Tomas Venclova remembers Irena Veisaitė: her house was the most hospitable apartment in Vilnius and she herself was a bridge between the Lithuanian and Jewish communities.

Irena Veisaitė’s house used to be full of young people, and Irena was the easiest to find a common language with young people. He has always been able to understand the opinions of others and, perhaps more difficult and important, to feel the emotional states of others as his own. These are the necessary traits of a good teacher, and Irena was a poorly trained teacher.

He often visited his house, more precisely, the apartment, in a huge building from the early twentieth century. That house is located on Basanavičiaus street, from where the views of the old town open. Probably the same building where Romain Gary, a French and Eastern European writer, spent his childhood; In one way or another, he described those houses in his most famous tale, The Promise of Dawn. A little funny monument was erected in front of him recently, in which a boy tries to eat a kitchen. This is the scene from the aforementioned book “The Promise of Dawn”.

There is a more official commemorative plaque on the wall of the building, commemorating the founders of the Lithuanian Social Democracy. This also agreed with Irena, at least in part. He did not belong to the Social Democracy, he did not belong to any party, but he was not on the right anyway.

The wide and even monumental stairs, which I remember as always under repair, led to perhaps the most hospitable apartment in Vilnius, an important point on the cultural map of the city. In part, it was even a museum. Here he saw photographs and portraits of Irena’s friends, including her close relative Alexander Strom, a famous Lithuanian and American lawyer and political scientist. Writers and philosophers, journalists and theater people, diplomats and musicians, teachers and high school students came almost every day. People of different nations and quite different worldviews came from Lithuania and other Baltic countries, especially Estonia, Poland, as well as England, Germany, and Russia. And in the culture of those lands, Irena was not less oriented, sometimes even better than a common English, German or Russian. There was talk of new books and performances, exhibitions and concerts, films and travels and, of course, political news: from Lithuania, from Europe and from around the world.

Thoughts crossed in a dynamic atmosphere, only undemocratic and intolerant views were unacceptable; well, those people just didn’t come to Irena’s house. Dating began, often brought beautiful fruit. It was a place where ideas and cultural projects arose. Irena, I would say, was a kind of Lithuanian ambassador who did not fit within the framework of political protocol. His identity was heterogeneous, multi-layered; by the way, this is no exception in our time. I believe that such a complex identity will soon be a feature of the majority.

Irena was a Lithuanian and a Lithuanian patriot and, at the same time, a Jew, it affected her fate. He was one of the few survivors of the Kaunas ghetto. A very young man arrived, fresh from the school bench. She was rescued by Lithuanians, first of all Stefanija Ladygienė, the widow of a general in the Lithuanian army who was shot by the Enkavėdists. Irena, like no other, understood the horrors of the entire period, as well as all the confusion.

She was perhaps the only person in Lithuania who was able to build bridges between the Jewish and Lithuanian communities. The extraordinary gift of empathy, something very rare in our time, and absolute sincerity and decency helped here. Irena perfectly understood the problems of Lithuania and Lithuanians, all the disasters that Lithuanians went through and their national aspirations. He knew how to enjoy the achievements of Lithuanian culture and art more than a frequent Lithuanian. He perceived both our traumas and nationalistic phobias, but he knew how to speak of them in a civilized and invulnerable way.

After the war, Irena studied in Moscow and Petrapilis, which was then called Leningrad. It must be said that their teachers were often the heirs of the great culture there; not all were destroyed by Stalin. Thus, he became a Lithuanian-Russian border man. He defended his dissertation on German studies: This is the new frontier. For many years he taught German and Western literature in Vilnius, as well as theater history. Speaking of Lesing or Brecht, he gave an idea of ​​how to deal with the inhuman times that he himself had lived. He became perhaps the most competent and intelligent theater critic not only in Lithuania but also in the Baltic countries. He supported all the phenomena in the field that seemed fruitful to him and never agreed to praise social realism.

She was especially close to Estonia: her husband was the famous Estonian director Grigory Kromanov. He had many friends in Estonia, including the world famous composer Arvo Pärt.

I owe a lot to Irena: she was a moral guide for me, a support in moments of weakness and just an older friend. It did not belong to open dissidents, but it was part of their backs. It belonged to those intellectuals without whose support and assistance the dissident movement would not have existed. In Russia, those people include, say, the physicist Sergei Kapitz or the famous singer and poet Bulat Okujawa.

After his release, he headed the Open Lithuania Foundation for many years, as well as being a curator of the Thomas Mann Cultural Center in Nida. George Soros said in vain that Lithuania first associates it with Irena’s face. The Open Society Foundation of Lithuania, as far as I know, has published around eight hundred books, which are extremely important for the democratization of our country and the introduction of European customs.

Irena’s two books are unique. One of them is Lithuanian, their co-author is Aurimas Švedas, the other is English, the co-author is Yves Plasseraud. These books open up to us the world of Jewish culture in Lithuania, which no longer exists, but first of all the post-war world from which today’s Lithuania was born with great difficulties and contradictions.

Irena Veisaitė was a European moral authority. It has created a mature civil society not only in Lithuania, but throughout our region. We lost a really great man. For me, it is the loss of a loved one, no one will ever replace him.