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IN 1985 I saw a pre-World War I map of the Vilna area. Postov was there, east of Vilna, over a river and near a large lake. A contemporary Russian map of the area showed Postavy where Postov had been, east of Vilna, over a river and near a large lake. Postavy is the Russian name of Postov. I thought that if someone had bothered to put Postov on a map, it is a place we could visit. Perhaps we should.

This trip was never envisioned as a family vacation. We conceived it as a fact-finding mission. Each of us had reasons to be concerned that the close confinement of this extended trip could strain family dynamics. But Melvin Gold, my brother-in-law, was an outstanding planner. The trip was to be a pilgrimage to the places that his wife, Shifra Gold, my sister, had lived before coming to America, and to sites that held special meaning for us. Mel's research yielded a surprising amount of information from a number of resources, among them the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. Before World War II, this library had been in Vilna. It was the largest library of Yiddish literature in the world. Mel also compiled articles from Yad Vashem (The Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem), Bet Hatefuzot (the museum of the Diaspora, in Tel Aviv), as well as from Argentina and from our local Jewish community library. We translated these documents from Hebrew and Yiddish into English. The material was recorded onto audio cassettes and transcribed into a written syllabus. Mel saw to it that we would all be prepared ahead for our journey. (Much to Mel's credit, the scattered data was gathered before any of us had access to the internet.)

Shifra was eager to go to the shtetl where she was born. Our father had moved west over the border into Lithuania where he married Shifra's mother. There he opened the importing branch of the family dry goods business. Today, Utena (or Utyan, as we knew it) is less than an hour's drive from Postov. It is west across the boundary shared by Belarus and Lithuania, and north of Vilna.

Back in 1940, when a fourteen-year-old Shifra last made the trip between Postov and Utyan, all border crossings were illegal. Buried in a hay wagon, she passed through a farmer's field under the cover of darkness. This field, owing to an arbitrarily drawn boundry line, began in one country and ended in another, and the farmer, whose day job was to tend his crops, had discovered a more lucrative night job in transporting illegal travelers across his property.

Our trip to Utyan was not much faster than Shifra's hayride of fifty years earlier. We were the only travelers at the border crossing and yet, before we were permitted to go, we first had to satisfy the changing humors of the local small-town bureaucrats. When we approached the gates, I remembered the tension that my parents experienced each time we did a border crossing. They were never to get over the fear of uniformed officials. For our part, the guards we encountered only made us laugh for they sternly examined our American passports--upside down. They were under the impression that Belarus didn't have diplomatic relations with the U.S., and wanted to know how we got our visas. Fortunately for us, these officials lived in Postavy, and they turned friendly when they found out that thatwas our destination. A discussion with the superior officer and some American cigarettes and chocolates then settled this complex diplomatic question--in our favor.

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