2
Early Russian Connections

Russians are more famous for their poetry than their industry.
—BILL KELLER, New York Times, 1991

AT A TIME WHEN the United States and the USSR were threatening to destroy each other, physicians from the two hostile countries shared the helm of IPPNW. The organization could not have come into being had I not cultivated a Russian connection in the preceding fifteen years.

The connection began in an improbable way, when I made a guess based on a pair of shoes. The place was India, the year 1966; the occasion was the Fifth World Congress of Cardiology. I was about get on an elevator at the Ashoka Hotel in New Delhi when a short, brisk, well-attired man approached. As I tried to place him, I happened to glance down at his shoes. They had a coarse, stodgy solidity that contrasted with his otherwise fashionable apparel. He must be a Russian, I thought; only a Russian would wear such shoes.

The man was Eugene Chazov. I knew of his teacher, the academician Alexander L. Myasnikov, a Russian with the stature of our own Dr. Paul Dudley White, President Eisenhower’s personal physician. Chazov was the very person I was eager to meet. The reason had nothing to do with the nuclear threat. I was frustrated by the lack of research support from the National Institutes of Health for the formidable problem of sudden cardiac death. I theorized that it would take a Russian cardiologist to help focus American attention. The reasoning was convoluted, if not Talmudic.

When the USSR launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, its success had a searing impact on America’s sense of self. After all, as a nation we were in the avant-garde of science and technology. Then the backward Russians, with a sputtering economy and laughable technology, had taken first prize in a global competition by launching Yuri Gagarin into space. It was an affront not easily borne. From that moment, the United States became obsessed with denying the Russians any other lead.

Thus emerged my plot: If I could persuade Soviet cardiologists to take action on the issue of sudden cardiac death, the United States would spring to the fore and the National Institutes of Health would open its coffers for the neglected research. But first, I had to alert Russian cardiologists to the issue. In fact, I needed an invitation to address some key medical meeting in Moscow. I imagined myself a Van Cliburn of cardiology. He was an unknown American pianist who had recently become a world celebrity upon winning a Tchaikovsky piano competition in Moscow. I could exploit the Cold War not with music but with concern for the heart. Therein lay the importance of detecting Russian shoes; luckily, Eugene Chazov was the one wearing them.

My initial conversation with Chazov was brief since I spoke no Russian and his English then was fractured and barely comprehensible. He had no idea what I was chattering about. He was unaware of the magnitude of the sudden cardiac death problem and, more crucially, of the fact that it resulted from an electrical derangement of the heartbeat. I tried to explain that if the potentially fatal rhythmic disturbance was due to an electrical disorder, it was readily correctable with the direct-current defibrillator I had developed. Thousands of lives could be saved immediately. I suggested that he invite me to lecture on the subject in Moscow.

Two years passed before the invitation arrived. Strangely, the message did not designate who my audience would be, the duration of my lecture, or the topic to be addressed. It was a laconic directive: Come and lecture. My wife, Louise, urged patience. “After all,” she said, “it’s a different culture. They will explain when you arrive in Moscow.”

It didn’t turn out that way. No one in Moscow seemed to have a clue why Louise and I were there, other than that we were guests of some important personality or group. We had a week of sightseeing. We attended the Bolshoi Ballet, the Moscow Circus, the State Tretyakov Gallery of Russian Art. We took in the French impressionist paintings at the Pushkin Museum. Still, there was no word on the lecture.

Having established that we were art lovers, and to avoid further badgering about the intended lecture, one of my hosts, Vice Minister of Health Dimitri Venediktov, urged us to Leningrad for two days to visit the Hermitage Museum, the most famous of all Russian art galleries. I remonstrated that I was eager to deliver my lecture on sudden cardiac death. By the time we returned from Leningrad, it would be the next to the last day of our Soviet visit.

“Not to worry, Lown. You Americans crave certainty, and life is all about uncertainty,” Venediktov replied. Resigned, we took the overnight express train to Leningrad and dutifully feasted our eyes on the treasures of the Hermitage. Upon our return to Moscow, one of Chazov’s lieutenants met us at the railroad station, frantically waving us to a limousine that would race us to the lecture hall. He appeared in a dither. “You almost missed the lecture! Today is the last day of the Congress of Physicians of the Federated Russian Republic. The meeting ends in two hours!” He acted as though I had been derelict, irresponsibly gallivanting to Leningrad when I knew full well that I was supposed to give a lecture. Attempts to explain myself proved fruitless. This was the first of my many Kafkaesque experiences in dealing with Russians.

At the congress, I learned that I would be allowed only ten minutes for my lecture, since they were already behind the scheduled adjournment. I couldn’t show graphics, as they had no projector. No translator was provided. The fact that few of the participants understood English did not seem to faze anyone.

At my insistence a translator was dredged up—a scientist from the University of Moscow who hadn’t the foggiest notion of medical terminology. By this time, I was raging. “No translator with medical credentials, no lecture!” Eventually a cardiologist volunteered to do the chore, but he demanded an abridged text that he could read. I would say ten words, such as “I am honored to be here…,” and then he would translate my script.

As the translator droned on, I was increasingly dismayed. Few, if any, of the assembled were paying attention. The hubbub of conversation was creating quite a din among the more than five hundred attending doctors. Cigarette smoke was so dense in the hall that the attendees beyond the third row were barely visible through the haze. At the end of my lecture there was only tepid applause and no questions. When I inquired about the indifference of the participants, I was told that sudden death was a novel subject not encountered in the Soviet Union. It was deemed an American disease, a capitalist scourge resulting from exploitation of the masses and the alienation of human beings.

While in Moscow, I realized that although Russian doctors had a clear understanding of the various risk factors for cardiovascular disease, in practice they were cavalier. Salt whitened food before it was tasted, vodka substituted for water, fruit was barely visible anywhere, vegetables were regarded with contempt, fatty gristle was deemed a delicacy, and butter, cream, eggs, and bacon were consumed in startling portions. Chain-smoking was ubiquitous and exercise dismissed as being for muzhiki, the peasants.

My Russian adventure turned out to be a disappointment, if not a fiasco. I was certain that it would be my first and last journey to the home of Bolshevism. In fact, it was the first of more than thirty visits.

One year later, in November 1969, Louise and I were back in Moscow. This time the subject matter was not sudden cardiac death but the care of patients with acute heart attacks. The meeting was sponsored by the World Health Organization, and the audience comprised cardiologists from the socialist bloc countries. Once again I had occasion to meet Chazov, who was now a deputy minister of health. My talk dealt with the coronary care units that were then spreading throughout hospitals in industrialized countries. CCUs improved rates of survival for those who suffered heart attacks; they enabled research on how best to treat this common condition and lowered health costs by drastically shortening hospitalizations to a week.

At the time of my visit, patients with heart attacks in Russia were kept in hospitals from six weeks to three months, part of the time on strict bed rest. Mortality was three times as high as in the United States. Instead of using clinical data to support their practice, Soviet doctors offered a bizarre explanation for the vast difference in length of hospitalization. According to them, the United States operated under a capitalist system that obliged workers to return expeditiously to their jobs in order to optimize profits; in the USSR, a workers’ state, there was no such pressure. In this dialogue as in many others, ideology trumped facts.

Our good fortune on this second trip was the assignment of Nadia Yakunina as our guide, interpreter, and master navigator through the stifling bureaucracy. Approximately our age, she was fluent in English, broadly cultured, and in love with American literature. As a person, she emanated kindness, even motherliness, nearly tucking us into bed at night and returning to join us for breakfast, even though it took her three hours to travel to our hotel from her home on the outskirts of Moscow.

Nadia introduced us to a new constituency, the intellectual dissidents who were aloof yet integral to Communist society. They promoted the forbidden fruit of samizdat, resented the stodgy intellectual dullness of the Brezhnev era, evinced insatiable curiosity about life beyond the iron curtain, and learned to voice their opposition in ambiguous Aesopian language. At the same time, they benefited from the perks granted to those who toed the party line and were expert in slithering about within the narrow confines of the permissible.

Through Nadia, we gained insight into the ambivalent loyalties of the intelligentsia. She also arranged my first medical consultation in Moscow. Nadia finagled tickets for Louise and me to the Taganka Theater from its impresario director, Yuri Lyubimov. In payment for the precious tickets (for which many a Muscovite would have committed mayhem) I was to examine Lyubimov’s mother-in-law.

We picked up the tickets in Lyubimov’s cramped office. His walls were covered with signatures and inscriptions from distinguished visitors like the San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the West German novelist Heinrich Böll, and the American playwright Arthur Miller, who had scribbled, “Once again the theater is saved.” Though only in existence about four years at the time of our visit, the Taganka was already widely regarded as one of the world’s most innovative theaters.

Lyubimov founded the Taganka after a career as an actor in popular film and theater. He won the Stalin Prize for his stage work, but by poking fun at the repressive Soviet society, he enraged the authorities. The power establishment regarded him with distrust and yet was ambivalent about shutting him down because he had a substantial following among decision makers. The apparatchiki (Communist bureaucrats) were in a state of schizophrenia about whether to permit such sacrilegious experimentalism to flourish so close to the Kremlin; a play might be closed by government censors as soon as it opened, only to be permitted a reopening several weeks or months later.

Nadia had prepared us for our meeting with vignettes of Lyubimov’s past, so I was surprised to encounter an extremely courteous, diffident, and gracious man, not at all the tough person I had anticipated. The play we were to see was an adaptation of the American journalist John Reed’s classic book, Ten Days That Shook the World, based on his eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution.

Even though we couldn’t understand a word beyond Nadia’s whispered smidgens of translation, the play made a deep and enduring impression. It conveyed the excitement of the turbulent early days of the Bolshevik Revolution. From the moment we stepped into the lobby, we were swept into the heart of the insurrection. Theatergoers were indistinguishable from performers. Workers milled around alongside soldiers, peasants, students, sailors from the Red Fleet, street hawkers, and people on soap boxes exhorting listeners to support various political factions. In the mad swirl of activity, singers vented revolutionary songs accompanied by accordions and balalaikas.

“You want to hear Lenin?” came a shout. “Follow us!” and the crowd was guided to their seats. The theater was decorated with graffiti; anti-czarist, anticapitalist, and antiwar posters covered the walls. The stage was but a small part of the action. It was easy to connect with what John Reed described as “a slice of intensified history.” The October Revolution unfolded as a mighty torrent that swept all into its wake.

Many actions took place simultaneously. Where were we to look? Some images were illuminated on screens. There was a movie of Lenin speaking. Surging proletarian masses moved hither and yon, seemingly without destination. Enlarged figures were silhouetted onto a huge white screen—a cross-section from all walks of Petrograd life, from the wretched of the earth to the stylishly coifed upper strata of pompous nobility. The spirit and chaos of 1917 overwhelmed us, the formerly ignorant onlookers. I will never forget multiple sets of solitary hands protruding through a black screen that pantomimed the intense political struggle of the day. We left the theater eager to read John Reed and see the play again.

Our good fortune continued. In return for the consultation, we received tickets for Maxim Gorki’s play Mother. We were given two extra tickets, so we invited our host, Dimitri Venediktov, and his eighteen-year-old daughter, Tanya, a first-year student at Moscow University. I remember little of that play except the discomfort on Dimitri’s face. The hard reality depicted in the play was not the fare of stilted Soviet discourse, contrasting as it did with lofty revolutionary promises.

After the show, I went to thank Lyubimov. In the darkened office slouched a tall, lanky, boyishly handsome figure. He roused himself and looked up at me, irritated at the intrusion. I found myself face to face with a popular Russian poet and blurted out, “You are Yevgeni Yevtushenko.”

He responded, without missing a beat, “And you are from the CIA.”

I continued as though not having heard. “Mr. Yevtushenko, we have much in common.”

“How so?”

“We are both preoccupied with the heart, except from different perspectives.”

He seemed perplexed.

“Well, you are a poet and I am a cardiologist.”

He laughed loud, now fully awake, and proclaimed that this association deserved to be memorialized with a drink of good vodka. He invited the four of us to be his guests for the evening.

It was raining and the poet’s car wouldn’t start. First, he had to mount the windshield wipers, which had been hidden against theft. He had also disconnected something in the engine so that no one could steal his car, but now he couldn’t remember exactly what. Swearing prodigiously, he finally figured out how he’d disabled the motor. He gunned the engine and burst out from the parking space, only to smash into a passing taxi. The enraged taxi driver leapt from his car, cursing. He wielded an iron bar and seemed ready to brain Yevtushenko. Then he recognized the culprit and stopped dead in his tracks. In a complete turnaround, he began apologizing to the great poet for having blocked his way. He begged Yevtushenko’s forgiveness. If I hadn’t witnessed the scene, I would have dismissed it as improbable novelistic license. But we were in the USSR, an atheist society where cultural icons like Yevtushenko were modern-day saints.

The night was electrified by tumblers of vodka, large mounds of caviar, and black bread. Throughout the evening, Yevtushenko insisted that before we talk about anything else, I needed to tell him what Arthur Miller had written about his recent visit to Russia. Yevtushenko presumed that every American knew the playwright and his every word. He confided, “Arthur Miller is so perceptive because he has the wisdom of the Jew.”

When I reflected on this particular evening after a number of subsequent encounters with Yevtushenko, it was clear that he hadn’t been his usual self. His usual flirtatious dalliance with language was lacking. Venediktov’s presence had constrained the poet, and Yevtushenko’s speech turned circumspect, peppered with biblical allusions. For example, when I asked if his writing was censored, he replied, “They locked the gates on Samson forgetting that he carried them on his shoulders,” implying that it was only his Samson-like strength that allowed him to be free. He talked about a recent visit to Sweden, where he said that the Communist Party censored writers. The Swedes confronted him with a statement to the contrary by the head of the Soviet Writers Union, who was also visiting Stockholm and who denied that anyone was censored. “Which of you is lying?” the Swedes pressed him. “I responded that neither was lying. Each was reflecting his own experience.” He then continued, “Everything in socialist society is far from perfect. Moving from an old to a new home, you frequently carry the vermin with you.”

I jotted down bits of the rambling discussion: “Brightness is talent’s weakness; grayness is the strength of the ungifted.” “Lyubimov transplants hearts at his Taganka Theater.” Yevtushenko, widely known as a great raconteur, didn’t disappoint.

One vivid tale stays with me. At a birthday party he attended for Robert Kennedy, Yevtushenko asked Kennedy why he wanted to be president. Bobby said that he wanted to continue his brother’s work. Yevtushenko suggested that they drink to the fulfillment of the wish by following an old Russian custom: to drink bottoms up and then smash the wineglasses. Bobby looked uncomfortable and went to the kitchen to substitute ordinary wineglasses for their crystal goblets. Yevtushenko was dismayed. How could such a vital wish be tempered by something as trivial as the cost of two wineglasses? The two men drank from the new wineglasses and then threw them to the floor. They didn’t shatter; they merely bounced and rolled. When Yevtushenko picked up a goblet and tapped it, it emitted the dull, muffled sound of plastic. He felt a terrible foreboding. Kennedy turned pale. “He was probably as superstitious as I was,” Yevtushenko told us.

After completing my lectures in Moscow, we traveled to Leningrad as guests of the Ministry of Health. Of that visit, only one event remains sharp in my memory. Soon after our arrival, we were with Nadia in the restaurant of the Europeskaya Hotel. We were hungry and impatient for a waiter to take our order. Although there were plenty of waiters standing around, they gazed right through us as though we didn’t exist, a common experience for everyone in the USSR.

While waiting, I asked Nadia about her thoughts on Khrushchev. I suggested that he would remain a significant historical figure for his speech, given to the Communist Party Congress in 1956, which lifted the shroud on Stalin’s crimes. Nadia looked uncomfortable. In past conversations, she had indicated a full awareness of Stalin’s crimes. Yet on that evening, my innocent remark unleashed a torrential outpouring. After thirty-six years, I still recall most of her words.

“Why, Khrushchev was worse than Stalin!” she exclaimed. “Until Khrushchev the Soviet people had a vision, a dream. It might have emerged in a fouled nest, but it was still an inspiring and reachable dream!” She insisted that Stalin deserved credit for the victory in the Great Patriotic War because he had unified the Soviet people and had persuaded them in their darkest hours that they could, and would, prevail. We in the West had never had faith in that victory, sure that the fascists would make short shrift of the Russians as they had of the French, Czechs, and Poles.

With biting words, Nadia criticized all capitalist democracies without troubling to differentiate between them, going so far as to suggest that the West would not have been terribly unhappy had Hitler won. How else, she asked rhetorically, could one explain the appeasement of Hitler by Chamberlain and Daladier, the betrayal of Spain and Czechoslovakia at Munich? “While you sweet-talked and flattered Hitler,” she said, “we stopped fascist tanks and their superior weapons with our bare hands. Stalin coaxed the Soviet people to give their last ounce of strength, their last drop of blood. We won, but at what cost? We shall not be healed in one hundred years.”

She went on to tell us that during a May Day parade when she was eight years old, she had been chosen to present a bouquet of red roses to Stalin on behalf of her school. Remembering this at her present age of forty-two, her face was beatific. Stalin had lifted Nadia and swirled her in the air, showing her off to the assembled multitudes in Red Square. For that moment she was a Soviet heroine.

She recalled Stalin’s voice and the power of his calm, unadorned words crackling over radio static. She smiled, remembering the time Stalin had burped during one of his talks and then apologized, admitting that the herring he had eaten gave him heartburn. She maintained that such a homey touch brought him close to ordinary folks. The people were starving, yet they kept building trenches, hacking away at frozen ground with picks and shovels, even with bare hands. Stalin helped plain people become heroic in their own eyes.

Nadia brushed tears away with a handkerchief as she continued with growing ferocity. She hurled her words like grenades meant to hold back enemy hordes. Nadia told us she was certain that when her brother died in the Great Patriotic War, the last words he uttered were, “For Comrade Stalin and our Motherland!” Before her father, a party leader and Bolshevik, was shipped off to the gulag, never to return, he confided to his family, “If only Comrade Stalin knew, this would not have happened.”

Nadia spoke bitterly of the delay in opening a second front in Europe. She described it as part of a Churchillian anti-Communist conspiracy that later became the Cold War. After the carnage that claimed more than twenty-five million Russian lives, she had believed that the Allies would contribute to reconstruction. After all, western security and freedom from Hitlerism had come because Russians had sacrificed their lives in chilling numbers. Common human decency, Nadia insisted, demanded that those in the West, who had sacrificed far less, help Russia rebuild. “You lacked the honesty to own up to a colossal debt,” she said. “Instead, you threatened us with nuclear annihilation.

“How could we overcome this enormous challenge with half the country smashed? How could we even bury our dead? Where could we find the resources to counsel the millions of bereaved, the shell-shocked, the people gone mad from having seen what a human being must never witness? How are we to house the amputees and cripples on every street corner?” She maintained once again that Stalin had helped gird people with the will to reconstruct a devastated country and prevent the West from achieving what the Hitlerites couldn’t, the destruction of Russia.

Nadia recalled her own labor in rebuilding Moscow. She worked despite unimaginable exhaustion, hunger, and psychological emptiness. Above all she remembered the penetrating cold. Without gloves in that merciless first postwar winter, her hands would stick to the iced brick she was laying. She would tear them away and leave her skin behind, blood soaking into the mortar. We sat frozen at the table as she told us that her last ounce of energy was sparked by the dream of a better Russia, no more gulags, no more repression, no more want. “We have paid our debt,” she repeated several times. “Stalin provided the thread that held the illusion together. Then came that crude”—she was at a loss for an expletive—”Khrushchev, and in one speech he demolished everything.

“My brother and father were killed. My mother had starved to death, my friends were gone, my youth consumed. All this enormous sacrifice for nothing.” She shouted between sobs, “I hate that man more than I hate Stalin!” and raced out of the room.

Louise and I sat transfixed, dumbfounded. We didn’t look at each other. We felt like accomplices in a horrendous crime perpetrated against the Russian people. We were glad the waiters had ignored us.

The next day when we met up with Nadia, she acted as though nothing had happened. We never spoke of Khrushchev or Stalin again.

When we returned to Moscow, Venediktov suggested we visit Minsk, where the war had been most brutal, the destruction nearly total, and partisan resistance most heroic. He, like many other Russians, was eager for westerners to gain some appreciation of the enormous sacrifice exacted by the war. In his mind, if something holy still remained from the Bolshevik Revolution, it was the Great Patriotic War.

Louise suggested, “For Bernard it would be more meaningful to visit his birthplace, Utyan.” This was a tiny village called Utena in Lithuanian. I was not at all eager for such a visit, for most of the people I’d known there had been murdered. Venediktov turned to the big map of the USSR behind his desk, but nowhere could he locate the shtetl of my youth. Immediately, using one of his four phones, he dialed a colleague, the Lithuanian minister of health in Vilnius. He alerted him that we would be visiting the next day.

Nadia came with us. While not eager to travel to Leningrad, she was enthusiastic about going to Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. Her purpose was comic, if mundane: she was looking for bras. They weren’t obtainable in Moscow, but the effective Soviet grapevine, a precursor to the Internet, suggested a plentitude of bras of all sizes in Vilnius.

When we arrived the next day, a delegation of academics from the university, the medical school, and the Ministry of Health met us at the airport. One doctor, a tall, broad-faced woman, grew quite emotional upon meeting me. She asked if I was the Lown of the Cardioverter. When I said that I was, she promptly burst into tears. Apparently, to get a doctorate in medicine, one had to write a thesis. Hers was on cardioversion, a method I’d invented, a process that used electrical discharge to correct an abnormal heartbeat. She had never imagined that she might one day meet the inventor, her “proverbial mentor.”

The Lithuanians who met us at the airport indicated, with some embarrassment, that an old man was waiting in the lobby to greet me. He came from Utyan and claimed to have known me as a child. I instantly recognized him as Kalman-Meyer, the town plumber, who had miraculously survived the war. Because he was a worker, the Soviets had evacuated him to Russia ahead of the advancing Germans. Now he was wizened, white-haired, and slight, though still vigorous. He spoke a brisk Yiddish.

Without introduction, he held out an old frayed photograph of a kindergarten class and pointed to a little boy. “Who is this?” he asked me. I looked closer at the photograph and recognized the faded image of my brother Hirshke beneath Kalman-Meyer’s finger. “Then you are Boke!” he exclaimed, a happy glint in his eyes. Indeed, my childhood nickname had been Boke, a diminutive of my given name, Boruch.

I was mystified. Why was the old man at the airport? How did he know we were coming to Vilnius when we ourselves had only learned of our travel plans twenty-four hours earlier? And what was the photo all about? How did he happen to have it?

As we soon learned, Venediktov had sent a telegram to the Ministry of Health in addition to his telephone call. He wanted to be certain that the Lithuanians would be prepared for our visit. In the message, he spelled out who I was and included the detail of my birth in Utyan. It happened that a cleaning woman working at the ministry in Vilnius was from Utyan. Many years before, my mother had employed this woman—her name was Dvorah—as a domestic in our house. When Dvorah spotted the telegram from Venediktov, she copied the message and delivered it to Kalman-Meyer, the elder statesman and archivist of our shtetl. A telegram from Moscow, she thought, might be important for the Jews.

Kalman-Meyer was puzzled by the message, for there had been no one by the name of Lown in Utyan. What followed sounded like a convoluted Talmudic pilpul, a long-winded rabbinic disputation. He first asked himself who had left Utyan in the 1930s, the time of a large Jewish emigration. The Segals had left for South Africa, the Goldmans had migrated to Argentina, the Cahns had settled in Cuba, etc. The Katzes went to America, but they only had daughters and the telegram said the visitor was a man. Then he recalled a Nison and Bella Latz, who had left for the United States in the mid-1930s. But the visitor’s name was Bernard Lown.

Meyer reasoned further. Jews in America assimilated. In a first act of Americanizing and melding with the goyim—the gentiles—they often changed their names. He surmised that they must have felt guilty for abandoning their heritage. To maintain some link to their roots, they would have kept the first letter of their former surname. Latz to Lown: it fit. Moreover, he recalled that Nison and Bella had had four children. He reasoned that the youngest, Moshke, would be too young to have achieved distinction in medicine. The next child could be dismissed outright, for she was a girl, Laika. The second-oldest son, Hirshke, was a possibility, but the H defaulted him. The visitor must be Boke.

How to confirm the theory? The old plumber searched through his meager archive and found a kindergarten photo wherein he recognized the second Latz boy. The rest he left for me to confirm upon my arrival. “See, Doctor, it was quite obvious. It could not have been anyone but Nison Latz’s oldest son. The letters matched for the first as well as the last name,” concluded a triumphant Kalman-Meyer.

Two episodes of that memorable journey to Lithuania are worth recounting: the visit to Utyan, and my cardiology lecture in Kaunas. A five-car caravan traveled from Vilnius to Utyan, carrying a handful of survivors who had once been residents of the shtetl. In September 1941, the Jewish population of Utyan was killed, less than three months after the Hitlerite occupation. The killing was well organized and lasted several weeks. No Jews were spared; men, women, children, and the elderly were forced to dig trenches that would become their own graves when they were systematically machine-gunned down.

The astonishing fact is that only two Germans were in Utyan at the time, according to local Lithuanian informants. The mass murder was done by native Lithuanians who knew their Jewish neighbors intimately.

Of the forty-five hundred Jewish inhabitants who had once made their homes and lives in Utyan, only one family remained. I asked Itzchak Weinman, the head of that family, why he remained in this graveyard. He answered that it was impossible to abandon the dead. He was destined against his better judgment to sustain “the weak thread of continuity with what had meaning.”

We were first taken to a memorial erected by the local authorities. With one side written in Lithuanian and the other, to my surprise, in Yiddish, the memorial recounted the spare facts. It identified the murderers as “local fascists” and gave the dates.

An event in honor of our visit took place at the Weinmans’ modest home. This was the first time since the war that Jews and Lithuanian officials had gathered in one place. About twenty people crowded into the Weinmans’ tiny dining room. The place resembled a bakery, delicatessen, and fancy restaurant rolled into one. Every conceivable Jewish patrave, or delicacy, was on display for Louise and me to taste. We made many toasts with schnapps and vodka, and followed with the customary banal expressions vowing everlasting friendship between peace-loving people.

But the toast of Kalman-Meyer was different. It is still hard to recall without a searing tug to my heart. He spoke in Lithuanian rather than in his native Yiddish. His speech was halting as he struggled to capture the right words in a language he seldom used.

He said something to this effect: “We take pride in greeting Bernard Lown, now a world-famous doctor. It was just in an instant of luck that he and his family were saved from fertilizing the Lithuanian soil. Many others were not so fortunate. His close friend Chaimke, who was a gifted poet, wasn’t so fortunate,…” and then he went on, listing many of my childhood contemporaries and their unique accomplishments as musicians, chess players, mathematicians, artists, budding scientists, aspiring scholars. Above all, they aspired to grow up. Pointing at me, Kalman-Meyer finished what was now a plea. “The world lost many Bernard Lowns. We must not forget them, for our own sake. How else can we affirm our humanity and make certain that such a monstrous deed is never repeated?”

Here was an ordinary working man, pleading with the children of the murderers for no more victims. A painful silence followed. No one toasted thereafter, for there was little left to say. But Kalman-Meyer was not quite right when he said that my family had been spared. My grandfather, a distinguished rabbi in the nearby shtetl Shirvint, was burned alive in his synagogue with his family, including my uncle, aunt, and cousins.

As a gift of the occasion we were given a package of teglach, honey-soaked sweets prepared for Jewish holidays, and a huge chocolate cake. When we returned to Boston, our family assembled to hear of our travels. They listened with rapt attention, but they were dry-eyed even as Louise and I recounted our return to Utyan. Then we presented the teglach, and the first bites unleashed a flood of tears. It was as though this little delicacy linked us with what had vanished.

When we left Utyan, our small group headed to Kaunas, Lithuania’s former capital, which I had visited as a small boy. Remarkably, the city was exactly as I remembered it. I was to present a lecture on sudden cardiac death at the medical school. Unlike the Soviet doctors in Moscow, the Lithuanians expressed great interest in the issue. I was introduced by the dean of the faculty. After uttering my first sentence, which Nadia translated, raucous foot-thumping stopped me short. Was this an outbreak of antisemitism? Was the ghost of Utyan following me? The dean was dismayed, seemingly taken by surprise. I looked to Nadia; she was crying quietly. I did not know what to do except stand foolishly at the lectern, facing an angry audience.

Within a few minutes a man appeared, apologized, and explained that the audience disapproved of translating the speech of a son of Lithuania into Russian. He said he would be honored to translate my words from English to Lithuanian. Thereafter, it was smooth sailing. The talk was rapturously received. Clearly Lithuania was not reconciled to being part of the Russian empire. In Pushkin’s famous drama, the czar of all Russia four centuries earlier, Boris Godunov, lists “Lithuanian plots and secret machinations” among the dangers to his throne. This was new to me. I had much to learn.