In an article published on the website of the literary and arts magazine Literatura ir Menas, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas shares his memories of the late Fira Bramson.

Esther’s Scissors
by Mindaugas Kvietkauskas

I will call her by a biblical name, Esther. Now I may. That was how the rabbi called her to eternity so recently his prayer uttered before the first three handfuls of earth were sprinkled on her shrunken body, cut off from the world of the living.

In life it was different: she was Fira, sometimes Firochka. I smile when I think how unrecognizably the name of the queen of Persia, meaning morning star, has changed in our lands, in the daily language of the Yiddish dialect washed by the great Slavic languages. But now that she has entered a time of more perfect reckoning, Fira has again become Esther, the daughter of Israel, the morning star, Ester bat Israel.

Fira Bramson in 1949

Full piece in Lithuanian here.