Friends forever
It’s late in the afternoon so long sheets of papers are slowly threading through the old printing press. As they spill out, the newspaper is packed and readied for delivery, all 3,000 of them
This is tomorrow’s Draugas with news and pictures about Lithuania and Lithuanians in Chicago and in the same language, Lithuanian, since the day it began publishing in 1909 in Chicago.
On another floor in the newspaper’s building on the city’s Southwest side sit the newspaper’s bound volumes, the pages browned and crinkling, some as soft and fleeting as dust in the hand.
They are filled with the stories from when Lithuanians poured into Chicago at the start of the last century, building one of the largest communities outside of Lithuania.
Then it was called the Daily Draugas, or the Daily Friend.
Today, it is only Draugas, and Dalia Cidizikaite, its editor in chief, feels the presence of history as she puts out the five-day a week paper that some consider the world’s longest continuing newspaper in Lithuanian and the only daily newspaper in Lithuanian outside the home country.
She edits. She writes – when she has time. She oversees the flow of stories about Lithuanian community events and the news as well about Lithuania. And when invitations come to attend Lithuanian community events, she rarely turns them down because she knows the importance of the paper’s presence.
In Lithuania she was a scholar and actress. Here, she still cares about acting but the newspaper takes so much of her time. Here, Lithuanians want to know what is happening, and they want others, she says, to know what they are doing.
Here, she says, “life is so rich. They really feel the community ties.”
So on another floor, amid piles of books and machinery and far from the bound volumes of disappearing news pages that told Lithunianian immigrants about the struggles of the small country they are bound to, here is tomorrow’s news in the language Lithuanians have refused to forget.
Just as it has been for the last 100 years.
Fabiola
April 2, 2010 at 9:52 am
Wow, this is amazing. I like this story very much!