WHY DO YOU STAND AT THE DOOR? presents work by the Ukrainian artist Nikolay Karabinovych (°1988, Odesa) as well as a selection of publications housed in the Yiddish library of the Jewish Museum of Belgium. The exhibition juxtaposes the history of migrations of Eastern European Jewish communities with that of cultural publications written in Yiddish in the 1920s and 1930s.
This project is the result of research carried out by the artist in the museum archives, in association with curator Patricia Couvet (°1994, Paris) and the Jewish Museum of Belgium.
Venue:
The Jewish Museum of Belgium
Dates:
17 Jun 2022 — 01 Jan 2023
The title of the exhibition WHY DO YOU STAND AT THE DOOR? is taken from the Yiddish folk song 'Lomir Zikh Iberbetn' (Let's Make Up).
The lyrics are a call to love, as well as a reference to the fear of the other's departure. The line is used here as a metaphor for the compulsory and successive migrations of Eastern European Jewish communities to the gates of the West. A forced nomadism, which can also be read on the first and last pages of the Yiddish cultural productions housed in the Jewish Museum of Belgium. Some were published in Kyiv, Warsaw, Vilnius and then sealed in Johannesburg, New York and are now kept in Brussels, Ghent or Antwerp. These seals are a starting point for a poetic exploration of a fragmented collective memory, within which the women poetesses testimonies reconstruct historical intervals of displacement, a history of migration omitted by books presenting national narratives.
The history of Yiddish publications is inextricably linked to those who speak the language. Its use has survived the qualifications of zhargon thanks to a culture that transcends notions of,
national borders and cultures. The Judeo-Germanic vernacular was transformed by migrations through Eastern Europe by those who practised it from the Middle Ages in the Rhine Valley to Birobidzhan.2 Yiddish is an inherently diasporic language.