Memory office: Jaq Greenspon
Jaq Greenspon was born in 1967, Las Vegas, United States of America. Together with his sister, he grew up in a traditional Jewish family. Jaq says, that the biggest gift of his parents was the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them.
Since 2011, Jaq Greenspon is teaching at Vytautas Magnus University and is residing in Kaunas, Lithuania. He fell in love, created a family and has a two-year old daughter. J. Greenspon talks about cultural differences, stereotypes and difficulties that he encounters in his everyday life in Kaunas.
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“My parents gave me the courage to fail. I was involved in theatre since I was little, and my parents encouraged all of that. (…) Even if they didn’t understand it, they would put me into situation or position where I could learn or participate in anything that I was interested in.”
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“I knew I was coming to Kaunas and so I picked up a copy of the inner-pocket guide. I looked it up and researched in it. The way I was explaining it to my friends back home… “Where are you going?” I said, “I’m moving to Kaunas”. I’m not even sure if I pronounced it correctly. “What it’s like?” I said, “I don’t really know. From everything I gathered, it’s kinda like the San Francisco of Lithuania”, meaning that it was very artsy. That’s what I was expecting.”
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"I know, we tried to avoid “Kaunas is the most Lithuanian city”, but I think it’s part of its charm, that you do feel a little bit more of the Lithuanian culture. (…) Kaunas is much more Lithuanian.”
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“When our daughter was born, we had a conversation, what to name her. Her first name is Lithuanian. It ends with an “a” sound. Because, you know, when I said this name, my wife would be “It doesn’t sound like a girl’s name”. So, the deal was that I got to give her the middle name. And so, I gave her the middle name, which is not the Lithuanian name. And to the point, when we went to register her, her Lithuanian passport only has her first name (…), because they wouldn’t accept a middle name that wasn’t a Lithuanian name. And Americans said, “Can we give her the middle name that we want to have, even though it’s not in her Lithuanian birth certificate?”, “Yeah, that’s fine”. So, in American [passport] she has three names and in Lithuanian [passport] she has only two. But that was certainly a discussion that we are going to have a child, the child is going to have a Lithuanian name (...), that’s a cultural conversation.”
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“Travel is what kills close-mindedness. Opening yourself up to different cultures tells you that there are more people in the world. Any time of provincialism, any type of people, who never leave their home, don’t understand that there’s a world out there.”
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“She talks to my parents every day, my daughter. She talks every day and sees them on a video in a chat. So, she understands their culture, she sees their house, she sees the way that they live. The more she grows, the more she’ll learn about these different things and the more she’ll learn about my background. I think it’s fabulous. I think it opens the world to her so that she understands that there is no one way to do things. That everywhere you go they do things in a slightly different way, and so she will always be able to be open to that. I think it’s awesome, I think it’s amazing.”
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“I love Kaunas, I think it’s a great city. (…) When somebody asks me “What’s it like?”, usually their question isn’t “What’s it like?”. Their question is “How is it different?”. Nobody wants to know, what it’s like to live in some place, they want to know what’s different. Especially Americans. What you miss from home – that’s what they want to know. (…) I’m from Las Vegas, so if somebody says “What’s Kaunas like?” I say “Well, it’s not Las Vegas”."
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“When my folks come to visit, I absolutely take them to Spurginė. Absolutely. And I will tell them a story, how in post-soviet times it was bought by the women that worked there. We are already making plans, I will take them to Grūto Parkas to see that. Because for them, they’ve never seen anything like that. That’s a whole new world.”
Interview date 2019 03 26.