Story: Leanne Stahulak
Photography: Provided by Kamile Sulkson
The line to see New York Times bestselling author Ruta Sepetys stretched from the doors of Wilks Theater to the steps leading up to Miami Ice. A mad rush of students had exited the theater after her talk, some already clutching her historical novels in their hands and others clamoring for copies at a small table near the door to the theater.
Sepetys came to Miami on October 15 to give a talk as part of a joint program from the Havighurst Center and the teacher education department. Sepetys primarily writes historical fiction novels for young adults and children, and her talk at Miami focused on the inspiration for her novels as well as her latest book.
The group of students at the talk contained a mixture of Havighurst students, high school education majors and die-hard Ruta Sepetys fans. Those in line eagerly waited to have Sepetys sign and personalize their books, giving them a few seconds to interact with the author before the next student stepped up to meet her.
Some students talked with her about the first time they read her books, or why her writing meant so much to them, or what they enjoyed hearing during her talk. But at the very back of the line, one student rubbed her hands together anxiously, pulling her phone out of her pocket to check it before shoving it back in again. She didn’t have any books with her.
When I asked Kamile Sulkson whether she wanted me to take a picture of her with Sepetys, she shook her head and turned to me with nervous eyes. She blurted out, “I have to tell Ruta hello from my grandmother.”
As the line crawled forward pace by pace, Sulkson told me part of her incredible story.
***
Ruta Sepetys is a Lithuanian-American who grew up on the outskirts of Detroit, Michigan. During her talk, she didn’t go into a ton of detail about her childhood growing up as a Lithuanian-American, but she did talk about how her heritage has impacted her writing.
Before she became an author, Sepetys worked for 22 years in the music industry as a manager and songwriter. Sepetys will never forget when one lead singer, AJ, asked her what her story was. All she told him was that she was Lithuanian. His response was, “I’m so sorry, how long have you had that?”
After Sepetys explained that Lithuania was in fact a nation, not an illness, AJ the rock singer gave her something else to think about. “That’s your story, you’re Lithuanian? No one knows, with all due respect, what that means. What does it mean to be Lithuanian?”
Sepetys found part of the answer to that question the first time she traveled to Lithuania to visit her relatives. She knew that her father had fled Lithuania as a child when the Soviets invaded right after WWII, but she didn’t know the entire story of what happened to her father’s family.
Her grandfather was a high-ranking Lithuanian military officer. When he fled the country with his wife and four-year-old son, the Soviets looked for them but couldn’t find them. So instead, they arrested and deported 12 of her grandfather’s family members to Siberian labor camps and death camps.
“This was part of my own family history, and I didn’t know the story,” Sepetys said at her talk. “And all I could hear was AJ's voice saying, ‘No one knows what it means to be Lithuanian.’ And in that moment, I was so passionate, I decided I wanted to write a book.”
That book became Between Shades of Gray, Sepetys’ first bestselling sensation about a 15-year-old girl who was deported to the same labor camps Sepetys learned her own family was sent to. By telling her people’s story through the lens of a young girl, she was able to connect with millions of readers all over the world.
But the story that few people know is that Sepetys’ grandfather didn’t flee the country alone. He was accompanied by another Lithuanian family, an engineer and his wife, who would eventually give birth in Germany to two little girls. One of those little girls was Kamile Sulkson’s grandmother.
Sulkson’s great-grandparents and Sepetys’ grandparents lived in Germany together for a few years before leaving for America. During that time, Sulkson’s great-aunt was baptized with Sepetys’ grandfather as her godfather, and Sepetys’ father was reunited with the family at the refugee camps they were living in. Once both families had gathered all of their members, the group set off for America.
The families settled in Detroit in the 1950s. The two families remained close during those first few years, but each generation stretched a little bit further away as the children grew up in a westernized, Lithuanian-American community.
Sulkson had never even heard of Ruta Sepetys until her book came out in 2011, and she didn’t learn about her family’s connection to the author until her grandmother emailed her about it a few months ago, laying out this complex history between the two families. When Sulkson heard Sepetys would be visiting Miami, her grandmother encouraged her to meet the famous Lithuanian author.
As Sulkson explained the details of her grandmother’s email to me in the book line, she asked me whether Sepetys was Lithuanian or Lithuanian-American. She didn’t want to try to speak the language to a true Lithunaian because she feared offending Sepetys with the westernized version she’d learned growing up. I assured her that Sepetys didn’t think too highly of her own grasp on the language, so Sulkson had nothing to worry about.
What I didn’t know was that Sulkson was selling herself short. She may have been born and raised in the United States, but Sulkson and her family embody their Lithuanian heritage through several aspects of their lives.
***
“When I have Lithuanain friends or when I meet new Lithuanians from different parts of the world, the first thing my mom always asks is what their last name is,” Sulkson said, “because my mom can always determine if she knows them because of their last name, and I always thought that was the coolest thing.”
Calling the Lithuanian community tight-knit is an understatement. Sulkson said almost everybody knows everybody, and if you don’t know somebody, you likely know someone else that the other person also knows.
There are large pockets of Lithuanians and Lithuanian-Americans all over North America, from Chicago to Detroit to Toronto to L.A. Sulkson was born and raised in Woodridge, Illinois, just 40 minutes southwest of Chicago. She’s moved around to different suburbs over the years, but there’s always been a strong Lithuanian presence closeby.
Her dad’s family also grew up in the Chicago suburbs, but her mom’s family has lived in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, since they arrived in the U.S. decades ago. Sulkson travels to Michigan a lot to visit her family and participate in the same Lithuanian traditions her mother did several years ago.
Every summer, Sulkson attended a Lithuanian girl scout camp outside of Detroit. The camp was split up into different age groups, but each morning, all the campers would wake up to the sound of a bugle, grab their age group’s flag, and march up a hill for the flag raising ceremony.
“You literally go kairė… kairė… kairė dešinė kairė, and that’s literally left… left… left right left,” Sulkson said. “When we sing together, they’re all Lithuanian songs; when you have the flag raising and the flag letting down, you say the Lithuanian national anthem; and all the announcements are in Lithuanian. So yeah, they try to speak Lithuanian as much as they can.”
Sulkson could think of few similarities between Lithuanian and American scouts.
“It was very intense — like American boy scouts on steroids,” Sulkson said. “For example, one night they split you up in age levels, and you would go hiking the entire day. Then you split off your own way, and you’d go in the middle of the woods and you had to build a fire and make food over the fire and make a tarp covering, and we all slept on the ground. It sounds like it’s not that intense, but it was kind of like Survivor.”
“We for sure didn’t sell cookies or anything – we shot guns and the like.”
Sulkson made lots of Lithuanian-American friends during her summers at scout camp, but she also met people during the school year when she attended Lithuanian school near Chicago. From preschool up through fifth grade, Sulkson spent her Saturdays learning how to read, write and speak Lithuanian, learning about the culture, history and Catholic religion and learning about the common folk dances.
She even skipped a grade after spending six months living and going to an international school in Lithuania itself, picking up more of the language when the school would put her in Lithuanian language classes instead of English classes. Sulkson’s family moved back to the U.S before the school year was over, but they still visit the country every other summer.
“I visit family, my grandma owns a farm so we go there, and then I don’t know, you just do the typical Lithuanian things,” Sulkson said. “You go visit some castles, you go downtown, you go to some museums.”
The summer of 2018 was one Lithuania trip Sulkson will never forget, because she and her friends got to participate in the 100th anniversary of a Lithuanian folk dancing festival.
“People from dance groups from all around the world just got together and danced,” Sulkson said. “We practiced all week long, and then on performance day people came and watched and they had a whole organized dances. There was no competition; it was all celebration.”
While her Lithuanian school briefly taught folk dancing on Saturdays, Sulkson has been part of an outside dancing group since she was a kid. Sulkson was part of the same dancing group in Michigan that her mom danced with when she was a child. She even had the same instructor that had taught her mom decades ago.
Sulkson folk danced for years, taking a brief pause in middle school before starting back up again in high school. She danced in Michigan and Chicago, and today she drives up to Michigan every few weeks to practice with her dance troupe. She said Lithuanian folk dancing is a far cry from what she’s seen of American dancing.
“Somebody will bring an accordion, and play it and everybody would dance actual dances,” Sulkson said. “Lithuanian folk dancing is different – it’s not just moving in place. It’s like you grab a guy and you’re getting spun around and thrown up in the air. There’s no awkwardness between a guy and a girl – a random guy will just come and grab you and start spinning you around. So yeah, dancing is a pretty big thing in Lithuanian culture. We really like to dance.”
Sulkson’s learned both partner and all-girl dances, and she’s seen several all-guy performances. The partner dances are her favorite, because one song will play and everyone will immediately know exactly what the dance is. Lithuanians grow up learning a handful of the same dances, or they’ll teach these routines to newcomers so they’ll know it the next time that song comes on.
While folk-dancing, women will wear the tradition tautiniai rubai or “tauts,” as Sulkson called them. They’ll also wrap a jostas around themselves, a brightly colored woven belt, which Sulkson keeps hanging in her dorm room. For jewelry, amber is a popular accessory because it commonly washes up on Lithuania’s shores from the Baltic Sea.
Sulkson knows she wants to pass on Lithuanian traditions and customs to her own family one day through the language, food, dancing, decorations, clothing and jewelry. She’s happy to have grown up balanced between her American life and her Lithuanian heritage, which is easier to do than people would think.
“Just little things help me stay connected, like when people ask me about [being Lithuanian]. I explain it to other people, and that helps me stay connected to it every day.”
***
Nothing about Sulkson’s appearance or actions screamed Lithuanian while standing next to her in the book signing line. But the moment we stepped up to Sepetys and Sulkson said, “Labas, Ruta,” it’s like a rope wrapped around the two of them, binding them closer together. Sepetys cried out in Lithuanian, opening her arms and welcoming Sulkson with a wide smile.
Sulkson eagerly explained the email from her grandmother, asking Sepetys whether she remembered meeting her grandmother three years ago when she came to Detroit for a different book event.
Sepetys thought about it for a moment before nodding vigorously. She recalled how Sulkson’s grandmother and great-aunt had given Sepetys a photo from the baptism in Germany featuring Sepetys’ grandfather. The author has very few pictures of her family from around the time they fled Lithuania.
The two continued swapping stories, a jumble of Enlgish and Lithuanian filling the space between them. When Sulkson finished explaining the connection between their two families, Sepetys came around the signing table and wrapped Sulkson in a hug.
Standing there on the outskirts of their moment, I remember the awe and
wonder tightening in my chest. I remember my incredulity, witnessing these two women separated by a generation and by distance embrace over their shared history. A history not just between two Lithuanians but between two members of an interconnected family who found hope and love together in the middle of war and persecution.
What really surprised me, though, was how unsurprised Sulkson was about the connection between her and Sepetys.
“I get to know people from all over the place,” Sulkson said during our interview. “Like with Ruta – I don’t really know her personally, but we have some kind of relationship that I didn’t even know about, and now I know.”
***
Between her folk dancing and her summer trips and her scouts participation and more, Sulkson has had plenty of opportunities to learn about who she is as a Lithuanian-American. She’s found a way to balance both worlds, and she knows how she wants to carry that legacy forward into the future.
But meeting Sepetys reminded Sulkson that everything she’s built her life on was only because her family escaped. Her relatives fought and ran and scraped by just to give her a chance to live a better life, a life where Stalin doesn’t “hang over [her] like a shadow.”
Those were the words Sepetys used to describe the true witnesses and survivors she talked to while researching for her books. It’s hard for Sulkson to contemplate that technically, her grandparents are survivors and witnesses of that horrifying deportation process too.
“[My grandparents] had so much time to process and accept what happened, and what they had to go through to get to where they’re at,” Sulkson said, “but because I was not there to experience it firsthand, it still blows my mind. I don’t think I’m ever really gonna fully understand and fully grasp the concept, because it’s something you hear in history books. But then the fact that it's so close to me – like literally my grandparents – is just crazy.”
Despite the hardships Lithuanians like Sulkson’s and Sepetys’ families suffered through, they’ve remained strong. They’ve passed down their culture and traditions to thousands of Lithuanian descendants all over the world, keeping the spark of their people alive and thriving. No matter where they go, they’ll carry that spark with them, igniting future generations who will grow up knowing exactly what it means to be Lithuanian.
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