First Let’s Kill All the Lawyers

“Do you like lawyer jokes?”  I am asked.

“No.”

“Do you want me to tell you one?”

“No.”

“I know a really, really good lawyer joke, can I just tell it to you?”

“By all means as I can see it’s really important to you.”

My first husband was born in Poland, but both his parents were born in Lithuania.  He explained when the Russians came into Lithuania his parents were children and their families moved to neighboring Poland.

When we had been married for a couple years my mother-in-law, Stefania, came to stay with us for a few months.  On the one hand, she and I had communication problems because her English was not always good and my Polish was much worse.  On the other hand I learned Eastern European women are such good housekeepers you can eat a meal off the corner of your kitchen floor with no fear of contamination. 

My husband and I drove very used cars that always seemed to be breaking.  Stefania and I were having trouble with the car when I made a comment to the effect of the cars always being problems.  Stefania said that’s what her father told her.  I knew her father died in Lithuania when she was little.  I was surprised they had cars in Lithuania in the 1930s.  “Your father had a car?”  She told me her father had many cars, probably seven.  Seven cars in Lithuania in the 1930s, I asked what her father did to have so many cars.

Stefania explained her grandfather was a judge, a very important judge.  Her father was a lawyer.  When the Russians invaded her country they rounded up all the important people, took them outside the city and shot them.  Someone told her mother what happened.  Her mother got together all the valuables they could carry and she took herself and her two children to Poland.  The family also had a large amount of land, which the Soviets confiscated. 

Shakespeare did not write the line about first killing the lawyers as a joke, suggesting their death would lead to a better world.  The line was stated by a character who wanted to kill the lawyers so he might more easily place a man on the throne who wanted, but had no right to be, king.  The character hoped that by killing the lawyers there would be no one to defend the law.  When I hear that Shakespeare line, stated as though it is a joke, I see Stefania, who lost her grandfather, father, home and country, in one fell swoop so local lawyers would not be present to fight for their countrymen in Stalin’s Lithuania. 

My father-in-law’s family also fled Lithuania for Poland, but they suffered no loss of life, no lawyers in that family.