time back in the United States for family reasons. But for the most part, I’d say my home base is Lithuania.
And how is life here?
Oh, I love life here. I really enjoy it. I mean, I’m genetically Lithuanian, I grew up in the Lithuanian diaspora in New York, so I very much identify as a Lithuanian. I would say the only problem for me is that despite my best efforts, I still have a slight accent when I speak Lithuanian, and that always pins me as the Other, the outsider. Sometimes there’s some strong reactions to that.
Like what?
Like – “what are you doing here?” “Oh, why don’t you go home and pick dollar bills off of trees, why are you here?” All these misconceptions and misunderstandings. But what also could be difficult in terms of building a career as a writer and academic in Lithuania is that a lot of people use my work, absorb my work into their own work – to put it politely – and then, through my work, occupy professional positions, and that makes it harder for me to get an academic professional position. It’s very hard to teach in university when you’re an outsider. I don’t even know how to explain it. As a Lithuanian American, there is always this underlying perception of you as an outsider. There is always some aspect of jealousy – this assumption that you come from wealth and leisure, which is really not true in most cases.
There’s this reluctance to allow you to participate in cultural and academic life on an even footing. For example, you might be offered to volunteer, to help out with something, but you won’t be offered a position, not full-time, not half-time, not quarter-time. I think, as my mother said to me once, “You feel like you’re always on the outside looking in” – you’re never quite invited in. She only came to Lithuania once or twice, but she made that observation about me when I talk about Lithuania. I was born in the United States; my mother was born in the United States; my grandparents came to the United States when they were 18 and 26 years old, as diplomats. So really, my family has been based in New York City for a hundred years now, right? But we still maintain our Lithuanian identity. We feel the connection with Lithuania, but very often other people make the assumption that you’re just passing through, you’re a visitor, you don’t belong. You can sit and admire from the distance, but you’re never invited to fully participate in the culture. So, it’s a very subtle thing. Maybe it’s easier for the younger generation, because younger people are more open-minded, but for my generation it’s a lot harder.
Do you think that’s envy? Again, with the assumption that people are better off there, that you’re living in the Amerika! Right?
Yeah, it’s a very old, nineteenth-century idea.
Maybe some of these stereotypes trickle down – that you’re supposed to be a different kind of person, a different kind of class.
You know, I think that a lot of people struggle. Not just in Lithuania, but in the United States, everywhere. We’ve got this one percent hoarding all the wealth in the US; in this part of the world, you have oligarchs hoarding it. So your average person is struggling to earn a living and raise their family and take care of the basics. But there is the stereotype of the “American Dream,” so when you come here with your primary or secondary American identity, those emotions come up.
I was at an event with a lot of recent immigrants – well, third-wave immigrants from Lithuania who have settled in the United States, some of them were there for 10 or 15 years. One of them said to me, “Oh, we so envy those of you who were born into Lithuanian American families because you’ve had families to pay for things and help you, while we had to struggle for everything.” I’m thinking, well, here in Lithuania families do support and financially help their children and grandchildren, but that’s not the tradition in the US, where many students pay for their own studies, leave home quite early, and have to establish themselves. There’s no expectation that your parents will support you. I thought that was a very strange assumption – that if you’re born in the US, you had a lot of access to inherited wealth. That may or may not be the case.
I love being in Lithuania. Despite the obstacles, I feel like I’m part of the culture. I feel like I belong. My family history is closely linked to Lithuania. So I feel hurt when I get that kind of feeling of being pushed away, not included. I earned my PhD doing very innovative work, which I published in my book Vanished Lands – on intergenerational cultural and historical trauma, on postmemory, on memoirs by Lithuanian American writers whose grandparents were collaborating with the German regime. Very sensitive work, but I feel that in Lithuania I had to work very hard to prove that my research and academic work is worthy.
A very touchy subject in Lithuania.
Extremely. I received letters telling me I had no right to do this work, that I was defaming the name of Lithuania. But then I see younger colleagues, who have absorbed entire chapters of my books into their dissertations without giving me credit, being hired to teach courses in Holocaust studies or diaspora writing here, in Vilnius University. How come I can’t teach my own work? I’ve never even been invited to present one of my books at Vilnius University. When you’re a Lithuanian American, many doors are slammed shut in your face – unless you are somebody who has a lot of money and resources and you’re very generous with that money. Then doors fly open for you. I’ve observed that.
You were raised in New York, the city of cities, some might say. How does Vilnius compete?
I don’t put them in the same category. For every New Yorker, there is no other city except New York. I hate to admit that. I think that this is New York centrism? I don’t know what it is. It’s a mentality – we don’t even say “New York.” We say, “The City.” There’s only one city.
Like Rome, right?
Yeah. [laughing] Chicago? Ehh, that’s not a city to New Yorkers… Nothing else is a city. But Vilnius holds a special place in my heart as a completely different kind of small, beautiful city. I know they built some tall buildings on the other side of the river, but that doesn’t make it anything like New York. That’s just not it. New York is a city of dreams – now it’s really changing under the Trump administration, it’s destroying things – but if you had a dream, you would come to New York and try to realize that dream. You had people from all over the world. I remember that walking through Manhattan on a single day, you could hear a dozen different languages being spoken, and I always enjoyed that. And all the cultural institutions, the museums, the people, that specific way of being in the world that’s very much New York. It’s not necessarily what’s marketed to the outside world. For example, I have never once in my life gone to Times Square to see the ball drop, although I’ve celebrated New Year’s Eve a few blocks away. There are things for tourists and things for locals.
Also in New York, your grandfather held a pivotal diplomatic position as Lithuania’s consul general during the period of the Soviet regime in Lithuania, refusing the Soviet order to abandon the consulate. Did any of this reflect on your upbringing?
Yes, in a huge way. He was a real authority, but you have to understand – he was really a person of his generation. Now we live in a world where everyone is advertising themselves on social media – he was the complete opposite. I once wanted to write his memoirs, but he wouldn’t cooperate with me – he said, “I did what was my duty to do for my country, and there is not much more to say about that.” That was very much the mindset of his generation – you had convictions, you did what you felt was right, and to try to somehow memorialize what you did or to get attention for that would be wrong.
His modesty, his conviction, and the way he was always willing to help other people made the deepest impression on me. In 1991, when people were able to travel, you could invite people from Lithuania to travel to the United States, as long as you did all the paperwork and you could guarantee their cost of living. I had a good friend whose father had died, and she was having a very hard time, economically and in general. I offered to help her out and asked my grandfather whether he would give her a job at the consulate. He agreed. My grandparents even housed her. She didn’t know how to type or do anything, so my grandfather paid her generously just to take the trash out. He once told me that when he was five years old, his father was taken to fight in the First World War and never came back. They were left with a farm, together with his mother and sister, and they really struggled. He said, “I will help anybody who needs my help because I know how hard life can be.”
He helped everyone in New York’s Lithuanian community however he could. In those days, every once in a while, there would be somebody who escaped out of Soviet-occupied Lithuania without a passport. Simas Kudirka said to me that he felt like my grandfather was one of the few people who treated him like a human being. So he was able to help people without making them feel like they’re beholden to him. His compassion, empathy, and understanding were deeply moving to me.
It was that deep sense of empathy that enabled him to work for 65 years, basically receiving only a minimal salary, struggling economically to raise his family and support my maternal great-grandparents after the war, and run the consulate general office. He knew that in terms of diplomatic laws, as long as the consular office and the embassy were continuing the work of prewar independent Lithuania, Lithuania had a legal chance to regain independence. He did that with great love and empathy. I think that from him I’ve absorbed into my own life a strong sense of empathy and caring, and I think that a lot of my work as a writer is definitely connected to the values my grandfather passed on to me through his vision and life’s work.
You also spent some time living in Germany, enrolled at the Lithuanian Gymnasium, known in Lithuanian as February 16 Gymnasium, a school founded by a community of Lithuanian expats in 1950.
You know, the more research I do about that postwar period, the more it surprises me – when all the displaced persons ended up in the DP camps in the Allied territories, they were having baby after baby after baby! They’re having babies as they’re running from Lithuania, they’re having babies in these DP camps, like, I don’t know what was going on! And since they had all these children running around, they developed kindergartens, schools, and high schools to educate them. The Lithuanian Gymnasium was one of those postwar, DP-camp high schools for those who weren’t able to emigrate in the late 1940s and go abroad from Germany, usually because of health-related problems. The displaced persons wanted their children to be educated according to the prewar Lithuanian educational system.
But as an American citizen, why were you there?
In the early 1980s, a dynamic, brilliant, young educator named Andrius Šmitas, or Andreas Schmidt, and his wife Marytė, a Lithuanian American, both worked there, and they had this mission to really energize the school and make it something special. One of their projects was to create a parallel class for émigré Lithuanian children from all over the world – North and South America, Canada, Australia. This was really interesting, and innovative – now when I think about it, somebody should do research and write about this.
So they pulled children from all over the world?
They did. But what everybody had in common was that they were the children of displaced persons. My father was a World War II refugee. On my mother’s side it was actually my great-grandparents who were the ones that were WWII refugees. I studied there with a full scholarship. But, for example, the South Americans’ currency was so weak that they couldn’t afford the tuition, so the gymnasium – who were always running on a shoestring budget – pulled the money from somewhere and somehow covered the tuition costs for students from South America.
The interesting thing was that all of us kids who showed up had whatever little fragments of Lithuanian we had learned at home from our families. I have to admit that my Lithuanian language was not very good. Friends of mine who knew me from childhood often laugh: “What? You write books in Lithuanian? You were terrible at Lithuanian!” Everybody came to the gymnasium with varying degrees of Lithuanian, but Lithuanian was our common language, and that is how we quickly became conversant in Lithuanian.
The parents of some of my German Lithuanian friends there had actually been what you’d call vilko vaikai [Wolf children or Wolfskinder – children from East Prussia at the end of WWII, many of whom were homeless orphans that had fled to Lithuania and were taken in by local families], and they had terrible, terrible home situations. Some had fathers who were raging alcoholics because they were so traumatized as children during the war. The gymnasium was a safe place for these kids, and that’s how some of the German-Lithuanian children ended up there from grade 5 until graduation. Because the school offered safety and structure, the teachers became like their parents.
We had German-speaking Lithuanians, Spanish-speaking Lithuanians, English-speaking Lithuanians, Lithuanians who came from Lithuania. We had Lithuanians who came from Israel. So that’s how we really learned the language – by talking to each other. We had lessons on Lithuanian literature, we had folk dances, the Ateitininkai, and all these other organizations there.
Your first visit to Lithuania happened during this time, on a school trip in 1983. Is it true that the local Lithuanian dissidents in Germany asked some of you kids to bring care packages to people in Soviet Lithuania?
Yes. Our teachers were the ones connecting us with the dissidents. Radio Free Europe was located in Munich – that’s a few hours’ train ride from where the gymnasium is. We had Poniutė Grinienė, who was a dissident, Kęstutis Girnius, and all these different people who were working there. There was this whole network of Lithuanians of that WWII generation, and some of their sons and daughters, who were running underground dissident operations and were mostly connected with Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, or Vatican Radio and who were receiving information from the Lithuanian underground and getting information back to Lithuania. They were also connected with the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania [an underground periodical that ran in Soviet Lithuania from 1972 to 1989 and documented human rights abuses] and they were very tightly connected with political prisoners and dissidents in Lithuania.
The lists would come through indicating which students were invited to come to these trips. Our dissident contacts would come to the gymnasium with packages – you know, people would come back from Siberia with very serious illnesses, and back then there was a shortage of medicine in Lithuania because of the occupation, so they needed medicines. There were also letters, banned books, Bibles.
They would write down addresses on little scraps of paper. It was like a big game for us. First we had to get through the border. Then we had to find these people and get everything to them. I had this suitcase that was kind of like a double suitcase – there were two layers, but you can’t really see that second layer unless you go in and pull it out. We knew that when the train from Germany reached the border between Poland and the Soviet Union, they had to lift the train and change the undercarriage because the diameter of the tracks was different. So you would be hanging out in that train for a couple of hours – but that’s also when they would come through the trains and search everybody’s luggage.
We knew that they had fifteen minutes for each person. I had Bibles, I had medicines, I had all sorts of things I had to bring in, so I put them in the hidden compartment of my suitcase. But before the trip I also went out and bought all kinds of light porn magazines – you know, Germans love their porn, so even a kid could go to the local grocery store and buy it. Just girls wearing lingerie, that kind of thing, nothing too serious.
Obviously, something they didn’t have in the Soviet Union.
Yes, it was banned in the Soviet Union. So I had some of my clothes and things and a few of those magazines tossed on the top layer of the suitcase. At the border we were searched by these young guys – 18, 19 years old, just conscripted into the army. They hadn’t seen a magazine like this in their lives – so they’re using that fifteen-minute quota to leaf through it!
Brilliant! The trips themselves, though, in your own words, were propagandistic in nature, and you were always accompanied by KGB informants.
Oh yes. Most definitely.
So was there a network of these informants at the school?
Yes. They were mostly young people that had grown up in Lithuania and had some sort of German family connection. They were able to emigrate, but their German really wasn’t strong enough for them to study in German universities, and many wanted to study medicine. So they would form connections with certain people in Lithuania and inform on their classmates. They were integral in these trips, in terms of who got to go and who didn’t. We knew who they were.
I’ll give you an example. I was picked to go a second time in 1984. Our dissidents gave me and a couple of other students who they trusted certain things to bring through. But in West Berlin, one of our students – she later came back to Lithuania to study medicine – together with a man in a suit approached me and another girl, cornered us in the train station, and said, “We know exactly what you have. You see those lockers over there? You have to empty your bags and put everything in those lockers. We will be watching you.” They were onto me. That was disappointing.
You know, there’s a Latin proverb: iucunda memoria est praeteritorum malorum – “It’s a lot of fun to sit back and laugh at past dangers.” There’s another story from that trip in 1984 that’s quite funny. Our KGB handlers decided that they were going to take a big risk and take us to a technical college in Vilnius, where a folk ensemble would sing for us. We arrived and met young people three or four years older than us. They’re dressed up in their folk dresses, while we’ve got long, scraggly hair, jeans, ratty sweaters – this was the end of the hippie era. After their beautiful Lithuanian folk music concert, this KGB man – the same one who made me put the books away in West Berlin – says that now it’s our turn to sing a song for the students. Of course, we had nothing prepared. One teenager from Australia spontaneously crouched down and started leaping around, imitating a kangaroo. Everybody’s laughing. The KGB handlers can’t control the situation. They don’t know whether this is a serious performance or not. In the middle of this confusion, two Lithuanian students tapped me on the shoulder and kind of gave me a signal to follow them. We go off into the hallway, and one of them starts talking to me: “This is all a farce, we’re not free in the Soviet Union, we’re occupied, this is how they treat us,” things we already knew, but they probably thought we didn’t. As I’m listening to him, at the end of the corridor I see the same KGB guy approaching us. We’re caught red-handed having an unofficial conversation. The KGB handler is enraged. He immediately takes me back and tells all our students to get on the bus and that we’re all going back to the hotel.
Fast-forward to 2007. I was in Lithuania with my three kids. My sons are very good friends with the Vaicenavičius brothers, whom you might know from the folk band Kūjeliai. So we’re sitting in the kitchen with their family, just having tea and talking about this and that. Their father, Rimantas Vaicenavičius, who is also a friend of ours, turns to me and says, “Laima, do you remember that boy from Australia who was jumping around like a kangaroo?” And I said, “Yes! Wait a minute – was that you talking politics to me in the hallway?” “Yes, that was me!”
Incredible!
We had been friends for about 10 years until it dawned on us that we had met before under very different circumstances! We were laughing so hard – in one lifetime, I’m like this, you know, privileged Westerner coming to see how these poor Lithuanians imprisoned in the Soviet Union live, he’s explaining the realities to me, and we get caught. I always wondered what happened to that young student who was talking to me. And all these years later, we’re sitting in a free Lithuania, just enjoying ourselves. It just shows how the reality shifted so dramatically for my generation.
The next time you visited Lithuania was in 1988. That was a very turbulent time – the beginning of the independence movement. What was the atmosphere like?
Yes, I went in 1988 and then stayed for another year as a student. It was incredible. It was so exciting that I remember when I would go to sleep, I could hardly wait to wake up in the morning to find out what had changed overnight. I went to every single demonstration, witnessing whatever I could. My professors at Vilnius University immediately saw that they needed help with translation, so they asked me if I could translate, and before I knew it, I was translating for Sąjūdis already at its founding assembly – I was very quickly invited into that inner circle as a translator. The foreign reporters who would come to Vilnius to cover the demonstrations and meetings were all trained in Russian. Back then, and still even now, it was assumed in the West that Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians were simply Russians and that everybody spoke Russian. You also had a lot of Russians who lived in this region and were the descendants of colonists, going abroad, saying that they’re Lithuanian but speak Russian – that furthers the stereotype.
Sąjūdis realized this and had a brilliant idea at the time – the only way that they were going to make these journalists realize that Baltic states have different languages and different cultures would be through the laborious process of having everything translated. Even though it would’ve been so easy for Vytautas Landsbergis to meet with Bill Keller from The New York Times and have a fluent conversation in Russian, he wouldn’t do that. He would bring me in to sit at the table and translate. Casual or off-the-record conversations may have taken place in Russian, but everything else was methodically translated because they were really trying to break this stereotype and drive home the point that the Baltics are not Russia.
So as a student in your early twenties who was visiting Lithuania for the third time, you interpreted for Vytautas Landsbergis, the man who led Sąjūdis?
Yes. There used to be a café downstairs from where the Sąjūdis headquarters were, which is where a lot of these conversations with foreign journalists would take place. There was one time when I interpreted for Landsbergis and Keller. Throughout the whole interview, Bill Keller was trying to corner Landsbergis and get him to admit that he has trouble balancing the liberal, communist-party wing of Sąjūdis with the more dissident wing of the Lithuanian Liberty League. Landsbergis was being very careful in answering each of Keller’s questions – he didn’t want to give the impression that he was having any trouble within Sąjūdis. He kept maneuvering out of that question in a clever way. The interview ended, we all stood up, got our coats, and were literally walking out into the street when Bill Keller said very casually, “Oh, it must be so hard for you balancing the left and right sides of Sąjūdis.” So I interpreted the comment. Landsbergis chuckled and said, “Oh yes, that’s one of my biggest problems.” Landsbergis thought the interview was over. We all did. But that became the headline for Keller’s article: “Landsbergis Says His Hardest Task Is Balancing the Right and the Left Wing of Sąjūdis.”
Did you observe that tension while you were here?
Oh, yeah. Definitely. The tension was there, but everybody wanted independence.
But people had differing definitions of it?
The former political prisoners had nothing to lose. They had seen torture, hard labor camps – they had been to hell and back. They were willing to risk their lives for freedom. But if it hadn’t been for them and the presence of Antanas Terleckas and the Lithuanian Liberty League, maybe it would’ve taken longer to come around to independence. They were always that moral force saying, “Don’t dance around the issue.” Whereas there were some people in Sąjūdis during that time who had careers and pretty comfortable, middle-class lives, and they were nervous about losing all of that. They were considering a more moderate route to independence.
Lithuania as a fairy-tale land and Lithuania as a real place. Does this dichotomy exist in the mind of someone raised by Lithuanian expats?
Most definitely. It was the whole basis of diaspora education. In fact, you should see some of the books we had in Lithuanian Saturday school – drawings of very idyllic Lithuania, perfectly clean little girls and little boys running around, playing dressed in Lithuanian national costumes. It was very highly idealized. But you have to understand – this was a generation of people that had been rebuilding Lithuania after centuries of tsarist oppression. And they really achieved a lot in twenty years. And then it’s all taken away from them. So you could really justify and understand that level of romanticism.
I do think that so many Lithuanian diaspora people of my generation, when they came to Lithuania, had to first overcome the shock that contemporary Lithuania is not the way it was depicted in the Saturday school primers. Everybody doesn’t live in a perfect, cute, little wooden cottage and walk around in national clothing. Although, interestingly enough, during the Sąjūdis years, because the folklore movement was so strong and such a powerful backbone for Sąjūdis, you had young people who had grown up in the city going back into the countryside to collect songs and stories and find out what life was like before occupation and bringing it all back into the city. So they were kind of doing the same thing the old DPs were doing, running around the streets of Vilnius wearing linen, singing folk songs, and idealizing village life. It’s not just the diaspora that’s guilty of that – the same process was going on with the people who were trying to break away from Soviet reality, creating an idealized, romantic past. I think it’s just human nature.
I think that’s a good segue into literature and your most recent book – Heritage, Connection, Writing. Its three main parts are based on the stories of descendants of the first and second waves of Lithuanian migrants to North America (1868–1918, 1918–1940), the descendants of political refugees and displaced persons (1940–1945), and the descendants of Litvaks (1900–present). Each part is divided into sections that consist of a conversation with a particular Lithuanian diaspora writer and some samples of their work. Why did you structure the book this way?
I think what really fascinated me was the first section of the book. We all know about the DPs and their descendants, and we know about the Litvaks who are returning to Lithuania. But writers like Lidia Yuknavitch, Ken Ilgunas, or James Joseph Brown have their roots in that initial emigration out of Lithuania, which took place so long ago – over a hundred years ago. But when you’re interviewing these people and spending time with them, you see their thoughts revolving around Lithuania. It’s a major part of their identity and who they consider themselves to be. That really woke me up and made me think. According to sociologists, immigrants in the United States typically lose their native language and assimilate into American culture fully after one generation. So why do you still have people with strong nostalgia for Lithuania two or three generations later? That’s the question I set out to answer with my book.
Why did I include samples of their work? That thought came to me later. I just thought it would be more interesting than only interviews. And those excerpts reveal so much. It’s one thing to have people tell you something in an interview, but their writing reveals another side of that story.
Some people say I could’ve had a fourth part – the immigrants since independence who are writing in Lithuanian. I certainly could have. But it would get to be a huge book. That needs to be a separate book. Also, that group writes in Lithuanian and publishes their books inside Lithuania. They’re sending their work home to Lithuania. Whereas the people in my book, they’re writing about their heritage for America and Canada. There is a difference of audience, so you need to apply different literary research tools. I have written a few articles about the literary work of this post-independence wave of immigrants, but you have to analyze it within a different literary context.
Heritage, Connection, Writing is a 550-page-strong book that spans more than a century of literary tradition and touches upon the lives and family histories of twenty-seven writers. Wasn’t it difficult to control such a trove of information and make it work for you?
It was. One thing was keeping track of permissions and rights. But also, because it is an academic publisher, my big challenge was making it adhere to academic standards. My editor didn’t want it just to be an anthology, but to include articles that provided analysis and historical relevance. That is what really got me started looking at what do these different writers have in common. That’s when I found themes that kept repeating themselves – one was a love of nature and forests. These immigrant children, as soon as they could, got out of the cities and went out into places like Alaska or Colorado, as if it’s in their genes or in their bones to be close to nature. Many of them, all of them really, had this concept that they strongly associated Lithuania with freedom and the fight for freedom. More so, they weren’t associating being American with freedom. I found it remarkable that Lidia Yuknavitch, who out of all these writers is the one who’s a more mainstream, well-known American writer, in her latest novel names her main character Laisvė [Freedom]. The Lithuanian language, and the Yiddish language for the Litvaks, was a very strong theme. There are these aspects of identity that really repeat themselves. Whether I’m talking to someone in Alaska, or New York, or Colorado, they’re kind of coming up with the same things. My introductory article in the book talks about these unifying themes.
What are some of the things that we should understand about these writers and their work?
That they’re a part of Lithuanian culture, of Lithuania. What people in Lithuania need to understand is that they should be more accepting and invite them in. For example, when I came here in 1988, I could not open my mouth without getting some kind of reaction. A lot of people thought I was Latvian because of how the American accent sounds – which was fine, since it allowed me to be incognito. But when people did know I was from the United States, there was a lot of strange emotions around that.
Nothing against Russian Lithuanians, but many Russian Lithuanians who spoke in Lithuanian with a Russian accent were much more warmly embraced as brothers and sisters and considered “one of our own” in 1988 than me, a Lithuanian who was coming home. I always felt that difference. It takes a long time to really find your place in Lithuanian society. And you always have to answer awkward questions, like “Why are you here?” Curiosity is one thing, but sometimes it borders on rudeness.
What I hope my book brings about is this understanding that the diaspora Lithuanians really want to belong. We can even talk about all these very large numbers of people who have emigrated since independence. Their children are growing up abroad, and those children may want to come back to Lithuania. They will face the same challenges – they’ll speak with an accent, they’ll have a different cultural identity, they’ll have different experiences. So, what is going to happen? Are they going to be pushed away, or are they going to be embraced and welcomed home? I think what the message is to try to be more understanding.
I was approaching this book like an academic. My study was to see what these people have in common. But you could take it to another level and say that I really want readers in Lithuania to become more acquainted with the many different types of Lithuanians out there and what their lives are like. And maybe to see something of themselves in those lives.
These writers project an image of Lithuania or use some aspects of Lithuanian culture or history in their works. How does this usage change based on generation or literary influence?
It honestly doesn’t change. I would’ve thought that myself, but it really doesn’t. Like I said, these are very idealistic concepts.
Have you come across any Lithuanian Americans perfectly comfortable with forgetting their Lithuanian heritage and fully embracing being American?
Yes, surprisingly, I’ve met many recent immigrants from Lithuania who really knock themselves out trying to Americanize themselves. Some push very hard to assimilate and be accepted. They change their surnames and sometimes even their first names – or Americanize them. They’re quick to give up their Lithuanian identity living abroad. I always wondered why.
And why?
That’s my question. I’d have to interview a lot of them to find out. Is it shame? What is it?
Maybe it’s because they’re not forced to give anything up. It’s a free choice.
It could be a question of choice, except for my generation. We’d say that they don’t want something that we’ve had to fight so hard to regain. You know, when someone has something valuable and throws it in the trash? Why are you throwing that in the trash?! I want it so badly! That’s the relationship.
Here’s another side to this – what we’re seeing now with the Republican party and the Trump administration is this vicious criminality toward immigrants. The way immigrants are being stripped of their rights and held in these horrible detention centers, or beaten, or murdered. You look at that and think – but America is a land of immigrants! Unless you’re a Native American, you’re an immigrant, right? But underneath that land of immigrants you always had a resentment toward immigrants by people who had been there longer.
Growing up Lithuanian American, if you had a Lithuanian name, that name always marked you as something other. If you don’t have an Anglo-Saxon name, or if there’s something about the food you eat… Oh my goodness, as a little girl, I remember my father growing his own apple trees, which was very unusual in the suburbs of New York–
And very usual in a lot of places in Lithuania.
Very. So, for my school lunch, my mother would pack an apple and a sandwich. Now, an apple from a tree might have a bruise on it or an imperfect shape. All the other children in my neighborhood were getting these perfectly beautiful, genetically created apples. I would come in with my very natural, Lithuanian apple, and all the kids at the lunch table would make fun of me. “That’s so disgusting! Is there a worm in your apple?! Ew!”
I started using my first and middle names, Laima Vincė, as a pen name when I was a graduate student at Columbia University. I was writing poems and having them published. The poetry editor from The New Yorker magazine, Alice Quinn, was one of my professors, and she wanted to publish a poem of mine. She said, “I can’t publish your poem in The New Yorker with a surname like Sruoginis – nobody can say it. It’s just a jumble of consonants and vowels – you have to change your name.”
Right: Laima with her dog Margė in Norwood, New Jersey, standing beside her father’s apple tree, 1975.
Photo courtesy: personal archive.
We used to go to Lithuanian summer camp as children, and some of the neighbors’ kids would ask me where am I going for the summer. I’d say I’m going away to camp. “Oh, you’re going to a concentration camp? With people like you, from concentration camps?” These children were hearing my father speak English with a terrible accent – his family had escaped deportations to Siberia. Somehow, all that got lost in translation. They thought that they’re going to a happy YMCA camp in America, and I’d be going to a concentration camp. They would also call me Laima Beans because there’s a type of bean, a lima bean, that Americans eat.
That’s how it was back then for diaspora Lithuanians who descend from that WWII generation which was forced out of Lithuania – you don’t quite fit in the United States or Canada, but then you come here and you don’t fit in either. It forces you to develop a self-sufficient personality, a loner personality. This has happened to me in Lithuania. I walked into a party of poets and writers, and either nobody talks to me or they say, “Oh, hi, Laima, so when are you leaving?”
[both laughing]
Which I think is so funny! O, labas, Laima, kada tu išvažiuoji?
I hope that my book can break apart some of that ice here. But I also hope that it helps readers in the US, UK, and Canada get a fuller understanding of the cultural history and the historical memory of this whole context that people are bringing with them.
How do these writers feel about tsarist Russia or the Soviet Union?
Oh, they despise it. Nobody has anything good to say about them.
Being an expat in the United States, which had a lot of political biases against Russia and the Soviet Union, the whole Red Scare thing, have you – or any of these writers – ever felt the need to explain something about the USSR that people weren’t getting right?
Most definitely. I think that Algirdas Landsbergis is a writer who suffered very badly from that. He’s an interesting case – I write about him in Vanished Lands. He was about twenty years old when the family fled Lithuania. They fled because they were on the deportation lists, since his father worked at the post office and collected postage stamps, which was one thing considered suspicious by the NKVD. He studied English literature in the States and became fluent in English. He was able to write competently in English and Lithuanian. He wrote a play titled Penki stulpai turgaus aikštėje and then rewrote it in English – Five Posts at the Marketplace. He was very much influenced by existentialism, by Nietzsche and Sartre. It’s basically a play about the armed resistance in Lithuania, but he never names Lithuania. He keeps it on a universal level – a group of rebels fighting a stronger power. This play was staged off-Broadway and was actually quite successful. It’s been staged multiple times in English and in Lithuanian. And he suffered both from the Lithuanian diaspora community and the Americans.
When staged in English, there is no marker in the play saying that it’s about Lithuania. But then it was perceived as being anti-communist, anti-Soviet Union. In interviews he talks about how directors would beg him, “Please, can you just put this in South America? We don’t want to insult all the Marxists.” So here’s this man who escaped within an inch of his life, half of whose generation has been murdered in Siberia, and he’s being told not to insult the Marxists. But then the Lithuanian diaspora attacked him because he didn’t place the play in Lithuania and make it clear that this play was about the partisan movement. They felt that was insulting and unpatriotic. All this was typical for his generation of writers, who were presenting their work in the Fifties or the Sixties, even the Seventies.
Why do I call my first book with Peter Lang Vanished Lands? Because lands really did vanish. They were not on the maps. And while I was doing this work, I realized that we actually had different maps. In the United States, our maps showed this enormous red mass that was the USSR. You had Vilnius, Tallinn, Riga, but no outline making it clear that they were different republics. The whole thing about the “brotherly republics”? That did not exist in what was exported to the West. It was just this huge mass of Russian-speaking USSR, monolithic, everyone’s the same. Whereas inside the USSR, to placate people, you had a different map that had lines tracing the Baltic States, the brotherly republic of Ukraine, and so on. It was very manipulative, what they did.
You really didn’t exist outside Lithuania. We felt that. Among Americans, we couldn’t say, “I’m a Lithuanian,” because, well, what’s that? It doesn’t exist. You made it up. You know what they used to hear? “You’re a Lutheran.” It was so non-existent as an identity that they assumed you were saying “I’m a Protestant Lutheran.”
I think writers in my book, like Antanas Šileika or Daiva Markelytė, talk about it in their work and in their interviews – about that double consciousness where you’re in this very strong, intense diaspora community that’s imparting this cultural memory upon your shoulders… Of a country you’ve never seen! And you’re supposed to fight and advocate for this country, and you have nothing to point to. There is nothing there. After Lithuania declared independence, my grandfather asked me to come to the consulate office to help clean out the old files that were taking up space. Everything they had had been frozen in time since 1939 – literally, because they had no money to replace anything. You could film an old movie there. I remember going through the files. I was looking at what were the news my grandfather had been collecting over the years. He was collecting anything that had any information about Lithuania. Some of these articles had, like, one passing reference. Could be a whole article about Jewish borscht, and there might be one sentence in it, like “Jewish people lived in Lithuania for 600 years and liked to eat borscht.” Just that! And that would qualify to be saved in the file.
I think that’s also what Heritage, Connection, Writing is about – it’s this struggle to hold onto identity. I think the story of Maria Williams was very interesting. She was adopted as a baby into a Lithuanian family and completely absorbed this Lithuanian identity as her own and is now writing about that. It kind of also tells you something about how much it is genetic, and how much it is something that’s handed to you.
Nature or nurture, right?
Yeah. Turns out you can nurture a Lithuanian!
a novel by Laima Vincė based on Matilda Olkinaitė’s life (independently published, 2025).
Speaking of other Lithuanian voices – Matilda Olkinaitė. When did you discover her life story and why did it inspire you?
I saw Rokiškis Community Theater director Neringa Danienė’s play about the young Lithuanian Jewish poet Matilda Olkinaitė. Sitting in the audience, I was deeply moved when I heard Matilda’s poems being spoken by the actress. Her poetry really spoke to me. One thing the theater group also did is they collected funds and found, based on stories of survivors in the area, the place in the forest where Matilda and her family were murdered. They cleared it out and put up a memorial honoring the family in Hebrew and Lithuanian.
I got a hold of Matilda’s original diary and notebook of poems through Irena Veisaitė. I spent the following winter in China translating Matilda’s texts from pictures I had taken on my phone. Together with people from the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, we published two books, in Lithuanian and in English, of Matilda’s diary, her poems, and documents pertaining to her life. Then I worked with Arc Publications in England, and we put together a little chapbook of Matilda’s selected poems. And then I wrote this novel. It took me five years to write.
All of that work I did researching the life of Matilda Olkinaitė was motivated by a few sentences that I read in her diary, where she expresses her disapproval of poetry by authors like Salomėja Nėris or Liudas Gira and vows that she will never write that kind propagandistic poetry. At 18 years old, she is in despair as she realizes that she can’t publish her first selection of poems, which was a dream of hers. And then her diary ends on January 31, 1941. Historians believe she was murdered in July 1941. I remembered myself at that age, when I was writing my first poems and seeing myself as a poet. If I had written my first collection of poems and was being arrested and about to be taken to the forest to be executed, I would’ve wanted someone to find my poems one day and publish them for me.
If you’re reconstructing a real-life story as you write a work of fiction, are you more concerned with giving the story a voice, or are you taking some kind of another creative direction?
My goal was to give her life story a voice. I was very careful not to stray too far from her story, but of course there were many scenes that I made up. There were people in her life that I know very little about, only from what’s in Matilda’s diary, but I had to make them feel like real people, really flesh them out. I consider That Unspoken Word to be life writing. It’s a new concept that’s about reconstructing a person’s life from the available fragments – you’re looking at texts that were written very much in the moment, you’re taking that material and you’re processing it creatively to write something that could be a work of literary non-fiction, but you could also take it one step further and make it into a novel.
You spoke of translating Matilda Olkinaitė in your conversation with Jonas Zdanys. You said that “there has to be some sort of a connection, a meeting of the minds between me and the poet. Otherwise, the translation doesn’t quite work.” This is interesting to me because I don’t always feel like that when I’m translating someone. Aren’t understanding and skill enough to make the translation work?
Probably, for a pretty good translation. But if you want to do the kind of translation that’s gonna knock the socks off of your reader, you better have that deeper connection. It’s like love. You fall in love – it just happens. For me poetry translation is this really uncanny thing. If I can really connect with the poet, I will read a poem in Lithuanian and hear it in my head in English and then just put it into words by listening to the original. My method only works with the poets I deeply connect with, like Nijolė Miliauskaitė, Vytautas Bložė, or Birutė Pūkelevičiūtė.
I have to say, translating Matilda Olkinaitė’s poetry was challenging because on the surface level, her style of writing seems very light and girly – but it’s really not. Underneath that, every symbol resonates very deeply with Jewish history as well as with her constant worry over the Holocaust and the sense of her own impending death. You have to translate those poems in a way that captures the lightness but also brings in all that shadow. I’m proud of those translations because I feel that I was able to pull it off.
Oh, how many have gathered
In my home of mourning.
I hold an infant in my arms,
And my infant—is Death.
[…]
All around me are lilies, white, white,
And faces wearing bright smiles.
But my hands are so cold.
A black ribbon is tied in my hair.
Excerpts of an untitled poem from Matilda Olkinaitė’s diary, November 14, 1940. Translated by Laima Vincė.
How did you get into translation? Was there any formal training involved?
I first started translating when I was an undergraduate student at Rutgers. I did translations of German poetry. As a graduate student at Columbia University, I took William Weaver’s translation seminar and learned a lot of the principles from him. I started translating Lithuanian poetry in the 1980s and 1990s – Sigitas Geda, Marcelijus Martinaitis, Judita Vaičiūnaitė, and many other talented poets. And my MFA at Columbia was in poetry. When you know how rhyme works, how rhythm works, what happens when you vary the number of syllables in a poetic line, enjambment versus end-stop, you internalize a lot of those skills. All of that machinery is working when you’re coming to translate a poem. However, to answer your question, first I started translating and publishing translations of Lithuanian poetry and then I took a few courses to help me improve my skills as a translator. In my final year as an undergraduate at Rutgers University, I worked closely with the American poet Alicia Ostriker to fine-tune my translation of The Ballads of Kukutis [Kukučio baladės] by Marcelijus Martinaitis.
Do you consider Lithuania a postcolonial society?
I know there are some Lithuanian theorists who are very much interested in that idea. I think that was true of the post-Soviet period, which I consider to be up until the early 2000s, when Lithuania joined the European Union. You could argue that those first decades of independence – when Russian culture provided a very strong point of reference and influence – as well as the writers of that time were postcolonial. But we have totally shifted to a global context since 2004. Cheaper airline tickets allowed people easier access to travel, exchange students came here and influenced local people’s lives – I don’t think that postcolonialism is as relevant anymore. Now we’re looking at Russia not as a source of cultural stimulation, but as a menace and a terrorist country that generates great misery in many places. We don’t romanticize the colonial power, which is a part of postcolonialism. It was a relevant argument in the 1990s and early 2000s, but I don’t see it anymore because the context has shifted so deeply.
I think we’re in a very interesting time. Look at Poland and how strong it has become. Ten, fifteen years ago, Poland was known as the country that exported plumbers to the UK. Now, I was just reading Donald Tusk’s statement that since Polish children were pulled into Jeffrey Epstein’s child trafficking ring, they’re going to dig through those files and prosecute criminals, which the USA won’t even do. Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, the Baltic states – I think that all of these countries are coming online in a very powerful way. I think this is going to be a very strong region culturally, economically, even militarily – if we can pull together to defend ourselves.
And there’s America, which used to be a really wonderful place. I love America, but I don’t know how it will ever bounce back from this level of depravity that we now see.
We spoke a bit about the recent protests in Lithuania, a lot of which have to do with the ruling coalition’s attempts to increase their control over the state broadcaster, and you asked me what I think about them. I see the alarmed response and the civic upheaval these parliament motions have caused in light of our shared postcolonial trauma. Centuries of oppression have repeatedly challenged our right to speak, from the tsars who punished us with a 40-year ban on all Lithuanian press, encouraging us to use a Cyrillic alphabet, even to read in our own language, to the Soviets who sought to rewrite history and silence dissenting voices, whose desperate attempt to regain control of the country in 1991 was carried out by seizing media buildings and the public broadcaster. Someone exerting control over the narrative as the public refuses to abide feels like a very familiar situation for us. That’s how our memory and postmemory work. For many people, that’s a hill to die on.
That’s certainly true, but there’s also another part to that argument. If you’re following the media, you’re gonna see that there’s a totalitarian playbook, probably created in Russia with the help of multinational oligarchs, that pretty much follows the same progression: weaponize democracy, make people apathetic about voting, go after the national radio and television, take away that voice and replace it with propaganda, and weaken the government. We’ve seen it happen so many times. In the US, for example, our real source of news is National Public Radio and public television, because they’re not biased. It’s not like Fox News, which is basically a business. The very first thing that Trump and the Republicans went after was NPR and PBS, pulling their funding. The first step is always to go after the media.
You know, these thugs are not smart enough to come up with this by themselves. They’re following a playbook. They steal precious national symbols, weaponizing them to symbolize their own bigotry and hatred.
Maybe it’s also up to us to sometimes set aside our own comfort level and step in and take responsibility. I think about this tiny little island off the coast of Maine, accessible only by ferry, where we lived for many years when my children were growing up. It was an old fishing island, but when we were a young family, a lot of artists and writers were moving out there, so I guess that was the attraction. In the 1990s, the local population in Maine was shifting from the traditional lobstermen and fishermen to cool, artsy people who all belonged to the city of Portland, which had governance over these islands. They would do things like raise property taxes for the residents of these islands, since they’re all technically living on waterfront properties, even though the islands were underfunded, had no police, etc. The islands decided they wanted to declare independence from the city of Portland and become a town to manage their own taxes. Some of them succeeded to vote independent and some did not. The island we lived on, Peaks Island, tried to vote for it twice, but didn’t succeed – too many people worked in Portland and were connected to the government.
But the island next to us became independent. I would talk to these people and see what was going on there. I learned that the population on that island was so small – like, a couple hundred people – that at some point everybody had to serve in the government office. You might just be a housewife sitting at home with your children, but your turn would come up, and you’d have to go into the government. I thought to myself, well, that’s how democracy actually works! Everybody takes their turn. In a small country like Lithuania, what if all of us stepped up and said – this is my turn to go into parliament, this is my turn to be a leader? What a difference that would make. I know I’m guilty of this – it’s one thing to sit back and criticize the people who are in government. But what if we started thinking about government differently? It’s not “They have to do it for us,” but “We’re gonna go and do it ourselves.”
