by Evaldas Labanauskas 15min.lt

When you put “Sergejus Kanovičius” into a search engine, it comes back with “poet, essayist, translation…” There are also references to Grigoriy Kanovich, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday. The latter is a Writer with a capital W, and Sergejus also talks about his Father (also capitalized).

When I read one of your father’s works, “Žydų parkas” [Jewish Park], I got the impression that it was a monument to Litvak culture and civilization, spanning 700 years but now dead. What is the current situation of Litvaks in Lithuania? Do you think this culture/civilization is being reborn?

There are people who express the opinion there are certain parallels between the project which I lead and my father’s work. If one is a material monument to the culture of the Jews of Lithuania, then my father’s work is a literary monument to an extinct ethnos. I think the Jewish community in Lithuania is experiencing a period of transformation. The word “reborn” might be more appropriate if we were talking about what happened 30 years ago, when there were 20,000 Jews in Lithuania, but today there are barely 3,000 Jews in Lithuania. Any sort of activity is encouraging, but claiming there is some kind of very bright future–I, as a revolutionary pessimist, would refrain from that sort of evaluation. Honestly, I am very glad about what is happening, and as much as I’m able I contribute to the activities of the Jewish community, but… while there is a lot of action, there is the question: is there a future?

Full interview in Lithuanian here.