Like Coming Home: A Visit to the Jewish Museum in New York

There are places you enter for the very first time — and feel you have always been there. That is what happened to me at the Jewish Museum in New York. Sue, a dear friend, introduced me to Larissa — a guide at the museum, who within minutes became a new friend of my own. Larissa gave me a private tour of the main exhibition, Identity, Culture, and Community: Stories from the Collection of the Jewish Museum curated by Darsie Alexander, Senior Deputy Director and Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator; Claudia Nahson, Morris and Eva Feld Senior Curator; Kristina Parsons, Leon Levy Assistant Curator; and Rebecca Frank, Curatorial Assistant. I almost laughed to myself — this is exactly what I have been working on my whole life. The exhibition felt as though it were speaking to me in my mother tongue.

Andi Arnovitz, What We Bring — artist's own wedding dress, laser-cut bookbinding cloth, threads

I stopped in front of a wedding dress by the artist Andi Arnovitz, a piece titled What We Bring. Above — white, delicate lace. And beneath it, where a train would be, names spilled onto the floor. Names of Jewish women, cut from paper, piling one upon another like a waterfall. I stood there a long moment. I thought of all the names I carry within me — Dr. Rachel, Elsa Freund, my grandmother, who packed apple saplings and a piano in Germany and came to the Land of Israel at the very last moment. One dress, and beneath it, generations of women. This is exactly where my art lives: to take a single name, a single fragile moment — and to sanctify it before it disappears.

Credit: Arlene Shechet, Travel Light, 2017 (gypsum, resin, and candles)

And then I saw it. A suitcase. Made entirely of white porcelain, with candlesticks and small vessels and little pieces of a home heaped on top.

Travel Light, the artist Arlene Shechet called it. She built it from the story of her grandmother, who emigrated from Belarus in 1920 — and the candlesticks were almost the only things she carried with her. I stood before it and could not move. This is my own project, On Our Journey Home, standing before me in porcelain. The very same question that haunted me when I thought of my grandmother: what do you take when you leave everything behind? What fits into a single suitcase? How much hope does it take to pack a candlestick and set out for an unknown land.

Delicate beauty, made on the edge of loss — and still, it remains.

And there was one more wing I could not leave —Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds, an exhibition devoted to the artist's final, unsettled decade.

The Nazis branded him a "Galician Jew," declared his art "degenerate," and cast it out of every museum in Germany. And he — in exile and in illness — painted his final years out of an immense inner freedom. I stood before his small angel,

Angelus Novus. The painting had belonged to the philosopher Walter Benjamin —the one who wrote of it as the "Angel of History": an angel whose face is turned toward the past, toward the debris of all that has been, while a wind drives him backward into the future. Benjamin revered Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption— the very thinker to whom my grandmother Rachel devoted her life.

After Benjamin's death the painting passed to his friend Gershom Scholem, and from there — all the way to Jerusalem, to the museum where it hangs today. An angel who crossed continents and wars, and in the end found home. It is really the same story, again and again — and perhaps that is why I star print in palladium, a process that survives two hundred years. There is a deep need in me to say to beautiful things: do not go. I am keeping you.

"I cannot be grasped in the here and now, for my dwelling place is as much

among the dead as the yet unborn." — Paul Klee

I left there with a rare feeling. Not that of a tourist who had visited a museum, but of someone who had found a second home. The works spoke to me because they asked the very questions I ask: about belonging, about migration, about what remains when everything changes. The word "hope" — the one that lives in my mind all the time — accompanied me there too, among the white walls, in New York.

And that, perhaps, is what I love most about art: its power to remind us that we are not alone. That women were here before us who packed a suitcase, who kept a name, who lit a candle — and passed it on. To me. And perhaps, through the photographs I make, to you as well.

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*Michal Greenboim · Artist & Fine-Art Photographer · michalgreenboim.com*

מיכל גרינבוים · אמנית וצלמת · michalgreenboim.com