An Other Land
This is a story about looking for connection in the place where my family came from, but not finding it and then, suddenly, finding it…
This summer found me in that ancestral place on an extraordinary journey through the former heartland of East European Jewish life – a multi-national and multi- provincial region which is sometimes affectionately called --“Yiddishland.”
These are lands where my parents came from, and places where I might have come from had history unfolded differently. My travels ended in the big and busy city of Warsaw, Poland---the city that had the largest Jewish population of any city in the world before World War Two.
Coming from one land but living in “another-land” is a part of our shared experience, whether our ancestors came from Poland or Spain, Persia or Israel.
It was in Warsaw that I began to play with images and ideas of past and present, displacement and replacement. Sometimes, if we enter a moment with a curious spirit, then history and human nature conspire to reveal many layers of reality, of which the present is only one.
Benny Ferdman
September 2015
This summer found me in that ancestral place on an extraordinary journey through the former heartland of East European Jewish life – a multi-national and multi- provincial region which is sometimes affectionately called --“Yiddishland.”
These are lands where my parents came from, and places where I might have come from had history unfolded differently. My travels ended in the big and busy city of Warsaw, Poland---the city that had the largest Jewish population of any city in the world before World War Two.
Coming from one land but living in “another-land” is a part of our shared experience, whether our ancestors came from Poland or Spain, Persia or Israel.
It was in Warsaw that I began to play with images and ideas of past and present, displacement and replacement. Sometimes, if we enter a moment with a curious spirit, then history and human nature conspire to reveal many layers of reality, of which the present is only one.
Benny Ferdman
September 2015
Scroll down to begin the tale....
An old painting from the turn of this century, inspired by an image found in a photograph of a lost wooden synagogue
And now the story begins...
1. ...with an old and evocative photo of me as a young boy in California- circa 1956.
3. And so I tried....
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2. My idea was to make a poster of this photo and paste it on a wall in Warsaw. What would I learn from this? (Translation from the Yiddish in the photo above: "An Other Land." )
4. And pondered the results...
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5. But felt out of place… I didn’t fit. But did I want to fit? I gave up and went to the National Museum of Warsaw and while wandering through the exhibits I encountered this....
6. What? – It’s me - in my photo!
Sculpture by Mikolaj Szliferz, Boy (Spring), 1904
Sculpture by Mikolaj Szliferz, Boy (Spring), 1904
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7. What layer of reality is this, when a little known Polish artist could sculpt a boy, waist deep in nature in 1904, and that I, as a boy, would pose in an almost identical way in California over a half -century later? As the fabric of time folds in on itself two boys of different eras meet in a timeless place, both personal and universal.
8. I returned to the graffiti wall with the poster and noticed that I had placed it right above a pair of stenciled words written in Polish.
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9. Turning to Google Translate for help, I pulled up a translation --?! Had I just fallen down the rabbit hole?
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10. Doodle before the journey
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11. Undzer Folk (Yiddish) : Our People
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“If you don’t know where you are going, then any path will take you there.”
The Cheshire Cat, from Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
The Cheshire Cat, from Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
"Curiouser & Curiouser"--suddenly mysterious dancers whirl around the boy in the gallery.....
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The end... (for now) |