Michael RAKOWITZ
Geniza for Ostia, 2013
"My mother is ill. In August, she began testing for lymphoma and by mid-October she was diagnosed with Stage IV lymphoma. As it would be for anyone, it is terrifying to ponder the prospect of losing my mother. We are extremely close. If I was not her son, I would still want to be her best friend. She is the reason I fell in love with poetry at an early age, she is the reason I became an artist.
When I was six-years old, my mother read to me children’s books about the American Buffalo and their disappearance due to a century of over-hunting by the white settlers. The allegory of these narratives spoke to the disappearance of Native Americans, who themselves were hunted by the white settlers, and displaced. My mother would weep while reading the stories, and from this early age, I became intimate with the profundity of invisibility in art. I became committed to articulating absences and voids.
My mother’s family left Baghdad in 1946. They were Arab Jews, who were proud to be Iraqi and proud of their heritage. They kept their culture alive upon arriving in the United States: their house in Long Island, where I grew up, was furnished with Iraqi carpets, some small pieces of art from Baghdad hung on the wall, Iraqi food was cooked and eaten, and the family spoke the Iraqi Jewish Arabic dialect. My grandfather even reopened in New York City the import-export company he operated in Baghdad, primarily as a way to stay in touch with colleagues and friends back home.
I was 16 years old in 1991 when the Gulf War began. I grew up in my grandparents’ house hearing enchanted stories of the Iraqi capital: towers that “sang the time” (minarets), scorpions in the basement, majestic date palms. When the place my grandparents fled to went to war with the place they fled from, I saw only green-tinted night-vision images of destruction. My grandmother’s stories were threatened, and in many ways, I have been working ever since to save them.
My mother is the last link in our family to the Jews of Iraq and was born shortly before her family fled Baghdad. I have been preserving her recipes through projects like Enemy Kitchen. In the midst of the terror and sadness one faces in the midst of a threatening illness, I found myself not just trying to save my mother’s life, but also trying to save a dying culture. Like a museum jeopardized during war, or libraries menaced by iconoclasts and fire, I saw in my mother’s illness a culture’s past and potential future in jeopardy. This year, I will commit myself to learning and archiving the Iraqi Jewish Arabic dialect, which faces extinction as only 4 Jews remain in Iraq. Thus, I continue in my pursuits to rebuild disappeared or threatened culture, to keep the last Iraqi Buffalo alive.
But right now, there is great sadness and I do not pretend that a culture in exile or a displaced culture will survive in the same way as it had back “home.” As with all diasporas, it will be different, and will evolve. The preservationist struggles with what is to be remembered and saved and what is to be discarded or laid to rest.
Damaged torah scrolls, prayer books and other religious material are required by Jewish law to be buried. A geniza is a deppsitory, usually in a synagogue, for such religious items to be stored before receiving a proper burial.
The Synagogue in Ostia is the second oldest in the western world, and was excavated in 1961-62. To bury is to hide underground, to lay to rest.
Over the years, I have collected fragments of centuries-old torahs from Iraq, damaged siddurium, Hagadahs,, broken Kiddush cups, and built what I thought was an archive of Iraqi Jewish history. In reality, however, it seems I built a genizah.
For Arte In memoria, I propose to bury my archive on the grounds of the Ostia synagogue. It was a way of saying farewell to the things that need to rest, which is the hardest thing to do when tryong to stay alive."
Michael Rakowitz