Father

I remember, how I once talked with Dad about the future. I tried to convince him that I, like him, should be a physician.  Dad, for some reason deep in thought, kept shaking his head.  He told me, “I took up medicine, because there was no other way, so medicine takes the second place for me now, I am a humanities man and would you to be like that, too. Lithuania needs both more enlightening and more enlightened souls.  After all, Lithuania is not a land of the sick.”  And I see that Lithuania, as a whole, is not just my old Vilnius doctors’ clinic.  Dad’s words are alive for me.  I always listened to him – he is my greatest guide. 

From Marutė Alseikaitė’s letter to Jurgis Gimbutas, August 8, 1938.
(After: Marija Gimbutienė ... iš laiškų ir prisiminimų. ( Marija Gimbutas ... in Letters and Memoirs) Vilnius, 2005, p. 82–83)