About
Dr. Laima Vincė Sruoginis, an established author, academic, and life-long part of the North American Lithuanian diaspora, courageously faces Lithuania’s difficult historical legacy in her ground-breaking book, Vanished Lands: Memory and Postmemory in North American Lithuanian Diaspora Literature. She has researched her community’s refugee ancestors, drawing both from personal interviews and dusty academic sources, confronting uncomfortable truths.
Laima Vincė writes in the genres of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Over the past few decades, writing under the name, Laima Vincė, she has published over twenty books in the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom. She is also an award winning literary translator from Lithuanian into English. She has published an anthology of contemporary Lithuanian poetry (Raw Amber, Poetry Salzburg), and two collections of poetry in English translation by Lithuanian National Poet, Marcelijus Martinaitis (The Ballads of Kukutis, published by Arc Publications and K. B., The Suspect, published by White Pines Press) among several dozen other translated books. She has researched the life of Matilda Olkinaitė, a Lithuanian Jewish poet killed in the Holocaust, and translated her diary and poetry into English.
Dr. Laima Vincė Sruoginis earned a PhD in Humanities from Vilnius University, an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of New Hampshire, and a BA in English and German Literature from Rutgers University. She is the recipient of two Fulbright grants, a National Endowment for the Arts grant in Literature, a PEN Translation Fund grant, an Academy of American Poets Award in Poetry, an Association of the Advancement of Baltic Studies dissertation grant and book subvention grant, among other honors. She teaches in the English Department at the University of Southern Maine.
Featured Work
Vanished Lands: Memory and Postmemory in North American Lithuanian Diaspora Literature
At the end of World War II, thousands of Lithuanian and Litvak survivors fled the terror of Soviet-occupied Lithuania and found shelter in the displaced persons camps of the Allied territories. By 1949, most had emigrated to North America. They brought with them opposing narratives about the Nazi occupation (1941-1944) when 95 percent of Lithuania’s Jewish community was annihilated. In the diaspora, historical trauma narratives were passed down to the second and third generations born in the United States and Canada, forming collective memory. Meanwhile, historical analysis of the Holocaust was obfuscated by the Soviet occupation of Lithuania (1944-1991) where censorship and isolation sealed off the historical record, preventing any serious examination outside of officially sanctioned communist propaganda narratives that deprived Jews of their identity, claiming them as “Soviet citizens,” erasing the memory of the Holocaust. All that changed when the KGB archives were opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union when Lithuania became an independent democratic nation in 1991. Nonetheless, gaps in the archives left more questions unanswered.
Literature has the power to fill in silences and speak the impossible. Vanished Lands analyzes memoirs written by three generations of North American Litvak and Lithuanian émigré writers. Their voices speak over the silences of decades, seeking answers. This book gives an overview of the history of Litvak and Lithuanian emigration, the Nazi occupation, the postwar anti-Soviet resistance, the Lithuanian émigré literary renaissance, and applies the concepts of postmemory, rite of return, cultural memory, collective trauma, and trauma theory to analyze literary works of creative nonfiction by Samuel Bak, Ellen Cassedy, Rita Gabis, Daiva Markelis, Antanas Sileika, Julija Šukys and a play by Algirdas Landsbergis. Vanished Lands traces how the vibrant postwar and Cold War Lithuanian literary movement in the diaspora inspired the spirit of the second and third generation, who continued to write about Lithuanian collective trauma in English for an audience of North American readers.
Other Works
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Lenin's Head on a Platter. Vilnius: Lithuanian Writers Publishers
2008
Awards and Recognition
- Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies Book Subvention Grant (2023) Lithuanian Cultural Fund Writer’s Stipend (2022) Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies Dissertation Grant for Graduate Students (2021) Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies Conference Travel Grant for Graduate Students (2021) Hessicher Literaturrat, Hessen Ministry of Culture Writer’s Residency Grant (2020) Lithuanian Culture Fund Writer’s Grant (2020) Fulbright Grant in Creative Writing (2007-2009) National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2004) PEN International Translation Fund Grant (2004) New York State Yeats Society Fellowship, Yeats Summer School, Sligo, Ireland (1993)
