Page - 28 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

28 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt stolen or reclaimed” but that is rather “a mode of cultural production in the present”, produc- ing something new, at the same time as offering a ‘second life’ to an existing place or object.38 James Clifford comments that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s concept of the second life of heritage “allows us to focus on the specific processes of transformation: how elements from the past are being made and re-made in specific relational contexts”.39 So, as cities, streets and buildings are regenerated, either in a deliberate process of renewal or through gradual change over time as new owners take possession, heritage and memory must be reproduced in order to continue to be made present. In the act of salting the earth at the place we think may be the threshold of the Meisels’ home, the salt is a marker for an absence: it temporarily demarcates a space, rapidly vanishes, but subtly affects the ground into which it mixes. Leaving our adverts on the noticeboards, we returned later that week to find they had already been covered over by other notices. But were we remaking memory, performing heritage, or doing something slightly different when we performed these ritual actions in Jatkowa Street? There was no direct link between our actions in Jatkowa Street and those of our ancestors, as we did not know what kind of actions they had performed. Our artwork could be seen as a form of re-making, rather than a direct re-enact- ment of a known heritage. These actions resurface of the spectral traces of our ancestors as a kind of return of the repressed, and try to think through the past and its relation to the present. And our actions could be seen as seeking to establish a direct connection to the past through the body, a sort of presencing of the past in a similar sense to the way Steve Pile has written about the body in cities engaging ghost-like presences or phantasmagoria.40 Having made a personal connection to a place that had since become a public site of Holo- caust memory in Vilnius, we then found more specific details of the Holocaust in Rokiskis, a town in north-eastern Lithuania that was our destination in search of our family. Our father William had just arrived in Vilnius. We decided to visit the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum and its adjunct display on the Holocaust in a separate building, housed in an old green house on Pamėnkalnio Street. These museums had been set up in the 1990s, reinstating a post-war Jewish Museum as well as pre-World War Two Jewish museums and cultural collections which had previously been plundered and destroyed.41 Visiting the green house, the home of the Holo- caust museum, we were following in the footsteps of Dan Jacobson in Heshel’s Kingdom, who wrote of visiting this museum and becoming suddenly aware that ‘the worst of the pictures had been taken by the killers themselves. Or if not by the men who were actually firing the rifles and machine guns at any one moment, then certainly by their companions and accomplices.’42 In the first room of the museum, Jacobson describes “an enlarged photocopy of an official summary by Karl Jaeger (the SS Standardfuhrer, and head of Einsatzkommando 3) of his activ- ities in Lithuania over one particular period”.43 38 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘Theorizing heritage’, Ethnomusicology, 39 (1995), pp. 367-80, at p. 370. 39 James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 2013), p. 277. 40 Steve Pile, Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (London: Sage, 2005), p. 165. 41 For further details of the history of the Jewish Museums in Vilnius, see <http://www.jmuseum.lt/en/about-the- museum/> [accessed 13 July 2017]. 42 Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, p. 129. 43 Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom, p. 126.