Description
Lara Bongard inherited a 100 year old Shabbat tablecloth, the only surviving heirloom from the vanished world of her ancestors, with which her great-grandfather Mordko Bongard crossed the river of his shtetl in 1911 and never returned. He left his family and community, to escape the pogroms that swept the regions. Lara embarked on an extensive research into the scattered history of her family in the previous Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). She retraced family members, collected testimonies, photographs, letters and archival material, researched Yiddish tales, symbols and mythologies in order to reconstruct her own image of the past. The tablecloth grew into a symbol of life: sharing food with family across time, connecting East with West, the generations, and diversity of cultures we as a family represent. Gradually, dislocation became a portable home. The Girl Who Crossed the River with a Tablecloth' is a multidimensional work and dynamic space of memory, in which fictiona
