The Girl Who Crossed the River with a Tablecloth - Lara Bongard inherited a
100-year-old Shabbat tablecloth, the world's only heritage that has disappeared from its
ancestors, with whom his great-grandfather Mordko Bongard crossed the
river from his shtetl in 1911 and never returned. He left his family and
her community to escape the pogroms that swept the region. Lara
embarked on an in-depth search for his family's scattered history in
the former Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). She found members of her
family, collected testimonies, photographs, letters and
archival documents, researched tales, symbols and mythologies
Yiddish, in order to reconstruct his own image of the past. The tablecloth has become a
symbol of life: sharing food with family through the
time, the link between East and West, generations and diversity of
cultures that we represent as a family. Little by little, the dislocation
has transformed into a portable home. \n \nThe Girl Who Crossed the River
with a Tablecloth" is a multidimensional work and a space of memory
dynamic, in which fictional stories about the lives of his ancestors are
written in conjunction with the ancient Hebrew lunar calendar, accounts of
travel and memories, photographs and illustrations. The project
helps generate new narratives of connection about fluid meaning
of being "at home" in our contemporary world and reframing the
perspectives on multiple histories and identities.
