From Institute News No. 4 June 2004
New Research
Beloved Profession – Archives, Life-writing, and the Impossibility of Memoir

Dr. Julija Šukys

In the years between 1941 and 1944, a university librarian in German-occupied Vilnius (Vilna) was granted permission to enter the Jewish ghetto supposedly to collect library books borrowed before ghettoization.  Instead of books, the librarian more often brought out people, placing children in orphanages and hiding adults in the library.  In addition to saving the lives she could, she assisted the ghetto resistance by providing its members with weapons, food, documents, and medicine.  The librarian worked with scholars in the ghetto to preserve important manuscripts, sacred texts and documents, routinely smuggling these rare texts out, and hiding them.  In 1944 her activities were detected.  She was arrested, tortured, and interned at Dachau concentration camp.  She survived Dachau and moved to Paris after the war, where she lived and worked as a librarian, which she called the ‘beloved profession.’  In 1966 she was honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, the first Lithuanian to receive this distinction. She died in 1970. Her name was Ona Šimaitė.

Šimaitė’s body of writing is enormous.  Throughout her life she corresponded with other librarians, poets, novelists, friends, admirers and strangers, occasionally producing as many as sixty letters a day.  These letters are now archived in libraries throughout the world, scattered across three countries and seven institutions.  Her correspondence tells a remarkable story, one that challenges a number of common assumptions in scholarly thinking about memory, writing’s importance as a life-structuring practice, and the literariness of private texts.  A major figure in the history of the Holocaust, but a native speaker of Lithuanian, a language with approximately 3.5 million native speakers, Šimaitė’s archive is literally illegible for the vast majority of scholars: only a small portion of her archive is written in Russian or French, the rest consists of Lithuanian language texts.  This uneasy space between languages has led to a neglect of Šimaitė’s story.  Her writings have never been studied, collected, or edited.  This is the work I have undertaken to do.

Šimaitė’s correspondence and diaries are remarkable in that she rarely mentions the events in Nazi-occupied Vilnius that stamped her life so decisively, or the actions with which she saved the lives of others.  During the war there are only masked and obscure references (she refers to “my errands,” to “those people,” to nothing concrete and to no one by name); the authorities had her under constant and careful surveillance and the justified fear of spies caused her to repress and silence crucial aspects of her experience.  Yet even after the war, Šimaitė continued to avoid writing of that time.  Although she was fastidious about ensuring the survival of her letters and written traces – in her correspondence with fellow librarians after the war, she requested that her letters and articles be safeguarded in Lithuanian archives – these traces contain few clues about the events that have secured Šimaitė a place in historical recollection.

Throughout Šimaitė’s postwar correspondence there is evidence of numerous requests for her to write a memoir, but despite her promises and intentions to do so, Šimaitė left us without completing the promised text.  But this is not to say that she left us without an inheritance.  On the contrary, Šimaitė left an impressive archive of her life’s writing: a collection of hundreds and possibly thousands of letters, scores of post-war notebooks, various articles and countless press clippings. Faced with a massive record that does not contain the single narrative everyone begged her to write, we must ask: how should we read this proliferation of papers?  What can a literary scholar learn about the practices of remembrance and life-writing from this archive?  What clues can we find within this mountain of documents as to how to proceed in our interpretation of this intriguing yet frustrating collection of personal writings?

One thing is for certain:  Šimaitė did not write to be published or recorded; she wrote to write.  In a recent article of great importance to the hermeneutics of authorial practices, Klaus Hurlebusch has distinguished between two kinds of writers: those he calls “work-genetic,” who imagine and try to accomplish a completed, perfected literary work; and those he calls “psycho-genetic,” for whom “texts are no longer the goals of the writing process; they are merely the results left behind, transitional stages” of a process of growth and self-development (“Understanding the Author’s Compositional Method:  Prolegomenon to a Hermeneutics of Genetic Writing.”  Text 13, 2000, 55-101).  Major examples of “psycho-genetics” for Hurlebusch are Montaigne and Valéry, but I believe Šimaitė should be included in this category.  Šimaitė writes – incessantly, obsessively – not in order to complete a work (a memoir, for example; on the contrary, she did not write such a text in spite of the many requests), but as part of a process of life-development and self-discovery.  What Hurlebusch has called “psycho-genetic writing” has also been called life-writing.  A technical term used by literary scholars since the 1980s, ‘life-writing’ designates private writing (diaries, letters) produced not as literature, but treated as such.  The study of such texts has allowed for the incorporation of marginalized modes and voices into literary studies (women, prisoners, native peoples).   My project is to treat and read Šimaitė’s archive as a record of a proliferating process of  psycho-genetics and life-writing. 

Writing and life for Šimaitė were inextricably, and sometimes painfully, intertwined.  She had very few ‘real friends’ (with whom she met face to face), but a huge number of ‘paper friends,’ with whom she corresponded.   She considered her diary-keeping a means of conversing with herself, and letter-writing was her primary mode of conversing with others.  After the war she found herself severely limited by sickness and chronic pain (which she called her ‘gift from the Gestapo’).  But through writing she lived a rich and complex life. She led what I call a ‘paper life,’ one lived through, in and for writing.  Reading, writing and research were her life’s blood and breath. 

Once we begin to read Šimaitė’s archive for what it contains, we find the story of a solitary life in exile, and of a woman who continues on after torture, loss, and sorrow.  We also find other life-stories in this archive, layered onto Šimaitė’s.  These are tales of lives plagued by despair, sickness, murder, imprisonment, forced labor, and deportation, many of which would be lost were it not for this correspondence.  Šimaitė stood at the center of an international constellation of characters – hers was a global existence avant la lettre (also a global existence through the letter).  To use an image from Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) her correspondence is rhizomorphous (like an iris or an ant colony), spreading, splitting off and multiplying from within.  One letter begets a response, which causes another letter to be written, which results in the addition of a new correspondent, which requires more letter-writing.  Even a lapse in letter-writing produces letters – notes of concern for the silent one, which in turn produce guilt on her part, which in turn necessitates the writing of an apology, then a response to the apology, and so on, and so on.  This is why Šimaitė’s story contains so many other stories within it, like that of the publisher Tayda Devėnaitė, whose suicide devastated and confused Šimaitė.  And like that of the poet Kazys Jakubėnas who, like so many other dissident Soviet writers, was erased from history after his execution by the KGB in 1950.

As the work of scholars like Natalie Zemon Davis (Fiction in the Archives) and Hugh Trevor-Roper (History and Imagination) has shown, the work of writing a life (or a constellation of lives, as is the case here) from the archives is never simply a matter of recovering a lost voice and remembering a forgotten life.  Like Šimaitė herself, the scholar is always in the position of intermediary, both facilitating the dialogue of the historical life with the living, and by him- or herself engaging in a dialogue with the traces, silences and memories of the historical voice in question.  Accordingly, in addition to a thorough investigation and collation of Šimaitė’s papers, my scholarly practice must involve the exploration of innovative discursive modes.  During the past two years of my work on a book-length manuscript on the life, death and work of the assassinated Algerian author, Tahar Djaout, I have been developing an approach to academic writing as memorialization and dialogue.  My book on Djaout not only commemorates the assassination of this outspoken writer, gunned down in 1993 for his ideas, but it attempts to clear a space for the dead writer’s words to resurface from under the weight of the elegiac writing that has become his legacy in the decade since his death.  I shall continue this approach with my investigation of Šimaitė’s writing.  My project will produce two texts.  The first will comprise an edition of Šimaitė’s writings – edited, translated into English, and annotated.  The second text will tell the story of this paper life.  It will read Šimaitė’s life as that of a writer, and her texts as its record.

Not all Šimaitė’s writings have found their way into archives. Before my arrival in Jerusalem I knew that in addition to documents already safeguarded at Yad Vashem – Šimaitė’s letters to Dr. Marc Dworzetski and her ‘righteous file,’ consisting of testimony about her actions in the Vilna ghetto –  there existed a collection of Šimaitė letters in private hands.  A major part of my research during the tenure of my fellowship at the Institute has focused on a collection of Šimaitė’s letters written between 1960 and 1965 to a young Jewish-Lithuanian writer named Icchokas Meras.  With the help of the author himself, I tracked down a set of these documents in Jerusalem. Almost forty years after their conception, copies of Šimaitė’s letters to Meras have been added to Yad Vashem’s archive, where they will be available to future researchers.

Dr. Julija Šukys received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto in 2001.  From 2001-2003 she held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University for a project on the life, death and writing of the assassinated Algerian author, Tahar Djaout. Her book-length manuscript, entitled The Underground Passage, is nearing completion.  Dr. Šukys holds three fellowships for 2003-2004 to support her research on Ona Šimaitė.  In addition to the Yad Vashem Postdoctoral Fellowship, she is the Immerman-Weinstein Fellow at YIVO and the Peter Hayes Fellow at the Holocaust Educational Foundation.  She has published in PMLA, Literary Research/Recherche littéraire, Alphabet City, and has articles forthcoming in Culture, Theory and Critique and The Journal of Human Rights.  She lives and writes in Sydney, Australia.