TAMEZ
2020
HD video, 22 minutes
A nature documentary in Yiddish, the language spoken by Eastern European Jews before the war. The Yiddish language I speak in this video is not the language of Isaac Leib Peretz or Mendele Moicher Sforim, – the language of the golden age of Yiddish literature from late 19th century. I have spent about a year trying to teach myself Yiddish, and subsequently written this film to the best of my abilities. I probably make grammatical mistakes here and there, and my syntax is possibly a bit clumsy. Some plants and animals may also be named incorrectly in my version, since sources have been hard to come by. Nevertheless, it was important for me to write the film myself, so that it is my Yiddish that comes across, – my own attempt to narrate.
The documentary was shot near the little Latvian town of Aizpute. The area in which I filmed used to have a Jewish population of about 20% before the war. The premise of the documentary is a kind of vain hope that the Yiddish language still resides in landscape, nature and vegetation, and by talking about nature and life in this area, I make an homage to the lost population.
