Blogerim

Searching for a Jewish past is the topic of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes. His best-selling, Hollywood-adapted debut novel Everything is Illuminated (2002) already depicted a young man on a trip to the Ukraine in search of his family’s past. His new book is also a search for Jewish roots, though this time artistic, rather than biographical.

Experimenting with the concept of absence, the book reproduces parts of Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, the English translation of one of two surviving texts of a writer, whose other works were lost when the National Socialists seized his Polish hometown Drohobycz in 1941 and murdered its citizens, including Schulz, in 1942. As if to depict the loss of literature by destroying the letters in a book, Foer cut into Schulz’s pages, leaving only select words and half sentences behind, thereby reducing, already in its title, Street of Crocodiles to Tree of Codes. → continue reading

Migration is a topic of increasing importance for museums, including our own. A conference taking place today in Newcastle (UK) as part of the European Museums in an Age of Migrations (MeLA) project looks specifically at museum displays as they adapt to show social interaction in greater complexity: www.mela-project.eu/events/details/-placing-europe-in-the-museum-people-s-places-identities

In a video interview, architect MJ Long, like Kitaj an American in London, remembers remodelling Kitaj’s house in Chelsea, and posing for his pictures:

“I found sitting for [Kitaj] actually much more disconcerting than being his architect. You just feel as though you’ve done something wrong, somehow, especially if it isn’t going well, which he makes very clear. […] Before and after it was delightful, because he would always want to sit and talk, but while he was actually working I found it quite intimidating.”

For more on R.B. Kitaj, see: www.jmberlin.de/kitaj