This talk with Laima Vincė will present the brief creative life of the Lithuanian Jewish poet Matilda Olkinaitė who was killed in the Shoah in the summer of 1941. Matilda and her family were murdered by local collaborators in the early days of the Nazi German occupation of Lithuania. Her diary and notebook of poems survived through a series of small miracles and the perseverance of people who did allow her voice to be lost forever.
Olkinaitė was born June 6, 1922 in Lithuania. By age nine she was publishing her poems in popular interwar children’s magazines. In the autumn of 1939, Matilda began her studies in French literature at the University in Kaunas. There she fell in love with a Lithuanian student, and the story of her first love becomes the theme of her diary. In 1940, she transferred to the Department of Humanities at Vilnius University, where Lithuania’s most famous poets and literary figures became her professors and mentors. After the Soviet Russian occupation of Lithuania in 1940, Matilda became an unpublished poet by choice.
Matilda’s poems were forgotten until 2017, when Lithuanian-American writer Laima Vincė translated her diary and poems from Lithuanian into English. Laima Vincė has published Matilda Olkinaitė’s poems in a bilingual Lithuanian and English poetry book titled The Cerulean Bird: Matilda Olkinaite . Together with editor Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, she published Matilda’s diary and poems, along with surviving photographs and documents, in the book The Unlocked Diary. Vincė’s historical fiction novel, That Unspoken Word, retells Matilda’s story, weaving in her diary excerpt and poems.
Matilda’s unique and visionary poems will be read in English translation along with excerpts from her diary (written between 1940 and 1941) and That Unspoken Word.