Upė į Rytus, Upė į Šiaurę

Institucijų Kūrimas

Building Institutions · 1955–1964

Published in 1964 during the Building Institutions period.

What It Is

This publication is evidence of the extraordinary institutional infrastructure the Lithuanian diaspora built in Chicago by 1964. The Lietuviškos Knygos Klubas functioned as a subscription book club that guaranteed a paying readership for serious Lithuanian literature — an economic model that made it possible for authors like Almenas to write ambitious multi-volume historical novels knowing they would be printed, distributed, and read. The Draugas press at 4545 West 63rd Street was not merely a newspaper printer but the central nervous system of diaspora publishing, producing books, journals, and periodicals that sustained a complete literary culture in exile. The cover artist P. Jurkus (Paulius Jurkus, 1915-2003) was himself a major diaspora cultural figure — a graphic artist, poet, and editor whose distinctive visual style graced dozens of diaspora publications, meaning this book's physical form is itself a cultural artifact carrying multiple layers of diaspora identity. The novel's content reflects the diaspora community's sophisticated self-understanding of Lithuanian history and its place in the broader European and Atlantic world. By setting the narrative in 1815 Žemaitija and extending it through the French Revolution and the American frontier, Almenas was making an implicit argument: that Lithuanian civilization had always been part of the larger European and Atlantic story, not a provincial backwater. This was a direct counter-narrative to Soviet historiography, which subordinated Lithuanian identity to a Russian-dominated framework. Writing from Chicago, Almenas could claim the full sweep of Western history as Lithuanian heritage. The presence of this book in a Lithuanian Saturday school library (Žiburio) reveals how high literary culture circulated through diaspora educational institutions. Heritage schools were not merely language drills — they were nodes in a broader cultural network through which adult literature, community publications, and historical consciousness passed between generations. A novel this sophisticated, shelved in a school library numbered 92 in what was presumably a substantial collection, tells us that the adults running Žiburio school believed their students should have access to serious Lithuanian literature alongside textbooks and primers.

Why It Matters

Culturally and historically, Upė į Rytus, Upė į Šiaurę is evidence that the Lithuanian diaspora of the 1960s had achieved something remarkable: a self-sustaining literary culture capable of producing ambitious, multi-volume historical fiction of genuine artistic merit. Published in the same year that Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, this novel was being written and typeset in a Lithuanian-owned press on Chicago's Southwest Side by a community of refugees and their children who had rebuilt an entire civilization in exile. The novel's sweep — from a Lithuanian manor house in 1815 to the streets of Revolutionary Paris to the flooding Missouri River — signals that diaspora writers refused to be defined by victimhood or nostalgia alone; they claimed the whole of Western history as their literary territory.