When Maryte Racys and Rachel Mines first met over coffee at the Cafe Calabria on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, they immediately discovered they had plenty in common. Not only were both translators, and not only did both stem from the Žemaitija region of Lithuania, but they had both published books in the spring of 2020 – and were therefore deprived of their book launches by the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. So the two translators decided to celebrate their Lithuanian heritage and and their books with a delayed launch, “From the Ashes: Two Endangered European Languages in Translation.” The event took place on June 9th in Vancouver’s Italian Cultural Centre.
Maryte Racys is the great-granddaughter of Julija Žymantienė (popularly known as Žemaitė).
Racys presented her book (co-translated with Violeta Kelertas), Marriage for Love: A Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Woman’s Fight for Justice, which is the first book-length translation of Žemaitė’s writings into English.
Rachel Mines, the daughter of Holocaust survivors with Latvian and Lithuanian ancestry, whose Lithuanian citizenship was reinstated last year, has been translating Yiddish literature since 2013. Mines presented her book, “The Rivals” and Other Stories by Jonah Rosenfeld, a collection of short stories by the early 20th-century Ukraine-born Yiddish writer.
Although on the surface Žemaitė and Rosenfeld appear to have little in common, both were self-taught writers from impoverished backgrounds who, in their writings, supported disenfranchised people – women, workers, poor and marginalized individuals – and wrote in the languages they loved.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many European languages and literatures came under attack. Lithuanian was suppressed by Russian and later Soviet occupiers. Yiddish was virtually eradicated from European soil when most of its speakers, East European Jews, were murdered during the Holocaust.
The evening was a tribute to the rich cultural and linguistic heritage of both languages. Proceeds from donations and book sales were donated to the Maple Hope Foundation, which provides medical support and other assistance to Ukraine.
The two books are available here: Marriage for Love, The Rivals and Other Stories
