For more than a century, Chicago has remained one of the most important centres of the Lithuanian diaspora. However, the Lithuanian community there is slowly shrinking.
In the Chicago Bridgeport area, there used to be six Lithuanian restaurants. The family of Gražina Bičiūnaitė, one of the few Lithuanians left in this neighbourhood, used to own one of them.
“My mother died in 1979 and left me the restaurant,” she says. It may have been the world’s longest-running Lithuanian restaurant, welcoming visitors since 1938.
“We put up a sign saying ‘Healthy food. Lithuanian restaurant’ and a yellow, green, and red flag for visibility,” Bičiūnaitė shares. However, the restaurant closed in 2009.
When Lithuanians started moving elsewhere, Patricija Nelija Paulauskas stayed in the area. Her family moved here when she was a child, shortly after the Second World War. “We ran away. Not that we wanted to come here, but fate brought us here,” she says.
Thousands of other Lithuanians found their way to Chicago through the ruins of Germany. They gathered in several neighbourhoods of Chicago where they created a home away from home.
Antanas Rašymas, the head of the Chicago Youth Centre, says his parents instilled in him a love for Lithuania before he had even visited it. “I think it was their project. They created a little Lithuania here,” he says.
Some Lithuanians continued to emigrate to Chicago after Lithuania became independent in the 1990s. Andrius Bučas, a founder of a Lithuanian restaurant in Chicago, was one of them.
But now, there are fewer and fewer Lithuanian customers, he says. “Maybe less than 50 percent, whereas before 99 percent of our customers were Lithuanians.”
According to Bučas, more and more Lithuanians are leaving Chicago as they move to states with lower taxes. There are also fewer Lithuanian newcomers in the city.
“In 2000, there was a wave of newcomers. But we don’t get a lot of Lithuanian students coming here anymore, even for the summer. Maybe they go somewhere else, somewhere closer to Lithuania. The decrease is very noticeable,” Bučas says.
Not only the number of Lithuanians in Chicago is declining, but also the connections between the different generations, Bičiūnaitė adds.
According to various estimates, there may be up to 100,000 Lithuanians or Americans of Lithuanian descent living in and around Chicago.
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