19 - Czesław Miłosz and Berkeley

Summary

HINSEY: In March 1977, after your testimony in Washington and speaking engagements across the East Coast, you arrived in Chicago—

VENCLOVA: I reached Chicago in the first half of March and stayed in my uncle's house. Uncle Pijus was my father's eldest brother. The fate of my father's family was quite typical for Lithuania. Five brothers and three sisters survived into adulthood; several other siblings died early, as often happened in peasant families—I don't even know how many, nor their names. Pijus, the eldest, was a high school teacher; he emigrated in 1944. Juozas, the second oldest, perished in a Siberian (actually, a Kazakhstani) mine as a Soviet prisoner—we have talked about him before. My father was the third in line. The two youngest brothers, Pranas and Kazys, remained in Lithuania. Pranas, a veterinarian, died of a badly treated appendicitis immediately following the war, and Kazys, an engineer, was still living in Kaunas in 1977. All the sisters, Konstancija, Izabelė, and Agota, had married and remained in their native countryside, and Izabelė escaped deportation by a hairbreadth.

In the United States, both Pijus and his wife spent the second part of their lives working in a packing plant. This exhausting and unrewarding work— which was completely at odds with their education and ambitions—nevertheless enabled them to buy a comfortable house, which would have been out of their reach in Lithuania. This was a typical Lithuanian émigré story. Pijus contributed to the Lithuanian Social-Democrat (i.e., strictly anti-Communist) press in Chicago. He was not in contact with my father, but I was surprised to find Father's works in his personal library: Soviet Lithuanian books were easily available in Chicago, in striking contrast with the reverse situation in the old country.

Chicago unquestionably possessed the largest concentration of Lithuanian diaspora anywhere. It started to develop in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Lithuanian émigrés, many of them illiterate or semiilliterate, found employment in the city's notorious stockyards. Upton Sinclair rather vividly described their experiences in The Jungle. The book was translated into Lithuanian more than once, and I was well-acquainted with the work. These émigrés established Lithuanian businesses, newspapers, and publishing houses, many of which survived until the 1950s, to which were added new ventures created by the next wave of émigrés.