By INNA ROGATCHI ©
Introduction essay for the Shtetl Memories Collection.
Each of us has memories, from a long ago and recent ones, the circle of one’s own reflections, which are living in their own rhythm, irrelevantly from a real-time chronicles, one’s own ‘capsule’, one’s internal mini-cosmos, which functions as both a guard and a source of anything we do in life. Each of us is more or less lucky with the content of that guarding and a resourceful ‘capsule’. For people of creative professions, that ‘capsule’ could be a blessing and it also could be its opposite, sometimes.
I feel myself very lucky and incredibly privileged to have my ‘capsule’ of the source of what I do in art of loving, humane, ever-thirsty for new knowledge, humoristic-does-not-matter-what Yiddishkeit of my family of teachers, engineers, doctors, musicians in generations. The destinies of all people in my family reflected very much the destinies of the Jewish people in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Latvia, Austria and France, which did bear the main feature for the Jews in that part of the world: overcoming.
To overcome to study, to overcome to get into profession, to overcome to being accepted, to overcome to excel in what you do, to overcome to maintain one’s and one’s family dignity, to overcome never-stopped chains of obstacles, to overcome a natural behavioural reactions and not to become bitter, grumpy and miserable.
Sometimes, from the distance of time, I cannot but marvel on my own and many other Jewish families’ never-failing abilities to be kind, helpful, gentle, joyful, to live to the full measure under never-seizing negative circumstances of all sorts which were permanent factors in their all’ lives, from childhood till the advanced age.
This ability to be genuinely kind and naturally open to joy despite having very challenging circumstances of life is probably the main threat amongst the Yiddishkeit which I feel as my own life-rope. This special quality is also to be found in everything that the great Jewish and Yiddish writer Grigory Kanovich ever wrote – because he did feel and perceived life, and lived it, as his family did, and as my and my husband’s families did, through the circumstances which were familiar and close to us all. Due to this common experience of overcoming, we feel the Kanoviches, whom we know for ages, as our family members, and what is also important and truly rarely to find, we feel the heroes of Grigory Kanovich lovely, nostalgic and organically humane books as members of our large Yiddishkeit family, as well.
When reading Grigory Kanovich, one has a difficulty: one does not know exactly if it is him or her who belongs to the family and group of people what the writer portrayed so lovingly and in such detail in his books, or it is them who belong to a reader’s family and friends.
How lucky is the writer who due to the wisdom of his heart and his vision was able to make this imprint of the Yiddishkeit for us all for good. This is what matters in life. To create the legacy which would stay and which will nourish the hearts for many generations ahead.
My Songs of Our Souls series of artworks has one specific, semi-mystical, but true detail. I never drew a single line of those works that I did not see in front of me as if appearing from the print which I have created. Those lines of faces and anything else materialise before and often in the process of creating these works which are dedicated to the memory of many of our people, those souls which are not anymore in this world, among us. As I discovered to my total amazement, those faces started to transpire from the surfaces of my prints one after another. Every time, for every work from the Songs of Our Souls, a miracle is happening, for which I am whole-heartedly grateful to the Creator, when the faces of our people are appearing – or reappearing? – in between the maze of the lines of my prints when I am focused and am working on those pieces of materialised memory.
When it happened for the first time, with the first work in this seriously special and highly personal for me Songs of Our Souls series, Song of Our Souls, I went dumbfounded. I also knew for sure and felt that all those people in the work were Jews from France, where part of my family on my father’s side has been and lived for more than a century, and are still living.
I am not creating these works too often, but only when I have an inner impulse, inner understanding of a right moment of doing it, and only when those faces, books, candles, those birds and children are there ready to re-emerge.
With Cry of Heaven, dedicated to the memory of our Six Million, it was supposed to be just one or two faces which I thought that I was seeing as appearing on the print. But when I started to work, all of them just started to emerge in front of my eyes exactly in the places where I had drawn them. Not less, and not more, just those who did appear. I have no exact explanation of that phenomenon, it is just my own personal working – and more – experience.
In the Litvak Song, there is the direct reference connection to the Litvak part of our family which in my case is prevailing. Everyone on my mother’s side are Litvaks from Belarus and Poland, and half of my father’s family are from Latvia. And I am deeply grateful to them all for such rich and potent intellectual and spiritual heritage, and such a stimulating background.
I realise that the story behind my Songs of Our Souls series might sound as a funny way of fantasising, but I just reflect on the process, of which I am very grateful and do feel privileged to be able to see those faces and anything else on my prints, to return them all if not to life, but to our all memory. They did deserve it in full measure.
And I am very glad to donate this small series of ten works from my growing Songs of Our Souls collection to such a good place and institution as Grigory Kanovich Public Library of Jonava in the writer’s home-town in Lithuania. I know that they would be at home there.
I also am very glad that the Organising Committee has selected one of my works, Shavuot Windows II, as an artistic part of the Grigory Kanovich Literary Prize 2024. I know that all my family is participating in this together, with smiles, joy, easiness and that impeccable refined humour that my father, talented, sharp-minded engineer and inventor Isaac Bujanover was such a super-master of.
There is a special joy in life. The joy of donating, the joy of gifting. This joy could be called also a champion among all sorts of joys. This is what Yiddishkeit is about, and what our families did teach us, too, so very luckily.
With cordial gratitude for this heart-warming project to all our colleagues who did participate in it.
Inna Rogatchi ©
July 2024