Apartment for Rent

The story begins when Mouse disappears from his apartment and the residents of the apartment building put up a notice: “Apartment for Rent”… Many people are interested, but it turns out that finding a tenant is not so easy. Although the apartment looks appealing, the fussy little animals never like the neighbours! And the neighbours here are all sorts: a hen, a cuckoo, a cat and a squirrel. This is a story about love (and sometimes lack of love) not only for a creature like yourself, but also for one who seems completely different… About the chance to accept one another’s differences with friendly curiosity and gentleness. And about harmony and the relief that comes when peace arrives.

Lea Goldberg (1911–1970) was a renowned poet, playwright, translator and literary critic of Jewish origin. She spent all of her childhood and youth in Lithuania, until 1935. Her home city, Kaunas, left a deep mark on her work. In 1935, Lea Goldberg emigrated to Palestine and settled in Tel Aviv. The fairy tale “Apartment for Rent” was published in 2022 by the publishing house Žalias kalnas; it is the first of the poet’s books to be translated into Lithuanian and published. Lea Goldberg wrote in Hebrew, and the fairy tale was translated into Lithuanian by Antanas A. Jonynas and Nathan Gitkind.

Puppet theatre actress and director Kata Csató, from Hungary, completed her puppetry studies at the Academy in Białystok, Poland. The artist has worked successfully in various countries around the world—Hungary, Serbia, Romania and Poland, as well as Lithuania. In her words: “These days, with so many complex conflicts in the world and, on top of that, a terrible war in our neighbourhood, it is truly worth reconsidering what it means to live together. And how can we understand one another? This performance, like most of my work, is almost wordless. It speaks primarily in a visual language that everyone can understand.”