LAUDERDALE MANSIONS/HA’ATZMAUT
Representing place and home and making visible the cultural memories attached to them are crucial to Goldhill’s work . Her exhibition at The Freud Museum , also visualised in an artist’s book, followed a narrative of displacement.
Although a very different tale to that of Sigmund Freud’s movement from Vienna to Hampstead, the story of her aunt, Anne Schwab’s, change of home from Lauderdale Mansions in London to the Ha’atzmaut housing development in Tel Aviv’s outskirts shares a similar narrative. She, having fled Nazi Germany at a young age, arrived in London and eventually settled in the mansion flat where she lived with her family for fifty years.
“I felt drawn to document her North London flat, with all its books and its stimmung , days before her belongings were to be packed up, and shipped to Israel. I subsequently photographed her, settled in Israel with her belongings where she had moved to be reunited her daughters.”
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As a child, I felt that there was a world I could never understand: my Aunt’s flat, her apartment. Always, from the climb up those stairs, I felt dislocated from the space I was about to step into.The living room felt huge to me, populated with conversations in strong German accents and deeply lined faces. We visited once after death and the mirrors were draped with fabric, all was dark; the men unshaven; strange smells, and cold food. Again during a Passover meal- which seemed interminable to my young years - all were spoken in Hebrew and was indecipherable to my liberal upbringing in Judaism.
But there was also an atmosphere of learning, books evident as special kinds of possessions, and an aura of a distant world, which implied unseen journeys. Then, last year, a visiting cousin from Australia suggested we go and visit Auntie Anne: she had been part of our family network, but she had almost slipped through it. Now I reconnected in a way that I found overwhelming, raising a strong compulsion to return and take photographs before she migrated to Israel.
She was a bookbinder and she showed me her books - which I had glimpsed before - some recently damaged in a flood from a leaking pipe in the flat above. There was a sadness that we had never- until now and the prospect of her move away from London - known each other properly and a sense of a loss of something which had never come about. Returning to take photographs in that room felt a tribute to the family that was now leaving for good and had shaped such evocative childhood memories.
It was the idea of ‘return’ - my return, her return - that was so potent in this situation, because, from time out of mind, exiled Jewish communities were partly defined through their imaginary relationship with their distant homeland. During the Passover festival at the end of the Seder night meal, it is customary for all to say ”next year in Jerusalem”. This phrase expressed the hope and possibility of finally going ‘home’. And for Anne, this annually repeated ideal has now become a reality, though not, perhaps, the return which she might have imagined.
I was able to go and visit her a few months later in Israel, settled into her newly built apartment. Embedded now in a space of stone and sunlight, her bound books and possessions had all been installed. It felt as if it had been there forever.