Delivery of a paper like The New York Times has been a thing of the past for us for many years now. But last Friday, when I picked up The Wall Street Journal, the Times was on the newsstand seemingly staring back at me, so I impulsively picked that up, too. The Times was a […]
In memoriam Irena Veisaitė: ‘I never doubted that I was Jewish’
176
Irena Veisaitė / LRT
Last Friday, Irena Veisaitė, a Jewish-Lithuanian literary scholar and Holocaust survivor, passed away at the age of 92. She had Covid-19. LRT.lt presents excerpts from interviews with Veisaitė collected in the book by Aurimas Švedas, Life Should Be Transparent.
Born in Kaunas in 1928, Veisaitė was a known intellectual, theatre scholar, and human rights activist.
Veisaitė s mother died in the Kaunas Ghetto during World War Two. She herself was later sheltered by a non-Jewish family.
After the war, Veisaitė earned a doctorate in Leningrad in 1963 with a dissertation on the poetry of Heinrich Heine and was a lecturer at Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences from 1953 to 1997.