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In 2009 I spent six weeks in Eastern
Europe. I went to study Yiddish at the
Vilnius Yiddish Institute and to
visit the Belarus shtetl from
which my grandmother had
come. With no great aptitude
for languages, I didn't aspire to
fluency, but I realized that Yiddish was
an important part of a culture that no
longer exists, the culture from which my
family came. I hoped to
incorporate it into my artwork around my
family history and cultural heritage.
In addition to
the language program there was a
cultural program led by two women in
their 80s, both survivors. They
took us through the former ghetto and to
the killing fields and told us their
stories. I was moved by their
stories, but also disturbed. I
knew when they were no longer there,
their stories would be lost. I had
already seen the rewriting of history.
in the course
of my visit I had gone to the Vilnius
Genocide Museum, housed in the former
KGB and Gestapo headquarters. In a
city which had been 45% Jewish before
the war, of which 95% were murdered,
there was nothing about the
Holocaust. It wasn't denial,
rather a sin of omission. The
focus was solely on the Soviet
occupation.
It was
out of these observations that I felt I
needed to develop artwork that would
tell the stories and give the silence
voice.
Click on the images to the right and below to
view larger images and story
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Acrylic on Canvas
72"x24"
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