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Rishon Lezion Artists Association Gallery 2020

Curator: Eyal Katz

 

Eighteen years after his death, I was able to arrange for my grandfather a meeting with an angel.

At first, when the thought was still not entirely clear in my mind, even then, without realizing it, an initial connection was formed between us. We worked together for many days in my studio, and at the end we were able to formulate an offer that he – the angel -  would submit to my grandfather, a suggestion regarding an alternative option to his actual life story.

Our story begins in the summer of 1939 in the city of Vilnius, Lithuania: my grandfather was 18 at the time. All his belongings had been sent forward on a ship sailing West across the Baltic Sea to England. He himself was supposed to board a similar ship that would take him to the same destination in a few weeks. In England, he was to begin his new life as a medical student at the University of Cambridge.

The annexation of the Baltic States by the USSR prevented him from doing so. He remained in Lithuania, and as a graduate of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, found a job as a graphic artist in a paper factory in the city. There he met a young company accountant who made a mistake in calculating his salary - and eventually became my future grandmother. They got married and a little later, the Germans invaded Lithuania. They succeeded in fleeing to the East, deep into Soviet territory, and in one of the towns of refuge on the way, they registered as refugees, following which my grandfather was drafted into the Red Army. Contact between my grandfather and grandmother was cut off and she continued eastward, with great difficulty, settling eventually in the city of Stalinbad in Tag’ekistan.

My grandfather turns out to be a brave and daring soldier, advancing through the ranks. He soon becomes a decorated officer in an elite patrol unit. Towards the end of the war he is mortally wounded, and recovers in a hospital until after the end of the war, when he travels 5000 kilometers eastward to meet up again with my grandmother. A year later, my mother was born, and on the family’s return to Vilnius, my grandfather is accorded great honor as an officer and as a member of the Communist Party.

In the mid-fifties, the family decides to emigrate to Israel and do so, first of all, via Poland, where they live in the city of Swednice, during which time my grandfather sells a large number of paintings to a wealthy American Jew (one of which will later be exhibited at the Holocaust Museum in New York). At the same time, Mossad emissaries recruited him to carry out various assignments related to helping the Jewish community in Poland. Two years later, they arrive in Israel and after several months in a transit camp on the shores of Herzliya, they find a small apartment in Bat Yam. My grandmother works as an accountant in a branch of the Ministry of Communications in Jaffa and my grandfather, as a graphic designer in a printing house in Tel Aviv. In 1966 he became self-employed and opened a photography lab in the area of ​​the old Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. Over the next twenty years, he and his partner designed hundreds of advertising signs, posters for the premieres at the Habima and the Cameri theatres, record covers for the best singers and bands of the period, and more. During the Six Day War, he was drafted for the second time in his life and stationed at the Intelligence Headquarters in Jaffa.

My grandfather retired in 1987. During his retirement he painted a lot, in a small room of his apartment where I used to sleep sometimes. I loved falling asleep with the smell of paints and old papers, high shelves laden with yellowing books in Russian, Polish, German and Yiddish. I would sleep and around me drawers full of pens and pencils, glue, and strange rulers, among them old boxes containing gilded medals from other places and times. In 1989, my grandfather boarded a plane with my parents to England, for the first visit to a country he had not reached in his youth. At the Cambridge Faculty of Medicine, he closed a 50-year cycle.

My grandfather died of cancer at Wolfson Hospital at the edge of Bat Yam-Jaffa: he was 78 years old at the time of his death. My grandmother will live on for many more years, until her death in good health in 2014, at the age of 96.

In the summer of 2016, my mother returned to the land of her childhood, all her family with her. We walked the streets of Vilnius, she in the lead. The house where she lived no longer exists - but there is a street, there is a shop with the same shop window, with the very expensive doll ... My mother enters her school yard, and says that it has hardly changed. The same smells characterize the market, my eldest son reacts with stomach ache. The town square remains where it was, very wide, as does the tower on the hill. The alleys of the old quarters of the city are still there, the old ghetto, the synagogue, the art academy.

Somewhere wandering through the alleys of the old quarters of Vilnius, the thought began to form in my mind that eventually constituted the basis of the exhibition presented here. The thought of the alternative option…

What would have happened if my grandfather had boarded that second ship on his way to study medicine in England? What if sometime during 1940, someone or something would have opened a small tear in the fabric of space-time and move it, against all the laws of nature, to change the direction of history behind the Iron Curtain?

This is something that angels can surely do.

I do not remember the particular moment when the dialogue between me and the angel began. Nor did we really talk. It was more like someone presenting to me in an abstract way the understanding about what I had written down and drawn. Apparently my part in the dialogue was to conceptualize them, clarify them. At one point, the angel warned me that it would come at a price. "Will the anomaly respond with an anomaly and thus balance be restored?" I asked him in my mind..

He nodded.

”If so, let’s formulate the proposal together," I said.

Once the task was clarified, it was left to me to put the proposal in writing.

”Everyone is given a second chance”, said the angel. “I will return you to your youth. I will allow you to board the ship. The Russians? They will be a week late, do not worry. You will cross the Baltic Sea, through the Danish Straits to the North Sea, you will arrive in Britain. You are alone. On deck at night. But there is a condition, an anomaly, a strangeness that I will plant in you: the memories of your first life will remain with you. They are yours and cannot be erased. That’s the deal”.

I do not know if my grandfather accepted the offer. I would have to ask the angel. Meanwhile, my connection with him was severed. This could be funny, because if my grandfather had accepted the offer, there may exist in a parallel universe an actual person like myself sitting and writing in English about his grandfather and his imaginary alternative life story - as a Soviet officer, a Mossad agent, an artist, an Israeli from Bat Yam.

The whole purpose of this exhibition is to portray the alternative option, to try and describe the nights of the voyage across the Baltic as my grandfather's imagination might have experienced it: the ripples of the waves, the taste of salt carried in the air, the smoke billowing from the smokestacks of passing ships, the sight of the glaciers in the moonlight, and the seagulls' wings in flight. How will all these be engraved in the mind of a young man looking forward excitedly to his new life, while in the background, with frightening strangeness, the memories of his parallel life resonate.

Special thanks to my mother, who accompanied me throughout this process with excitement and great understanding.