Culture

Laima Vincė. Ten years ago, two couples met in Jamaica to spend their vacation together. New York-based Lithuanian-born artist Ray Bartkus and his wife, Ina, a fashion designer, flew from New York to Jamaica, while Algirdas Kumža, signatory of Lithuania’s Declaration of Independence, and his wife, Toma, and their two …

Laima Vincė. My first Lithuanian folk dance festival – as veterans of Lithuanian folk dance festivals like to say – took place in Cleveland in 1984. I danced with “Liepsna” from Elizabeth, New Jersey. We’d dance in the church hall, just like all over the United States and Canada, young …

Reminiscences of Bernard Terway about his youth from 1940-1959 in Seltzer City, Pennsylvania, composed by Sandy Baksys. In June 1940, when I was just five weeks old, my father Joseph Tirva, 45, was buried alive in an accident in a “bootleg” coal mine. Dad’s so-called “coal hole” couldn’t have been …

Živilė Gimbutas. This memoir opens with a stroll along Freedom Avenue in Kaunas during the author’s childhood, around 1938, and a return to the bustling city center in recent times, around 2000. Turning on Daukantas Street, Dita and her mother pass Swans Pharmacy and come to the garden of the …

“Destination Lithuanian America,” the five-year-long heritage mapping project, is coming to a close. This January, project director Augustinas Žemaitis added his last 100 discovered heritage sites to the 750-site compendium. The map covers Lithuanian-American churches, cemeteries, clubs, monuments, museums, and locations otherwise falling under the rubric of “Lithuanian heritage.” It …

By Kendall Svengalis. LITHUANIAN HERITAGE September / October 2021 Over the course of its 112-year existence, Draugas (The Friend), the Chicago-based Lithuanian-Catholic newspaper, has bene ted from the contributions and tireless efforts of several hundreds of editors, writers, and staff members. Beginning in 1918, its operations, both administrative and editorial, …

By June Molloy. LITHUANIAN HERITAGE July / August 2021 The last few years have been difficult for us all. The Covid pandemic has left no one untouched, impacting all walks of life in every corner of the globe. People have been forced to work from home, or to suddenly home-school …

By Kęstutis Civinskas. LITHUANIAN HERITAGE May / June 2021 The year is 1899. The world is at the doorstep of a new century. The final decade of the old century is described as gay, merry, and optimistic, even though there is economic depression in the US and no fewer than …

By Mary-Lou Weisman. LITHUANIAN HERITAGE March / April 2021 For more than half a century, writer and cartoonist Al Jaffee has been gleefully putting a premature end to the innocence of American youth in the pages of MAD, this country’s first popular satiric magazine. Suddenly, parents were hypocrites, teachers were …

Two Brothers Went to War, Only One Came Home Neither Is Forgotten Sandy Baksys. Some 80 years ago, Julius and George Sneckus went to fight for their parents’ adopted homeland in World War II. The only children of first-wave Lithuanian immigrants Petronele (Nellie) Matukaite and Jurgis (George) Charles Snieckus, the …