Your uncertain shadow
Two capitals of two former empires – Moscow and London – happened to me so far. The first one I did not choose, the second one I did. It is rather symbolic that the start of my life in London in Autumn 2003 coincided with the Weather Project exhibition at Tate Modern by Olafur Eliasson. For months I found myself feeling that internal sun as a response to my choice of the city. 16 years later Eliasson came back to Tate with ‘In Real Life’. His 39-metre long tunnel of dense fog and ‘Your uncertain shadow’ projects rather well describe the permutations that have happened with me over the years. I am 39 now, my life seems more uncertain than ever, and yet, I feel hopeful about stepping into the next decade of my life, into the next decade of the 21th century.
The importance of healing
2 years today since my hip surgery, the words of the Nigerian poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo come to mind:
“You see, in a culture like ours, we were never taught the importance of healing, we were only taught to survive. Not heal. Bury, survive.”
Recovery Song is the handmade book of my recovery process from the surgery.
From across the pond
to return from the road trip across the US
to London, with familiar mews, crescents and turns,
yet there are more streets than i can count.
to show one beast to another,
who did not walk here for three decades.
much has changed in the docks, in the City, in everywhere,
but not the darkroom in St Martin-in-the-Fields’ crypt.
not enough time to sit down with friends,
not enough time to slip into forgetting,
into processing the photographs,
into remembering what it was like just moments ago.
faces and places from across the pond,
to keep in mind when proceeding East –
Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia.
does there exist a toolbox? a recipe? a book of guidelines?
of how to find a kindred spirit, friend, traveler, lover and confidant?
maybe there is one? in the folds of the desert rocks? or on the forest floor?
wrapped in the tunic of old postcards, photos and manuscripts.
after a search lasting a quarter-century,
after all,
there exists.
love, trust and forgiveness,
the word order changes,
yet those three remain in the rings of the tree.
i am starting my 40th year tomorrow.
40 years in the desert is the jewish tale,
yet it’s so appealing and teasing
to think that i am on my way out.
free of darkness,
free of sadness,
free of pain and rage.
for what happened to me,
to my ancestors and their friends,
to many others around and away.
i found some riches in love,
taken for a ride of 8000 miles,
across the land of the free
and the home of the brave.
to find meaning through loss,
fill the cup with pine cones and stones.
i might not be entirely free, true,
but it might also be the beginning.
A sketch for the centenary
My paternal grandfather Mikhail Gefter was a historian, philosopher, intellectual.
As an adult, years after his death
I learned of his pupils throughout the world,
of his philosophical and historical writings,
and of the www.gefter.ru platform for social sciences and intellectual thought named after him.
Many called him МЯ (Михаил Яковлевич – Mikhail Yakovlevich).
I called him Misha. I kept a couple letters from him and a couple of recollections of our time together.
I never asked about his childhood when I was little, when I had a chance.
When the question popped up in my head, he was long gone.
I asked my father and my uncle.
They never asked either, and МЯ never talked to his two sons
about his pre-war childhood in multi-cultured Crimea,
about his grandmother who adored him,
about growing up without a father,
about losing his mother and cousin in the Holocaust, and his uncle in Stalin’s purges.
I knew none of it when in April 2015, out of the blue, an email from my uncle popped up. Attached were the scans of four postcards sent by my great-grandmother shortly before she was killed in the mass-murder of Jewish population in Crimea in 1941.
It was the first time I heard about her. She had a name. She was a piano teacher.
Two days later at a friend’s birthday party in London I met Olesya Zdorovetska, a musician and composer from Southern Ukraine who now lived in Dublin. We talked about families, politics, arts, languages. Crimea had been annexed in 2014. The war was on between Ukraine and Russia. Many sensitive subjects came up.
Olesya invited me to visit her in Dublin in September.
When September came, Olesya suggested I came with her to Lviv, to the annual Book Forum. I agreed without a slight hesitation. Those postcards were on my mind, even though Lviv and Crimea are 1000 km apart. I also felt the urge to revisit my childhood places in the Carpathian Mountains, near Lviv. But most importantly, after years of wanderings, I felt like I was getting closer to finding the right doors.
With Olesya and alone,
I explored the cobble streets,
peeped into Lviv courtyards,
climbed onto the roofs,
wandered in the cemeteries.
At the Book Forum Olesya bought a collection of poetry by Debora Vogel, a female writer, art critic and intellectual, who perished in Lviv ghetto in 1942 and remained in obscurity for a long time. We learned that between the two wars Lviv was this inspiring metropolis for modernist thought in philosophy, mathematics, literary theory and arts, as well as a place of social and ethnic conflicts. It was among Lviv intellectuals and artists, during the period of rising chauvinism and anti-semitism, that the idea of an inclusive and open culture was formed. This redemptive and progressive vision was brutally squashed in the Holocaust, and yet not entirely extinguished. Fragments of it survive to be discovered through scavenging, collecting and juxtaposing.
What emerged was a patchwork of fragments, leads, innuendos and images in my lost and elusive family stories. Fragments of Memory brought me back to those postcards from 75 years ago. Lviv prompted me to recognise similar patterns centering around the figure of my grandfather, a scholar whose life was largely impacted by war, revolution and genocide, the details of which were suppressed.
МЯ was born 100 years ago in Crimea, where he grew up before travelling to Moscow to study History in 1936 and where he met my grandmother, born also in 1918 in Mariupol on the Azov Sea in Southern Ukraine. Neither did she talk to her sons and granddaughters about her childhood.
What about their families? Who were their parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins? Where and how did they live? What did they do during those cataclismic times of Enlightenment, Zionism, Pogroms, Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, World War I, Russian Civil War, raise of Communism, World War II?
The online search took me to Kerch and Simferopol in Crimea; Odessa, Kherson, Kharkiv, Zhitomir and Rivne in Ukraine; Moscow, St Petersburg, Vologda, Tomsk and Irkutsk in Russia; Lublin in Poland; Berlin in Germany; Lausanne in Switzerland; Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Washington in the US.
In this piece made for my grandfather’s centenary on 24 August 2018, I reflect on the intergenerational connections, inherited silence, on life and living in places of extinction and mass murder. The original text in Russian is below.
My grandfather’s voice in the video is an excerpt from the interview recorded by Lorenzo Scaccabarozzi in January 1989: “We aim to learn seemingly everything about the lives of people who lived before us, or about our own lives. But we do not know beforehand, that we would not be able to find out everything. Either way we are making a selection. And this selection is not an artifical selection, at the same time this is our choice: by choosing from what was before us, what entered us as ‘past’, we choose who we are. And by choosing ourselves, we choose our future, consciously or subconsciously.”
“Мы стремимся узнать как будто бы все о жизни людей, которые существовали до нас, или о нашей собственной жизни. Но мы не знаем наперед, что все мы не можем узнать. Мы все равно производим отбор. И этот отбор есть не просто искусственный отбор, это вместе с тем выбор: отбирая из того, что было, что входит в нас в качестве прошлого, мы выбираемых самих себя. А выбирая самих себя, мы сознательно или бессознательно выбираем будущее.”
Эти слова 30-летней давности моего деда историка Михаила Яковлевича Гефтера врезались в память и сопровождали в 2015-2017 пока я работала над Львовским проектом Пазли Пам’ятi / Fragments of Memory. Они же и привели меня в Одессу, Мариуполь, Херсон, Симферополь, Керчь и Москву. В ночь на 24 августа 2018-го, когда исполнялось сто лет с его рождения, видео ряд из этой поездки по следам предков подстроился под его голос, его слова о прошлом, отборе и выборе.
Одесса
В Одесском архиве, в студенческом деле Давида Блюменфельда (Мишиного дяди, младшего брата моей прабабушки Натальи) нахожу его диплом 1916 года – “Призовое право и великая война”. Заключение: «Пока война будет существовать, до тех пор будут существовать и стремления к неограниченному использованию средств уничтожения и разрушения. Но война, по моему, категория историческая; она исчезнет, как появилась. Государства будущего найдут более разумные способы борьбы.»
По прошествию двадцати лет юридической и дипломатической работы в Одессе, Берлине, Вене и Москве, 23 ноября 1937 года Давида арестуют и обвинят в шпионаже. Миша, студент 2-го курса истфака МГУ, отделается выговором со стандартной формулировкой: «за утрату бдительности, выразившейся в неразоблачении дяди, врага народа». 8 апреля 1938 Военная коллегия Верховного суда СССР приговорит Давида к высшей мере уголовного наказания – расстрелу с конфискацией имущества. Место захоронения – Коммунарка. База данных “расстрельные списка – Коммунарка” сообщает, что 8 апреля расстреляли еще 85 человек. 28 апреля его жену Фриду арестуют и сошлют в лагерь сроком на восемь лет как члена семьи изменника родины. Их сына Володю отправят в детдом. О муже сообщат в 1940 году, что он находится в дальних лагерях без права переписки, а в 1947, что он умер 18 марта 1942 года. После окончания 7-летней детдомовской школы в июне 1941 Володю отправят к тёте Наталье. Она будет преподавать в музучилище пока его не закроют. В первые дни сентября Володя поступит в техникум. Вместе их расстреляют в Симферопольском Рве в декабре 1941. Фрида переживет лагеря. С Мишей они потеряют друг друга из вида на 40 лет. В 1976 они встретятся в Одессе. В 1984 Фрида уйдет из жизни и Миша установит табличку с тремя именами – Фриды, Давида и Володи. Ни Фрида, ни Миша так и не узнают, что Давида расстреляли в 1938.
Одесское Таировское кладбище. Никак не могу найти могилу Фриды. Администратор кладбища рисует схему близлежащих могил. Нахожу. Со всех сторон она заросла грецким орехом. Орех прорвался и внутрь арматуры трех бетонных кубов. Живое дерево, прорастающее сквозь камень.
Симферополь
Получаю специальное разрешение на въезд в Крым от украинских властей, перехожу пешком границу и на закате въезжаю в Симферополь. Двор дома, в котором вырос Миша. Форма треугольника – улицы Одесская и углом Большевистская. Окна комнаты выходили на Греческую церковь. Об этом он писал. А еще писал о чистом, сладком, крымском воздухе. Хожу по старым улочкам Симферополя, виноград еще не поспел, а черешня и вишня повсюду, сладкая сладкая. Симферопольский Ров: “Всем поколениям всем временам” написано на одной гране памятника. Бесконечные поля пшеницы. Сижу, брожу, снимаю, плачу, в блокнот кладу колосок пшеницы. Теперь я знаю, что Давида и Наталью близкие и родные звали Дудя и Тиля. Их маму – Софiя. Возвращение имен.
Москва
Жизнь в Коммунарке. Осенние запахи памяти. 80 лет спустя. Место, где устроили расстрельные ямы, тогда было просекой. Когда закончились расстрелы, между ямами посадили деревья. Улеи, дым, желуди, детская площадка, дача Ягоды, церковные пристройки, колючая проволока на зеленом заборе по периметру территории. Самодельные таблички на деревьях в память о расстрелянных предках. Нет ничего более постоянного чем временное – спонтанность такой памяти в таком месте кажется тем самым способом помнить. Сделаю для следующего приезда и для нашего Дуди.
12 Bernstein
It was in the Summer 2016 when I first encountered the story of the derelict building at 12 Sholem Aleichem street (formerly Bernstein street). I came to Lviv to research Debora Vogel and her literary and artistic circles of the inter-war period. Wherever I turned I seemed to hear about the building – Google, resources at the Lviv Centre for Urban History, ad-hoc chats with people at the Centre.
Off I went to find the building. The door was locked. A sign БIБЛIОТЕКА (‘library’) on the adjacent building №14 was my route in – I walked in and sneaked at the back.
14 Bernstein street, 21 July 2016 (photos by Asya Gefter)
Crumbling walls separating the two buildings №14 and №12, a relatively recent (January 2015) communist newspaper with a picture of Lenin, some sort of a target shooting board, bits and pieces scattered around.
A couple weeks later Alena Andronatiy called and announced she got the keys to the building. The three of us – Alena, Olesya and myself – met. The world outside stopped to exist when we entered. I lost the sense of time. But we live in the digital age when everything is recorded. The first photograph was taken at 16:30:08, the last one at 17:27:47. It lasted less than an hour what seems a century. The building became a character in our project and film.
***
The Lviv Jewish museum was opened on 17 June 1934 in the building of the Jewish community on 12 Bernstein street. It immediately became a noticeable phenomenon in the cultural life of the multiethnic Galicia. Its collection included religious artefacts of the 17th-19th centuries (Maksymilian Goldstein Judaica collection) andmodern art.
The custodian of the museum was Ludwik Lille, artist and connoisseur of Jewish relics. He joined Artes, an avant-garde art group which tried surrealism, symbolism, abstractionism, cubism, constructivism and other movements which were in fashion in the European art of that timeheld exhibitions at the Jewish Museum and Vogel wrote about matters close to their area of interests; Henryk Streng, another member of Artes, illuminated Vogel’s prose collection Acacias Blooms well as her poetry books Day Figures and Mannequins.
In early 1940 the communist regime liquidated the Jewish Museum, and its holdings were transferred to the collections of the Industrial Museum and other museums in Lviv. Despite all the efforts of the Museum administration to save Goldstein and his family, thewere murdered during the Aktion of November 1942.
The same fate as of Debora Vogel and her family.
Ukrainian employees of the Industrial museum saved the artifacts by hiding them in the basement. In 1944 they visited Pavlo Zholtovsky, the director of the newly created Museum of Ethnography and Arts and Crafts, and presented him with the antiquities. In 1948, after the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued the resolution “On the Struggle against Rootless Cosmopolitanism,” Zholtovsky received an order to destroy all Jewish artifacts. The Ukrainian scholar, risking his freedom and life, issued to the NKVD a false certificate attesting to the destruction of the antiquities, and then hid them in the attic of the museum.
The people of Lviv discovered the twice-saved collection only in 1990, when the art historian Dr. Faina Petryakova unveiled an exhibit dedicated to the Jewish material and spiritual heritage.
‘Relics of the Jewish World of Galicia’ exhibition is currently on display at the Lviv Ethnography Museum – the very collection that was housed at the Lviv Jewish Museum in the 1930s.
The building of the former Jewish Museum survived too but has become a victim of difficult politics in the Lviv Religious Jewish community in the post-Soviet independent Ukraine.
Will be history obliterated and all memory erased yet again by the recent 2017/18 controversial renovation that might result in turning it into a hotel?
30 April 1978
40 years ago today – Red Saunders recollects the RAR Victoria Park Carnival:
On Sunday 30 April 1978, 80,0000 people gathered in Trafalgar Square, and danced their way through the East End to Victoria Park in Hackney for the first big Rock Against Racism Carnival Against the Nazis. RAR had emerged in reaction to an alarming rise in racist attacks on the streets, and support for the neo-Nazi National Front at the ballot box. Mainstays of the UK pop scene such as Eric Clapton and David Bowie – white musicians capitalising on black music – made statements that further inflamed racial tension. A letter to the music press, written by Red Saunders and signed by a group of fans, voicing their horror at such hypocrisy, quickly gained widespread support. RAR was part of a broader anti-racism movement in the late 1970s, but it has become a symbol of the role that people-led movements and popular culture can play in shaping and influencing attitudes.
From Pop Art to Community Arts in Hackney and beyond
If you did not have a chance to attend last week screening at the 2018 East End Film Festival, the film is available to watch online.
From memories of meeting Andy Warhol to the visuals of Chats Palace and Lenthall Road Printshops, See Red Women’s Workshop and Rock Against Racism movement, the film explores the influence of screen-printing on the Community Arts Movement in Hackney and beyond.
Lviv-London Double Impact
Join us at Pushkin House, London on November 14 for a special evening of imagery, history, words and music with London resident Asya Gefter, who has just launched the ‘Fragments of Memory’ project in Lviv, and Lviv resident Mark Tokar, double bass player and a key figure in the Ukrainian free jazz scene.
Over the past two years, Asya Gefter and Olesya Zdorovetska had been on a journey to discover Debora Vogel, an overlooked intellectual, writer, art critic, the Gertrude Stein of inter-war Lviv. They walked the places Vogel inhabited, exhibited and wrote about. They met people who survived the war and went on living, or were born long after and reconnected with the vanished world. They encountered the story of the former Lviv Jewish museum, a derelict building presently at risk. The work that resulted from this voyage is concerned with the presence and absence of people, with a discontinuous perception of poetic and physical spaces, with personal stories pointing to Lemberg/Lwow/Lviv for present and future generations.
Vogel’s experimental poetry, all written in the 1920s-30s, was, in the spirit of early 20th century European literature, radically avant-garde and attuned to all the modernist minimalisms. Being skilled in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish, she published essays covering Lviv’s intellectual life and urban landscape, the role of women in society and art. Yet, her name has always been connected with the Polish prose stylist Bruno Schulz. Vogel’s own work received little attention during her life and after her death in Lviv ghetto in 1942.
The multimedia exhibition was launched at the Lviv Museum of Ideas during the International Book Forum in September 2017. Project research and Lviv exhibition were supported by A-n Travel bursary (UK), Asylum Arts ‘Small Grant’ (US), Kickstarter Crowdfunding campaign, Lviv Book Forum and Lviv Museum of Ideas. The plan is to tour the exhibition and develop a website with project material in English, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish.
Lviv is not only about the past but also about the present. Mark Tokar will play and talk about contemporary music scene in Ukraine, his collaborations in Ukraine and internationally, including the multi-genre projects (visualisations, literature, performance) with Yuri Andrukhovych, one of the leading Ukrainian authors writing today. Among these projects: Endless Journey or Aeneid (multimedia collage based on Yuri Andrukhovych-Ivan Kotliarevskiy with the elements of lecture, concert and banquet). Albert, or the Highest Form of Execution (Albert was created on the base of eponymous story written by Yuri Andrukhovych. In the center of action there is the story of ingenious cheater Albert Vyrozemskiy who agrees to sell his soul to the devil to avoid death penalty. However, the agreement signed with blood did not work. One autumn day in 1641, he was publicly burned in the middle of the Rynok Square in Lviv.
From Pop Art to Community Arts
It has been an absolute joy to work with Peter Young on a film ‘From Pop Art to Community Arts: Hackney in the 1970s-80s’ commissioned for A British Museum Partnership exhibition ‘Warhol to Walker: American prints from pop art to today’.
This special exhibition explores the influence print movements have had on Hackney. Starting with the explosion of pop art in the 1960s, the exhibition displays works on loan from the British Museum by celebrated artists including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Kara Walker alongside Hackney artists.
The film is displayed at the Hackney Museum from 11 July till 16 September 2017. Once the exhibition is over, the film will be available online. Watch this space!
I can’t thank enough our interviewees, the most wonderful Hackney activists, artists and researchers – Jess Baines, Neil Martinson, Alan May, Ingrid Pollard, Rene Rice, Red Saunders and Rebecca Wilson.
My Europe
The end of the era perhaps? A new chapter? Of history. Of my history.
I spent my twenties struggling and fighting to get the European passport. I finally did, just weeks after I turned 30. Inner drive to be at home in Europe was huge – would not have had the energy and the resources now. London happened to become my adopted home. Not just for my love of bricks, but for its extraordinary diversity of people from all possible walks of life, of all ethnicities, beliefs, ways of thinking, seeing, listening, feeling.
Over the years, I have discovered lots of peculiarities about this fascinating island. I loved this particular joke – “Gales in Channel. Continent isolated.” Will we able to keep on joking about being an island and not being part of the EU? Of Europe?
I have recently watched a wonderful film ‘Play me something’ by Timothy Neat and John Berger. Here is what John Berger said in the interview for ‘Scotland on Sunday’ in October 1988:
“I think this film would have been impossible to make in England. People won’t sit and listen to a story because they happen to find themselves together like that.” The Scots, he said, are different in many ways – less complacent, less parochial. “Most importantly maybe for storytelling, the dead are present to them. Not just their personal dead, father or wife. I mean the living experience of the past. In England as in some other consumer-rich societies they have come to believe that although they are part of history they are exempt from it. What connects them to all other people who have lived is lessened”.
I felt the same all these 14 years I lived in the UK. I always wanted to prove myself wrong.
©Asya Gefter
#UnitedForEurope #MarchForEurope2017