Portrete liminale: Povestiri marginaleLiminal Portraits: Stories from the Margins

casa de lângă sinagogădas Haus neben der Synagogea zsinagóga melletti ház

Strada Mihail Kogălniceanu 43, Mediaș

During our joint research/artist residencies this summer, we focused on methods of retracing community characteristics, of honing in on individuals long forgotten and illuminating marginal markings never intended to be of consequence. We worked primarily with the texts described below and books of the Mediaș Jewish library, selecting children’s doodles and owner names from the margins, which reflect the presence of Jewish life in the region, both in villages and surrounding towns. We concentrated on the idea of the liminal, the transitory, the vague and exploring the limits of what can be known and communicated through vestigial belongings of a community or written testimonies.

The stories presented here are not from our archives per se, rather they are based on narratives and texts given to us by various individuals over the past years. The stories are largely unknown and also incomplete. Though we have used material from our archives and even the house itself – the home of the narrator – to fill in certain gaps, overall the stories remain fragmentary, creating questions rather than providing answers. Nevertheless, outlines form – outlines of a community, individuals, a time, a space, a town.

What particularly captivated us in these narratives was the juxtaposition of the said and the unsaid, the known and the unknown, the meeting of the mundane with the grave. The narrating girl, who was sixteen at the time of the story, discusses her friendships with two sisters and explains at some length their endeavors to convince the woman in charge of the baths to allow them to bathe for free, this while recording a story whose primary plotline is the near-destruction of a large group of community members. Her words not only disclose a forgotten story of escape, they also trace portraits of the community and its members – such as her apparently charismatic father, who was the assistant rabbi and kosher butcher and her gentle, yet resolute mother. Names long left unspoken in Mediaș are mentioned matter-of-factly – Gutfreund, a local butcher and Mr. Abraham, a shopkeeper who sat on the community board (in fact there were two Mr. Abrahams on the community board and we do not know which one figures in this story). The space around the synagogue,

consisting of several buildings owned by the community, the Jewish school with apartments and the mikva, is reactivated and understood as a Jewish space, as the mother urges her daughter to jump from the pantry window and run to the neighbors next door. When the girl is given a list of twenty addresses of board members whom she must notify of the evening meeting, the entire town reassumes its erstwhile Jewish character, as the two girls, Jolán and the narrator, trot through the streets, delivering messages.

There are several stark gaps in our narrative. Perhaps most fundamentally, we do not know the name of the girl herself, except that she was the daughter of Jolán and Josua Ehrenreich, originally from Șimleu Silvaniei. The manuscript was in Hebrew, as she apparently emigrated to Israel after the war. In light of the religious and geographic background of her family, her mother tongue was most likely Yiddish. We hope to eventually locate members of her family and discover more of her biographical details.

The other glaring lacuna is page nine of the manuscript, which, in this exhibition, is panel fourteen. We do not know whether the page was removed deliberately or lost. We do not know if it exists somewhere, with her family or other members of the Mediaș Jewish diaspora. Its absence reconfigures the story – the climax is missing, the actions of the main, potentially “heroic” characters are unknown. The exact intervention of the (also unidentified, at this time) German commander is omitted, whether intentional or not, leaving the reader to imagine what may have been.

The other story presented here, the “sub-story”, is composed of several Saxon testimonies relating to a relatively short period in late 1940-early 1941 when members of the Iron Guard were persecuting the local Jewish population. The lacuna here is the perspective of the Jewish community and its leaders themselves. Can it truly be said that the community was “satisfied” with the situation, as Hermann Lehrer contends? Did the Saxon “guards” also protect small Jewish shops and the homes of the less well-to-do? How did the lower

class community members – certainly a large part if not the majority of the local Jewish population – experience this episode? Can the actions described by mayor Hans Zikeli be aligned with the words he wrote on the front page of the Mediascher Zeitung on February 15, 1941: “…My work program is anchored in the national-socialist ideology (Weltanschauung) und I will shirk neither effort nor sacrifice in order to establish the town administration upon the body of thought associated with this ideology”?�� These stories and testimonies raise questions to which we do not pretend to have answers. Instead we invite you to consider these portrayals as uncertain, shadowy, fragmented, potentially distorted and flawed.

We would like to thank everyone who assisted us this summer, especially the other members of our team, official and unofficial – Alexandra Toma, Matthias Heinrich, Erzsébet Wenzel-Gazdag, Jochen and Gabriela Cotaru and Benjy Fox-Rosen, as well as our neighbors and friends, new and old, and the people of the town of Mediaș.

Răzvan Anton and Julie Dawson

casa de lângă sinagogădas Haus neben der Synagogea zsinagóga melletti ház

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 693857

1. „...mein Arbeitsprogramm [ist] in der nationalsozialistischen Weltanschauung verankert und ich [werde] keine Arbeit und Opfer scheuen, um die Stadtverwaltung auf dem Gedankengut dieser Weltanschauung aufzubauen.“