Work and leisure in the Krantai neighborhood : everyday life in Šančiai in the 1930s

Abstract

Oral history is still not very popular in Lithuanian historiography, so following the trends of foreign historical scholarship, the author decided to carry out a microhistorical study of a neighborhood in the Šančiai district of Kaunas in the 1930s. Šančiai was growing fast during the interwar period: there were some factories and workshops opened, and many people moved to Šančiai from rural areas looking for jobs and a beginning of a new chapter in their lives. A lot of the residents were blue-collar or white-collar workers, and Šančiai was considered a working-class district. In order to explore the history of a certain Šančiai neighborhood, oral history was used. In the summer of 2014, three non-structured interviews with former residents of Šančiai were made. During the interviews, the informants shared their memories of growing up in the Krantai neighborhood and their recollections of families and neighbors with their occupational activities and day-to-day experiences in Šančiai. The collected information (including photographs from personal archives) allow us to tell a story about everyday life in Šančiai in the 1930s; to show the social, economic, and ethnic diversity of the residents; to present their family life, leisure activities, work, and business; to evaluate their living conditions and their standard of living; and to reveal their interpersonal relations within the community.