when a border lands

how can we think our way between barbed wires?

Who will remain, what will remain? A wind will stay behind.” - Avrum Sutzkever

It’s been a simkhe beyond the borders of words to return with friends to the space-time of Yiddishland, to visit the Bialoweza forest, and meet memory guardians defying Fortress Europe, and defending a world where life and plurality bloom.

Wendell Berry once noted that there were two types of landscapes: sacred ones and desecrated ones. Here, where songbirds circle mass graves, where military vehicles trample bison while hunting for refugees, where fresh barbed fences rip through one of this continent’s last remaining primeval forests, where pines outgrow the bomb crater, which is which? What do we call the places where part of you is at home and another in horror, where beauty dances with brutality?

Perhaps here is where the fiddler, the healer, the activist agree: the minor key unlocks the major key; imagination is the lost pair of despair; hope is what copes with its silencing.

Here, in a forest cemetery, a buried rabbi warns future generations against the hypnosis of nationalism, supremacy and war. On the stage of a village theatre, an actress mourns her mother and the inter-cultural roots she had to hide. From a sidewalk, a woman holds the family album of a village and confronts a soldier. At the peak of a surveillance tower, a stork weaves a nest.

As Valzhyna Mort, a poet of these lands recounts, “History here is not about reasons and consequences, and genealogy is not about a lineage that connects one to the past: the lineage is gone into the dark of burned houses, archives, into loss. It is the music of history and the music genealogy that don’t know what “past” is. They belong to timelessness, like a dream we sink in and out of.”