Straipsnis skirtas Amerikos lietuvių kultūrinio atsparumo ir transnacionalinių ryšių sklaidai kintančių geopolitinių aplinkybių fone parodyti. Beveik 600 tūkstančių JAV gyvenančių Amerikos lietuvių yra reikšminga platesnės lietuvių diasporos dalis. Priešingai asimiliacijos naratyvui, dažnai siejamam su JAV „lydymosi katilu“, lietuviai Amerikoje išlaikė savitą ir atsparią kultūrinę tapatybę, nors didžioji dauguma (94 %) gimė Jungtinėse Amerikos Valstijose. Autorės siekė ištirti individualias ir kolektyvines Amerikos lietuvių perspektyvas dvigubos tautinės tapatybės, šeimos istorijos, tradicinių papročių ir geopolitinių įvykių temomis. Pripažindamos patirčių, susiformavusių per kelias migracijos bangas, įvairovę, tyrėjos atrinko penkiolika emigracijos bangų ir amžiaus grupių Amerikos lietuvių, palaikančių stiprius šeiminius ryšius su Jungtinių Amerikos Valstijų Vidurio Vakarų regionu, ir 2022–2023 m. atliko pusiau struktūruotus interviu. Straipsnyje palyginami ir sugretinami tyrimo dalyvių požiūriai į įvairias emigracijos bangas ir kartas. Tyrimo rezultatai atskleidžia, kad, nepaisydami laiko tėkmės, Amerikos lietuviai puoselėja ir išreiškia savo savitą kultūrinę tapatybę, pasididžiavimą ir ryšį su Lietuva. Mokslininkams, kurie tyrinėja kintančią šiuolaikinės lietuvių diasporos mozaiką, ši studija gali būti vertinga dėl tyrimo dalyvių ir autorių įžvalgų apie kultūros išsaugojimo ir adaptacijos diasporos bendruomenėse įvairiapusiškumą.

1951 m. JAV įsikūrusioje Lietuvių studentų sąjungoje (LSS) greitai išsiskyrė dvi tarpusavyje konkuruojančios studentų grupės: ateitininkai ir vadinamieji nepriklausomieji. Nepriklausomų studentų grupė susikūrė kaip atsvara gerai organizuotiems ateitininkams ir savo gretose bandė suburti įvairių pažiūrų, skirtingų ideologinių organizacijų demokratinio-liberaliojo sparno akademinį jaunimą. Jų skelbtos tolerancijos, nepriklausomos minties, humanizmo, liberaliojo sparno lietuvių jaunimo organizacijų bendradarbiavimo idėjos sulaukė jaunimo palaikymo; nepriklausomų studentų grupės kūrėsi įvairiuose universitetiniuose miestuose. Nepriklausomieji kurį laiką neturėjo formalios organizacijos, 1953 m. pasivadino Nepriklausomų studentų sąjūdžiu (NSS), o 1954 m. buvo įkurta visas nepriklausomųjų grupes vienijanti organizacija – „Lietuvių studentų santara“. Straipsnyje, remiantis publikuotais ir archyviniais šaltiniais, analizuojami Nepriklausomų studentų sąjūdžio genezės, narystės, veiklos klausimai. Didelis dėmesys skiriamas nepriklausomų studentų persiorganizavimui 1954 m. – „Lietuvių studentų santaros“ įkūrimui ir naujos organizacijos santykiams su Akademiniu skautų sąjūdžiu

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama Pirčiupių memorialo – pirmojo Lietuvos SSR įsteigto memorialo „hitlerinio teroro aukoms“ atminti – raida ir Pirčiupių kaimo sunaikinimo istorijos vaidmuo sovietinėje ir nepriklausomos Lietuvos atminimo kultūrose. Sovietmečiu naudojan tis šia istorija siekta pagrįsti esminį ideologinį teiginį, jog nacių represijų, teroro ir masinių žudynių taikinys buvo visa „tarybų“ Lietuvos visuomenė, sykiu diegtas ambivalentiškas Pir čiupių kaip taikaus lietuvių valstiečių kaimo, sunaikinto hitlerininkų, ir aktyvaus „partizanų kaimo“ vaizdinys. Atgimimo laikotarpiu Pirčiupių memorialo akcentas ir vienas iš Lietuvos SSR kultūros kanono simbolių – Motinos skulptūra – nebuvo pašalinta, tačiau pati Pirčiupių sunaikinimo istorija, dėl kontrreakcijos į intensyvią Pirčiupių istorijos panaudą sovietmečiu ir šiuo laikotarpiu sukurtas reikšmines asociacijas, kitų Lietuvos atminimo politikos prioritetų bei socioekonominių aplinkybių tapo antraeile atminimo vieta bei ilgainiui palankia terpe trečiosioms šalims plėtoti savąjį istorijos naratyvą.

The article briefly introduces US American politician, politician, lawyer Antanas Olis (1898-1958) and publishes two of his speeches to American Lithuanians: May 21st, 1949 speech at the inaugural congress of the American Lithuanian National Union (ALTS), and the last speech by Antanas Olis, broadcast on “Margutis” radio in the occasion of February 16th in 1958. Olis’s words are distinguished by tolerance, liberalism, and the promotion of the fundamental principles of freedom. Some of the problems raised by Olis nearly seventy years ago are still relevant today: how to stay a Lithuanian in a foreign land and not dissolve into a sea of strangers, how to entice young people to Lithuanian community activities, how to communicate between generations and interests, how to find balance between being a Lithuanian and a citizen of another country.

When the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in June 1940, the latter’s independent armed forces, created in the course of more than twenty years, were liquidated without having been given the opportunity to fulfill their duty. On the other hand, the chaos caused by World War Two rightly allowed the expectation that after this conflict had ended it would be possible again to raise the question of independent Lithuanian statehood. Those Lithuanian military leaders and political activists who had escaped to the West envisaged various scenarios of taking advantage of the existing situation. One of them was the re-creation of the Lithuanian army or of separate national units. A situation favorable to the entertaining of such ideas had arisen in the United States of America.

The article is dedicated to Antanas Olis (1898–1958), a Lithuanian American public and political figure, lawyer. It analyses the key moments of his life and activities, his influence in the political, public and cultural life of the émigré community. The article investigates the activities of Antanas Olis after Lithuania’s occupation by the Soviets when he actively joined political activities and made a special contribution in organising and participating in various political campaigns which sought to bring up the issue of Lithuania among Americans. Through his ties with Americans and his work in the national Republican Party group, Olis won his way to the broader horizons of the US politics in the attempt to draw attention to the case of the freedom of Lithuania.

This paper analyzes the collision of political views inside the U.S. Lithuanian diaspora community with respect to the Detroit Lithuanian Radio (DLR) program. Attention is focused on the interaction between this radio program and Soviet Lithuania as well as on the interaction between U.S. government institutions and the Lithuanian-American community. DLR is a good example of ties between a Communist organization working in the U.S. and Lithuania under Soviet rule in the context of the Cold War. Being pro-Communist DLR was under pressure from the U.S. federal government. Feeling this pressure the U.S. radio station which broadcast the DLR program chose to refuse broadcasting left- wing programs as well as programs of national minorities in general. The Lithuanian-American community, being mostly made up of displaced persons (DP) from Europe who had fled their occupied homeland, saw a pro-Communist radio program as an insult to their views and feelings and as an attempt to legitimize the Soviet occupation. So they established a radio program with a different political orientation – a Lithuanian-American Community Voice Radio Club program that urged the closure of DLR. A rivalry arose. Members of the Lithuanian community endeavored to convene a public court, but no representatives from the DLR showed up for the proceedings. But the opposing Lithuanian-American Community Voice Radio Club program got strong and the pressure on the DLR was very heavy, so the latter had to abandon broadcasting and several years later even close the organization supporting them.

Today Lithuanians are a diaspora people dispersed throughout the world. Among them, some are important to world cultural history; this article is about two of them. They were World War II refugees and currently are perhaps the most famous Lithuanian artists alive: Jonas Mekas (b. 1922) and Aleksandra Kasuba (Kašuba, Kašubienė; b. 1923). Their fates, like those of many postwar emigrants, were affected by the trauma of war and the problem of being a refugee, a “displaced person”. But in contrast to some other Lithuanian artists to whom such an existence in exile meant being creatively unproductive, Jonas Mekas and Aleksandra Kasuba found an environment conducive to their creativity in both the European DP camps and in the United States to which they emigrated. Both were able to participate in the international world of art and to leave their mark on 20th century art history. Jonas Mekas and Aleksandra Kasuba belong to the same generation of Lithuanian emigrants. Forced to leave their homeland early in their lives and not yet having had time in Lithuania to fully acquire and indentify with the national artistic canon, they created unique works in the West– creations born of artistic curiosity, a spirit of protest against the world’s imperfection, and the need to find a way of living in it. It is the purpose of this paper to explore both how war and the postwar condition influenced the lives of these young and gifted creators as well as what factors might have been responsible for the high quality of their artistic achievements. These factors are perhaps not so much the external conditions they faced as those internal, psychosocial constraints for an artist’s success that lie in his or her nature and individual qualities. [...]

From 2000 onwards Lithuania saw the publication of roughly 60 books whose authors are Lithuanians who have emigrated or who have lived for some time abroad or who are constantly migrating between their birthland and a new homeland. Recently a Lithuanian literature created abroad has become an integral part of the country’s literature, one that literary critics, historians, and sociologists are evaluating and reflecting on as they keep on discovering ever new changes, names, and trends either in common to many of them or setting some of them apart. As many as three books by authors living abroad took part in the 2015 Book of the Year Competition: Dalia Steponkutė’s Iš dviejų renkuosi trečią [Out of Two I Pick the Third], Valdas Papievis’s Odilė, arba oro uostų vienatvė [The Loneliness of Airports] and Antanas Šileika’s Pirkiniai išsimokėtinai [Buying on Time]; and the winner was Steponkutė’s book. Reflections on exile identity and on being in a foreign country characterize many Lithuanian texts. In the novels of Papievis and the essays of Steponkutė, issues of language, adaptation, and creativity blossom into intertextual literary and philosophical meditations. In her essays, E. P. Pukytė ironically juxtaposes British and Lithuanian ways of life and strategies of interpersonal relations. Books by journalists or writers (A. Užkalnis, Z. Čepaitė, J. Melnikas) touch not only on aspects of practical knowledge but also generalize on experiences of living abroad. Lithuanian publishing houses have begun putting out series of emigrant biographies or biographical novels, which likewise have an informational component. This article attempts to analyze how much, in books written abroad but published in Lithuania during the last 5 years, has changed in terms of themes, problems, and genres; and how important the exile context is in the popular romances produced by Lithuanian emigrant women authors.

In the hope of elucidating how diaspora Lithuanians “returning” to Lithuania understand the term “home”, what symbols, relics, and activities this concept embraces, where this “home” is for them, and why and how this process takes place—is it a return or just a “moving around” in global space?—this paper presents the results of a field investigation carried out in the summer of 2005, along with the theoretical perspectives and academic sources used. Anthropological methods, such as participant observation, observation, and open question qualitative interviews, allow us to hear the informants’s words “live” articulated in the key concepts they themselves use in order that we may understand from their own perspective what the real experience of those “returning” is like.