Tau Sesute: Gyvenimas, Kūryba, Prisiminimai
1969
Subrendusi Diaspora
Mature Diaspora · 1965–1979
Published in 1969 during the Mature Diaspora period.
A posthumous diaspora memorial volume honoring Lithuanian poet Pranas Lembertas (1897–1967), comprising his life story, poetry, and reminiscences gathered by the Lithuanian community in California. The title poem 'Tau, Sesute' became so beloved it circulated as a folk song even inside Soviet Lithuania, attributed to no author — a remarkable testament to the organic cultural reach of diaspora poetry. The volume includes reproductions of handwritten musical scores set to Lembertas's verses, making it a unique intersection of literary and musical heritage.
What It Is
This volume encapsulates a defining characteristic of Lithuanian diaspora literary culture: the posthumous community memorial edition funded by donor subscription ('aukotojai'), which served simultaneously as an act of cultural commemoration, community solidarity, and archival preservation. The dedication list in the table of contents — addressing by name individuals such as Prof. Marija Gimbutienė (the world-renowned archaeologist and Lithuanian cultural icon), prelate Jonui Kučingiui, and numerous family members — reveals the dense social network of the mid-century California Lithuanian diaspora and its deliberate practice of weaving personal and institutional relationships into published cultural artifacts. The extraordinary anecdote embedded in the prose section — that Soviet Lithuanian communist partisans adopted Lembertas's 'Tau, Sesute' as their own folk song while he was in exile in the West — illuminates the paradox at the heart of Lithuanian cultural survival: the language itself, through its lyric beauty, transcended political boundaries and ideological control. The diaspora community's act of publishing this story was itself a counter-Soviet cultural declaration, asserting the poet's rightful authorship against the anonymous absorption of his work by the occupying state's cultural apparatus. The inclusion of a photographically reproduced handwritten musical manuscript by composer J. Gaidelio — setting Lembertas's words to music for 'Meilės rytas' — elevates this volume beyond a literary memorial into a multimedia cultural document. It preserves a direct material link between diaspora literary and musical communities, and demonstrates how the Lithuanian song tradition (daina) functioned as the primary medium for transmitting poetic texts to a broader non-literate or semi-literate audience, both in Lithuania and in exile.
Why It Matters
Pranas Lembertas is a figure who achieved something almost impossible in diaspora literature: he wrote a poem so authentically rooted in the Lithuanian lyric tradition that it was absorbed into the folk repertoire inside Soviet Lithuania without attribution, sung by people on both sides of the Iron Curtain who did not know its author was living in California exile. This volume — published by his community two years after his death — is the primary document preserving both the poem's authorship and the story of its anonymous migration across political borders. Without digitization, this account risks permanent obscurity as the generation with living memory of the California Fine Arts Club community passes.
