20 - Travels: Exile as Good Luck

Summary

HINSEY: In fall 1977, following the decree revoking your Soviet citizenship, you moved to Los Angeles. There you took up a short-term position at UCLA—

VENCLOVA: After losing my Soviet citizenship and receiving political asylum, I was cut off from Lithuania—and from the entire Soviet bloc, for that matter— but that was to be expected and was, in a certain sense, even welcome. I could still exchange letters and phone calls with my family, who, it seemed, were being left alone by the authorities. That said, some anonymous individuals telephoned and insulted my mother, but she reacted with perfect calm, and soon this type of intimidation ceased. “I got used to being harassed during the Nazi occupation, when the callers accused me of being the wife of a Communist traitor,” she said later. “Now, they accuse me of being the mother of an anti-Communist traitor. For all I know, they might even be the same people, just a few decades older.”

That said, I was rather reconciled to my American experience. I liked the cliffs and quasi-tropical streets of Santa Monica. It might sound ridiculous, but I was rather thrilled by the fact that Lillian Gish and Alfred Hitchcock lived practically next door, that Thomas Mann had spent part of his exile in Pacific Palisades, and that the nearby suburb of Tarzana had been built on the site of a ranch belonging to Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of Tarzan.

My flat, very modest by local standards but comfortable enough for me, was on Eighteenth Street, several blocks from Wilshire Boulevard; I could easily walk to the seashore, where, incidentally, I used to run into Lithuanian émigrés from 1944. Los Angeles's Lithuanian community was quite large (second only to Chicago), relatively prosperous and vibrant.

Marija Gimbutas was one of its central figures. She was a friend of Miłosz and Roman Jakobson, and an authority on Slavic, Baltic, and Indo- European archaeology (her controversial theory of the matriarchal origins of European—and Lithuanian—culture brought her world fame in feminist circles). She had a beautiful house in Topanga Canyon, which I visited on a number of occasions.