Flowing with Eglė: Lithuania, Jewish Roots, and Entangled Layers of Uprooting

In Vilnius, I joined a guided walk into a hidden courtyard in the old Jewish district. I would never have found it alone. There stood a statue, placed there in 1987, tucked away where memory feels both silenced and preserved. The statue displayed Medeina, the Lithuanian forest goddess, who rules this world of trees, animals, and shifting forms.

A tall spruce caught my eye immediately. In Lithuanian and Latvian, spruce is Eglė. She belongs to one of my next book projects, and her story is one of transformation: after betrayal, Eglė turns herself and her children into trees.

Some minutes later, the guide told us that 95% of Vilnius’ Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Their district emptied. Farmers moved into the abandoned houses and perhaps planted spruces like the one in this courtyard. I felt a sharp, ironic vision: Jews becoming spruces, as Eglė once transformed, as my own grandfather’s spirit once seemed claimed by trees after his death in a forestry accident. It felt like a gentler ending than the truth.

But the truth is still in the forests. Mass graves are scattered across Lithuania; people were executed beneath those trees. Standing in that courtyard, I felt the contradictions of uprooting, erasure, memory. A pagan statue. A Catholic city. A Jewish void. A living spruce.

At Wood Wide Web Stories, I often wrestle with categories: do I tag this as Lithuanian, as Jewish, or both? Categories are both structure and exclusion. Boundaries shift like forest lines, like political maps, like myths carried across generations. For me, “Jewish” is not just a label but a reminder of intergenerational trauma, displacement, and resilience.

Being raised partly by nuns, surrounded by Catholic stories, yet drawn to pagan roots, I understand why Lithuania felt strangely like home: the Catholic churches, the pagan traces, the tree stories. In that courtyard, all layers coexisted: Medeina, Eglė, the Holocaust, the spruce, my own grief.

Later, I returned with G., who has lived in Vilnius for years but had never seen this place. She began asking questions about the statue, the bear, the spruce. Why here? Why hidden? The courtyard still withholds its answers, like the forest itself, layered, entangled, refusing one single story.