Louis Lentin's new documentary tells the story of his grandfather, who grew up in a small village in Lithuania and then fled to Ireland at the age of 60.  Lentin talks to Fiona McCann

When Louis Lentin was six years old, his 60-year-old grandfather came to live with him, moving into the family's Limerick home and sharing the little boy's bedroom.

"I'd be peering out from the bedclothes every morning watching how he got dressed, and [ him shaving with] his cut-throat razor," recalls Lentin. "I did ask him one morning: 'Grandpa, speak to me in Russian' and he was absolutely silent . . . I didn't realise at the time that he probably did not want to remember."

What Lentin later learned was that his grandfather was actually Lithuanian and had grown up in a Jewish shtetl, or village, known at the time as Zidik, before leaving his family, and a past that for the generations to follow was shrouded in mystery, for a new life in Ireland. The story of this taciturn, phlegmatic man who bequeathed to Lentin a surname that marked him out in Irish classrooms, turned into a personal quest for the septuagenarian filmmaker in search of his own identity.

The quest took Lentin, now 74, close to five years and across continents, culminating in a one-hour documentary which will be broadcast this weekend on RTÉ1, called: Grandpa, Speak to Me in Russian.

"The idea of the documentary gelled about four to five years ago," says Lentin. "I can't go back any further than my grandfather in terms of lineage, so who the hell am I?"

Knowing so little about his ancestors, Lentin also even questioned his name, convinced it could have been changed at some stage of his grandfather's younger life, unbeknownst to his descendents.

"We'd always had discussions in the family about what could it really be - Lentinovich, Lentinovski, all this sort of thing. So I decided I would do some research and have a look," recalls Lentin. Delving into his grandfather's past, he realised he'd found a tale worth telling. "I thought, 'I've got a story here'."

This story is that of his paternal grandfather, Kalman Lentin, who grew up one of seven children living in a small village in Russian-ruled Lithuania, where Jews were treated as second-class citizens.

"Taxes [ for Jews] were almost quadruple what they were for the average person," explains Lentin. "It was this constant state of fear, because although there were no pogroms in that part of Lithuania, you were confined there, you had to have an internal pass to move from town to town, from village to village, and the only time you mingled with your neighbours was on market day.

"Jews had a licence to be innkeepers and be distillers, but there was always the possibility that if you didn't serve your Christian neighbour as much as he wanted . . . then the chances were your inn could be burned down."

ON TOP OF this, Jewish men were forced to serve 25 years in the Czar's army, a conscription that meant alienation from family and heritage, and often death.

"Their chances of survival were very, very slim, and most of them that came back were no longer Jews," says Lentin.

Jewish boys lived in constant fear of being kidnapped for army service, and while the pogroms may have been a distant threat, it was known that they were sanctioned by the Russian government. "Anybody could go on the loose and burn down a Jewish village," says Lentin.

These reasons are enough to explain why a young boy like Kalman would have chosen to follow in his older brothers' footsteps and leave his homeland. "It was a terrible place to live and people couldn't get out of it fast enough!" says Lentin.

The difficulties of researching a distant and often undocumented past were compounded by the fact that much of the documentation that was unearthed was written in Yiddish, and Lentin concedes that he was left to fill in a lot of blanks concerning his grandfather's early life. "An awful lot of this film is conjecture," he admits. With what information he did have, he believes that Kalman probably left his homeland around the age of 14, boarding a steam ship to England from the Latvian port of Liepaja, and travelling on to Ireland.

"Why did he come to Cork?" Lentin asks. "We could never 100 per cent prove it, but we think we're right in that there was a relative of his mother's already living in Cork," says Lentin. It's the kind of story mirrored by so many migratory experiences, including the Irish one, where one pioneer writing home could spark a mass exodus.

"It only needs one person to find themselves in one place and say 'Look, it's quite good here, you can make a living here' in a letter back. The letter would have got read to everyone in the synagogue . . . and that's how it started," he says.

Somehow, Ireland became a popular destination for Jews leaving this part of Eastern Europe. "We were speaking to a local historian who showed me a Lithuanian document, where Ireland is listed amongst the places of migration in the late 19th century," says Lenin, citing this country's appearance alongside other popular destinations such as the US and South Africa.

So Kalman joined the exodus, crossing the border to Riga, and then travelling overland to Liepaja to embark for England. It was a trip that his grandson would take in reverse over 100 years later. The moment they arrive in Zidik is documented, with Lentin almost leaping from the truck at the sight of the town's signpost. "We finally made it, oh my God! We're the first Lentins to return to der heym," he says exuberantly to his son, Miki, who accompanied him on the trip. Der heym - the homeland - a concept that clearly troubles Lentin, who found himself strangely at peace in this Lithuanian town after a lifetime as an outsider in his birthplace of Ireland.

"In a funny way I felt at home. I felt easy. And I couldn't understand that, why I should feel this way," he says.

BUT IT WAS when he visited the local graveyard that the emotional impact of this journey back into his own past really hit home. He recalls being paralysed in the van as it pulled up at the graveyard. "I couldn't get out of the van," he says, his eyes even now misting over at the recollection. "I felt absolutely surrounded by Lentins."

He looked on while his son Miki searched the gravestones for evidence that their ancestors had indeed been buried there.

"I said, 'Miia, see can you find a Lentin gravestone', and he did. I couldn't believe it, it was too much altogether," says Lentin, who is visibly moved in the retelling of this monumental moment in his life.

"That was the proof that my name was as it is," he recalls simply. "I don't know why I really needed to know that."

After years of feeling like the outsider in the country of his birth, Lentin was finally at home. He describes growing up in Limerick and then Dublin as a time of growing consciousness of his difference from his fellow Irishmen, the experience finally articulated when, during his time working at RTÉ, a colleague questioned him on his understanding of some nationalistic subject matter.

"How can you possibly understand that?" the person in question asked him. "You're not Irish, you're Jewish!"

It's this sense that one precludes him from the other, or that his Irishness was always qualified by his Jewish heritage, that has kept Lentin from really finding a sense of home here, and that ultimately led him back to der heym.

Despite this connection with the land of his grandfather, however, he says Kalman did his best to put it behind him, making a life for himself in Ireland. He started out as a peddler and went on to run a scrapyard and raise a family. His silence about his past read as an indication of his determination to move on.

Despite his silence, however, Lentin is convinced his grandfather's uprooting had a profound effect on him, and one that has somehow transmitted itself through the generations. "I think there were two Kalmans," says Lentin. "The silent man I knew and the boy who lived in Zidik. Did he go around being so silent in Zidik? I don't think so beause kids aren't like that. So what silenced him?" Lentin sees the repressive Russian regime combined with the trauma of leaving his homeland as having left their mark on his grandfather and created the taciturn figure Lentin knew, and believes he himself even absorbed aspects of it.

"People who have suffered some great trauma, it's passed down in the genes," says Lentin. "Some people inherit it - I believe I have it in some aspects of my personality."

Lentin's story may be rooted in a past that is already partially lost in the passage of time, but it still resonates strongly in a new Ireland, where immigrants arrive daily as his grandfather did over 100 years ago. Which is why Lentin argues that Grandpa, Speak to Me in Russian, is ultimately the story of anyone who has had to leave their homeland.

"It's a migrant film," he says simply. "Every migrant has their own story, and the migrants that are coming in today, they've got their own stories. Nobody leaves their homeland willingly. They leave it for several reasons, and the homeland," he pauses, as if weighing up a legacy that future generations of Irish will also have to grapple with, "in some instances it takes generations to go."

Grandpa, Speak to Me in Russianwill be shown on Sun, Jan 6, at 10.55pm on RTÉ1