A Jewish City in Translation: placing Vilna in Vilnius

For several centuries, Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania, was a hallmark of Jewish civilization in Europe. Known as Vilna in Yiddish and Hebrew languages, Jewish Vilna was a cosmopolis, bound to Jerusalem due to its spiritual strength and intellectual scope. Eighty years after the destruction of Vilna during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania (and more than three decades after Lithuania’s independence from the Soviet/Russian yoke), the city’s Jewish cultural and intellectual legacy is still difficult, if not impossible, to place in contemporary Vilnius. Essentially, most of what speaks of the Jewish essence of the city comes via translation; be it an act of imagination. Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, scholar of Vilnius literature, writer, and translator from Yiddish to Lithuanian and Laimonas Briedis, scholar of cultural geography, and author of Vilnius: City of Strangers confront questions related to the national ownership and cultural/linguistic appropriation of the lost world of Vilna.

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