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Since leaving home I’ve been continually feeling a pullback to Judaism. This confused me because for as long as I can remember being Jewish never interested me. I used to hate it. I remember wanting so badly to rebel against being forced to go to Cheder every Sunday to learn about my religion, the tedious services with all the nasty people at synagogue, the Jewish secondary school that made us learn Ivrit three times a week. Because of this, when my interest sparked up again I was baffled. I assumed moving out and leaving my Jewish secondary school bubble would create ‘needed’ distance, it did the opposite. When speaking to other Jewish friends about my experience they have also found the same thing. This is what initially lead me to explore Judaism for my right to roam. I wanted to look at Judaism differently and of my own accord, how my relationship with it has changed so drastically, how it’s impacted my life in ways I haven't thought about before distancing myself from it.

In FMP I aim to research how Jewish experience varies between different generations, for example, my younger sister who has no interest in Judaism, and my grandma who is very closely connected to her religion. I want to spark conversations that may not occur without careful instruction and use visual communication to convey stories and ideas that have been left unheard. I also want to explore all the different manifestations of Judaism that exist beyond the boundaries of my own family. Growing up I was mainly only exposed to Reform Judaism as we went to a reform synagogue but I would like to look into how Orthodox families live. I’d also like to look at the traditions and experiences of those belonging to other religions and the similarities and differences between them and Jewish traditions.

Throughout this project, I want to facilitate connections using conversational tools and explore the aspects of Judaism that create bonds, such as food, location, holidays, dance, and Jewish songs. I want to document all of these aspects using all the methods of illustration I’ve learned on foundation as well as methods beyond drawing such as with writing, collage, film, audio, and photography. In addition, I want to look at memory through objects and the stories behind personal possessions of people in my family and other families. I like when a simple object becomes part of a yearly tradition, for example, the Channukiah I made when I was 7 that we use every year for lighting the candles. The prayer sheet my mum illustrated for us when we were younger to make Rosh Hashanah more interesting. I also want to look into the tradition of Friday night dinner and how it differs between each family. I’d love to document another family's Friday night dinner and look at their processes and conversations, food and prayers. During FMP the Jewish holiday Pesach (Passover) will occur which celebrates the exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. This holiday, despite being one of sad origins is my favourite for many reasons. Each piece of food on the Seder plate is representative of an aspect of the Passover story, for example, the boiled egg in saltwater represents the tears of the slaves. Growing up I found this fascinating, especially after watching Prince of Egypt which is still one of my favourite animated films. This year I will approach this holiday differently, I want to research how we gather as a family, the way we instinctively sing the prayer songs I never remember learning but somehow know.

I want to re-approach this part of my life as a visual communicator and learn about my religion through my own means of understanding.

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To begin my research I’ve started looking at how the Holocaust museum in Washington goes about displaying such a horrific period in history in a sensitive and informative way. The museum is described as a narrative museum based on communication rather than collection. It uses audio combined with visual aspects to engage visitors emotionally in the experience.

“A well-constructed narrative exhibition affects visitors not only intellectually but also emotionally; it arouses processes of identification. Visitors project themselves into the story and then experience it like insiders”  - Jeshajahu Weinberg, the Holocaust museum in Washington

I will look at the YIVO Institute for historical references, its archives and library hold a lot of useful information as well as it’s many online exhibitions. The centre for Jewish history also has a lot of interesting online exhibitions such as ‘Nourishing Tradition: Jewish Cookbooks & the Stories They Tell’. This exhibition highlighted the importance of food especially in Jewish culture as food has served as religious as well as cultural throughout history. It showed a variety of different cookbooks from widely published to family heirlooms which I found interesting as I would like to explore how objects carry memory. Alvin Lustig’s book, Jewish Holiday Dances, inspired me through its use of colour, shapes and collage that invoke the same joyous emotions that jewish dances bring about. Published in 1948, the book combines classic Jewish symbols and imagery with photos of popular dances in a playful and interesting way which is something I would like to communicate in my research.

I was inspired by Dal Park’s animated short West Question East Answer as I admire how well she depicts generational divide of opinions between her and her grandmother. I also love how she uses audio to enhance the experience of watching and uses interview recordings haphazardly so you  are left in suspense. She manages to make a very serious topic playful which is something I want to look at in my project as judaism can encompass both of those things. I want to use interviews and the tool of animation to tell stories that are relatable yet deeply personal. I also love her use of hand-drawn animation as it feels personal and delicate mimicking the subject choice.

I’ve been watching Yonotan Tal’s animations on Youtube since I discovered them in 2016 and his one week film ‘Overweight’ links very well with my topic. I like the way he shows abstract ideas of personality and identity in a simple but effective way that make you emphasise and relate. I’d like to use this in FMP to show my disillusionment with judaism and others who used to feel the same whose opinions have shifted.

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https://vimeo.com/363494810?embedded=true&source=video_title&owner=25402688

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Communication can be difficult when cultural and historical backgrounds are so distanced. A Korean grandmother and her German granddaughter try to work it out.

CREDITS

Sound Design and Mixing: Edward A Guy
Writer: Lydia Rynne, Dal Park
Actors Neighbours: Eunju Ara Choi, Sunny Sun-A Kim, Eunji Choi
Coloring Assistant: Alix Bortoli, Camille Gibut, Dana-Mari Tarakchieva, Terri Broughton, Tianhua Lin, Tom Salo, Shiran Shu, Brogan Bertie, Jia Li, Mariana Leal, Grete Ly Valing, Fazilet Akbaba, Jonathan Kan, Inadas Ait-Ferral, Fabian Wong, Zehong Zhu


AWARDS

Best Graduation Short Film - BIT BANG Festival Internacional de Animacion, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2019)
KersVers UK 2019 - International Filmfestival Assen, Netherland (2019)


SCREENINGS/ SELECTIONS

17th London Short Film Festival, London, UK (2020)
Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, Toronto, Canada (2019)
KABOOM Animation Festival, Utrecht and Amsterdam, Netherlands (2019)
BIT BANG Festival Internacional de Animacion, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2019)
Encounters Film Festival, Bristol, UK (2019)
KROK International Animated Film Festival 2019, Russia (2019)
Anibar International Animation Festival, Peja, Kosovo (2019)
Lille International Short Film Festival, Lille, France (2019)
Ars Independent Festival, Katowice, Poland (2019)
La Guarimba International Film Festival, Amantea, Italy (2019)
Pictoplasma Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2019)
Anifilm 2019, Trebon, Czech Republic (2019)
Tricky Women/ Tricky Realities, Wien, Austria (2019)
International Filmfestival Assen, Assen, Netherland (2019)
12th British Shorts Film Festival, Berlin, Germany (2019)
Moderna Museet Malmö, Malmö, Sweden (2018)
London International Animation Festival, London, UK (2018)
DUM-D Student Animation Festival, New York City, USA (2018)
Animateka International Animated Film Festival, Ljublijana, Slovenia (2018)

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https://youtu.be/dugyfN-qeTI

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https://www.cjh-exhibits.com/introduction

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Nourishing Tradition | Cookbooks & The Stories They Tell

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JEWISH COOKBOOKS & THE STORIES THEY TELL

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https://www.yivo.org/Archives-Library

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Overview of Archival Collections | Archives: Special Collections | Overview of Library | Library: Special Collections

YIVO is the great repository of East European Ashkenazic culture, of which American Jewry is the heir. The YIVO Archives and Library represent the single largest and most comprehensive collection of materials on East European Jewish civilization in the world.

The YIVO Archives contain some 23 million items, including sound and music collections, theater and art collections, communal and personal records, photographs and films, manuscripts, diaries, memoirs, personal correspondence, and much more. Its holdings span Jewish civilization from the 15th to 21st centuries, with an emphasis on the Jews of Eastern Europe and their descendants. There is a special focus on Yiddish language and culture, Jewish life in Europe, the Holocaust and its aftermath, and Jewish life in the United States.

The YIVO Library has nearly 400,000 volumes in all European languages, and is the world's only academic library specializing in the history, languages, literature, culture, folklore, and religious traditions of East European Jewry. It has books in many languages, but also constitutes the largest collection of Yiddish-language books, pamphlets, and newspapers in the world.

Collecting materials documenting the life and creativity of East European Jewry has been a major focus of YIVO's mission since its inception in 1925. During the fifteen years of YIVO's existence in Vilna, it gathered an extensive array of records, manuscripts, books, and artifacts, thanks to the efforts of an international network of professional scholars and amateur zamlers (collectors).

World War II and the Holocaust forced YIVO's relocation to New York in 1940. Its collections in Vilna were looted by the Nazis. With the help of the U.S. Army, YIVO was able to recover some of these materials and begin its work anew in America.

Today, YIVO's collections are the primary source of the documentary history of East European Jewry and the surviving record of millions of lives of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Archives and Library receive over 5,000 on-site visits, email, and phone requests annually.

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YIVO Archives & Library Collections | YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

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Overview of Archival Collections | Archives: Special Collections | Overview of Library | Library: Special Collections YIVO is the great repository of East European Ashkenazic culture, of which American Jewry is the heir. The YIVO Archives and Library represent the single largest and most comprehensive collection of materials on East European Jewish civilization in the world.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcOVAt13U3w

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Remembering With A Twist - A Jojo Rabbit & The Book Thief Video Essay

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NieC8KA0EvI

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The Prince of Egypt (1998) - When You Believe Scene (8/10) | Movieclips

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https://marissabidilla.blogspot.com/2011/11/secret-miracle-of-charlotte-salomon.html

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Last month I attended an extraordinary art exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, on loan from the Netherlands Jewish Historical Museum: some 200 gouache illustrations by Charlotte Salomon from her Leben? oder Theater? (Life? Or Theater?) magnum opus.

Salomon was a playwright without a stage. A graphic novelist before such a thing existed. A young woman struggling to find and claim her voice, to affirm herself and her existence. It is no surprise that her work -- with its themes of theater, creativity, love, feminism, identity, and history -- should resonate with me; these are things that I think about a lot.

Salomon was born into an upper-class Jewish family in Berlin in 1917, part of that wonderful cultured Mitteleuropean milieu of the early 20th century. Her father was a surgeon; her stepmother was an opera singer; and Charlotte attended art school. But, needless to say, by the 1930s, Berlin was a very bad place to be a Jew. Salomon's father lost his medical license, Charlotte had a school prize taken away from her on account of her religion, and shortly before she turned 21, her family sent her to the south of France for safety.

What makes Salomon's story really interesting, though, is its more personal details. Not only did she live in a dangerous and tumultuous era, but her family had its own tragedy: virtually all of the women on her mother's side of the family killed themselves. This information was concealed from young Charlotte until she was an adult (she had always been told that her mother died of influenza). When she learned the truth, she wondered if she too was destined to commit suicide. In a state of shock and crisis, she decided that she had only two options: either to kill herself, or to "undertake something eccentric and mad." She chose the latter option. She holed herself up in a hotel on the French Riviera and spent several months creating the hundreds of illustrations of Leben? oder Theater?

The narrative starts with Salomon's family history (the suicide of her mother's sister; her parents' meeting) and continues through her childhood and young womanhood, up until the moment she undertakes the Leben? oder Theater? project. Much of the narrative concerns Salomon's love for her stepmother's voice teacher, Alfred Wolfson, or "Amadeus Daberlohn" as he is called in the paintings (all of the Leben? oder Theater? characters have thinly disguised pseudonyms). Wolfson/Daberlohn was a World War I veteran whose philosophies about art, creativity, and finding one's voice had a great influence on Salomon. She paints his face obsessively, but also seems able to view him with a certain objectivity and humor -- you get the impression that he was a brilliant but also a pompous man. There's a memorable series of gouaches where Daberlohn is stretched out on a couch, pontificating on art and life:

"It is part of my nature as a man among men to remind them of suffering, which in our day we like to pretend does not exist. Yet I have never forgotten to emphasize that I love life and affirm it threefold. In order to love life completely, one must also embrace and comprehend its other side, death, including suffering. This is how my oft-repeated words must be understood those whom I love to undergo bitter experiences so that they will be forced to follow the path into their own depths."

These ideas would come back to Charlotte Salomon when she was at her lowest point and influence the creation of Leben? oder Theater? For, in the end, she followed the path into her own depths, learned about the death and suffering that haunted her family, and rather than being swallowed up by the darkness, made the choice to love and affirm life. The final panels of Leben? oder Theater? remind me of the closing scenes of a Chekhov play, where the young woman (Nina in The Seagull, Sonia in Uncle Vanya) clings to optimism and hope despite all the suffering that has befallen her.

Charlotte urges her grandmother: "Look at the flowers in the meadow. So much beauty, so much joy. Look at the mountains up there, so much sun, so much light."

As with Chekhov's plays, Salomon's paintings gain an extra bittersweetness because we know that their creator ultimately died far too young. After Salomon had completed Leben? oder Theater? and entrusted it to a friend, the Vichy France authorities discovered her. She was transported to Auschwitz, and killed at the age of 26.

Charlotte Salomon's story is a tragedy, but also, somehow, weirdly inspiring. They killed her. She didn't kill herself. Despite her family history of suicide, despite the grave dangers that she faced, she chose to self-create rather than self-destruct. She attempted to understand and redeem her family history, to break the cycle rather than perpetuate it.

The thought of Salomon, hiding out in the Riviera hotel, obsessively painting her gouaches, knowing that her life was in danger and time was perhaps running out (you can see the brushstrokes get wilder and more frantic as the series progresses) reminds me of a real-life version of Borges' story "The Secret Miracle." In that tale, a Czech-Jewish playwright is condemned to die before a Nazi firing squad, and his only regret is that he never finished the verse drama that he was writing. At the moment the bullets are fired, God grants the playwright's wish: he stops time and allows the playwright to take as long as he needs to compose the play in his head. So, too, by some miracle, Salomon was granted the time and the resources and the energy she needed to make Leben? oder Theater? (She already had the artistic skill.) It is also miraculous that the work survived, and that it holds interest from so many points of view -- artistic, narrative, historical, feminist. I confess I was less interested in the portions of the work that focus on Hitler's rise to power and the persecution of Jews, and more interested in the parts of it that reveal Salomon creating art, finding her voice, falling in love. A lot of art, up to the present day, deals with the Holocaust and the historical events surrounding it. It seems far rarer to view a museum exhibition about a young woman's coming of age.

Clearly, my blog post can't do justice to the full richness of Salomon's achievement. I'd tell you to see it for yourself, but the San Francisco exhibition closed two days after I saw it. However, the Dutch museum that owns it has scanned and posted every page online, and even included English translations of the text -- an amazing resource and well worth your time to browse.

Images from the website of the Joods Historisch Museum.

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Last month I attended an extraordinary art exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, on loan from the Netherlands Jewish Historical Museum: some 200 gouache illustrations by Charlotte Salomon from her Leben? oder Theater? (Life? Or Theater?) magnum opus. Salomon was a playwright without a stage. A graphic novelist before such a thing existed.

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Stars in your eyes project taught me how drawing offers an alternative way of understanding a person than having a conversation. This could help in my FMP as it gave me the skills to learn more about a person through drawing and talking, recording patterns and mannerisms, and mapping speech in a candid way. I will use this when going back to familiar spaces and approaching them in a new way to research effectively. Directory of us allowed us to explore our childhood goals through the eyes of our younger self. This is relevant as it will help me understand why I’ve felt a pull to Judaism when I’ve never been interested in it. I liked asking questions that we had to answer as our younger selves and I feel this will be a good way of research.

Political land taught me how to research with sensitivity, it also taught me the importance of conversation with people who have first-hand knowledge of a subject to get a first-hand viewpoint which I will utilise in FMP. Finally, all weather taught me the joys of observing and editing. I loved this project as it taught me how to observe in a constructive way, how to pick a place apart and gather the best and most interesting bits. I learnt how to draw quickly with wet materials and how to be even more confident with lines. I will use this when going back to my old communities and exploring new places.

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