Jurgis Blekaitis, at 89; poet, editor at Voice of America
WASHINGTON -- Jurgis Blekaitis, a poet, theater producer, and editor at Voice of America, died June 25 at his home in suburban Laurel, Md. He had Alzheimer's disease. He was 89.
Mr. Blekaitis worked for Voice of America from 1952 until 1987 in its Lithuanian service, and he retired as a senior editor. He spoke six languages.
He identified himself as Lithuanian, although he was born in Finland, where his family was vacationing during a break in his father's military service in the Russian czar's army. The family lived in St. Petersburg until, a few months after Mr. Blekaitis's birth, the Russian Revolution began.
The family retreated to his father's ancestral home in Birstonas, Lithuania. Growing up, he learned his mother's Polish, plus Lithuanian and Russian. He later learned French, German, and English.
Mr. Blekaitis was among the first to receive a degree in theater at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania. He was an actor and director in Vilnius when World War II began.
Rejected for service in the Lithuanian Army, he was on a list to be sent to a concentration camp with other intellectuals when he began walking the 210 miles from Vilnius to Liepaja, Latvia, near the end of the war. Caught between advancing armies, he continued on to Germany, where he ended up in a displaced persons camp.
He entered art school in Freiburg, Germany, and published essays about European and Russian theater. He also organized other displaced people into an amateur acting troupe and toured several displaced persons camps. Producing Clifford Odets's "Rocket to the Moon," Mr. Blekaitis was stumped by a US idiom. He finally decided to use the phrase "son of a gun" without translation.
Immigrating to New York in 1949, Mr. Blekaitis went to work in ethnic theater, staging productions at a Russian theater in Brooklyn. He joined Voice of America in 1952, when it was based in New York, and followed it to Washington when its headquarters moved in 1954.
He published two books of poetry in the United States and a memoir in Lithuania.
