The Other City
Opera · 2026 · history · poetry · ritual · memory · archives
This opera and its libretto was created from fragments: letters, memoirs, and archival materials now preserved at the Biržų krašto muziejus „Sėla." They are among the few surviving testimonies to Jewish life in Biržai, a community that was wiped out by persecution and murder.
The libretto opens with a letter to Dr. Abraham Zelman Levin. Bronislavas Petrauskas, a mechanical engineer whom the people of Biržai described as a „beacon of light," wrote it in 2001 — decades after Levin's death. The letter thus becomes a belated tribute to a man whose life was violently cut short.
But the libretto does not tell only the story of Abraham Zelman Levin. The fates of other Jewish people from Biržai are also reconstructed and reimagined from the few remaining traces. From memories, letters, documents, names, and individual moments passed down through the generations, people emerge once more whose lives had nearly vanished from memory. What has been preserved only in fragments comes together to form voices, stories, and life journeys — and, for a moment, brings back to life the Jewish world that once belonged to Biržai.
Thus, the libretto does not attempt to fill in the gaps in history. Rather, it follows the traces that remain and gives them space and a voice — as a scar and a void left in nowadays reality of this country.
- Music
- Vladimiras Konstantinovas
- Libretto
- Aneta Panek
- Directed by
- Karina Novikova & Aneta Panek
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