By Michael Rogatchi ©
The essay is the artist’s introduction to his POST-HARMONY collection and project.
Now it is almost a year since the shocking morning of October 7th, 2023, the day on which all the Jews in Israel and world-wide were supposed to celebrate the Simchat Torah, the uplifting celebration rounding the High Holidays in 2023.
Since that morning, we all have been living in a new reality, a painful, dramatic, tragic and shocking one. The reality which we did not live through before. The reality which resembles to me the reality in which our parents and grandparents lived, the one of the Shoah and post-Shoah, when innocent people of all ages and in all conditions were attacked in unimaginably cruel ways for a sole reason of being Jewish. I do recognise many differences in circumstances of the annihilation of Jews by the Nazis in the 1940s and attacking the Jews in Israel eighty years later in the 2020s by the Hamas terrorists, but the core of the attacks against innocent people, on their own territory, in their own country, is the same, in my understanding. It is the crime against humanity which is prompted by animalistic racial hatred. Which is indefensible.
The shock caused by the barbaric attacks committed against innocent people in Israel on October 7th, 2023, did not cease for almost a year after the massacre. On the contrary, we are hit by more and more terrible news about more murders, the desperate situation with the hostages, and more suffering all the time in the unprecedentedly difficult for every Jewish person world-wide situation of the unleashed hatred against us. Because of what? Because it has always been there, for all 3 300 years of our people’s existence, and now, the barbarity committed against us on October 7th, 2023 has re-opened the doors which were supposed to be shut down after the Shoah. They were not shut down for good, as we have learned so painfully now.
What happened on and after October 7th, 2023 in Israel matters to me and my wife essentially. Our family members and many of our friends live in Israel, and we love Eretz Israel whole-heartedly. When people in Israel are threatened, we are alarmed and deeply worried. It is our pain, and it does not go away.
What can we do, each of us, to confront this terror? These thoughts were overwhelming me for a good while, after initial shock, horror and bewilderment caused by the October 7th massacre and following consequences of it.
Each of us reacts to the existential threat of our people and country in its own way, in the way which we are capable of. I am doing it in the way of my art, my language of expression.
The scenes of October 7th and thereafter did evoke the scenes which I witnessed as a child and which never left me. Walking with friends, and also on my own, in outskirts of our Karaganda city in Kazakhstan where our family was exiled after the arrest by the NKVD of my father in his young age just after the end of the Second World War and sending him to GULAG in the place called the Valley of Death, where I was born, and previous brutal liquidation by the NKVD of my Hungarian Jewish grandfather before the war, we founded every now and then in the grass of the Kazakh steppe an odd subjects. Human skulls with holes in it, human bones, detached limbs. Those ‘discoveries’ , always sudden ones among the tall grass, and often many, have never left my mind ever since.
After October 7th, 2023, this backside of my memories came back. What I conveyed in these 36 black and white drawings of the POST-HARMONY collection, is my Kaddish. And it also is my Psalms, my lament to all the victims of the barbarism which has been committed against the innocent people on their own territory, in their own country, their families, their friends, everybody affected by this ongoing horror.
The thing is that the low cowards who attacked our people in Israel on October 7th, 2023, and those apologists who are permeating vile racial hatred to blossom in the XXI century, do not know, nor do they understand us, Jews. They do not have a clue of our history which can be also expressed as a history of resilience. The resilience of humanity, kindness, help and resolve. Resolve to live and to prevail over the darkest circumstances. As my people always did, as we are still doing, and as we always will do.
Throughout our mourning, we also live in resolve. Through our Kaddish, we also are resilient and committed to life, light and loving memory.
“Chazak! Chazak! Venichazeik!”, “Be Strong! Be Strong! And may we be strengthened!” – is pronounced loudly in our synagogues at the end of the reading of each of the five books of the Torah at our liturgies throughout the circle of a Jewish year. Every year. Three thousand and three hundred years and counting. This is my favourite line from our Book. The book of life, not death. The book of light, not darkness. The book of good, not evil. This disposition to life has made us who we are. This disposition to life has made us strong. That’s how we endured unimaginable trials.
And this what will keep us going in this gloomy, difficult current reality of post-October 7th, amidst our ongoing tragedy, longing for so many innocent lives lost, witnessing and going through so much suffering around us and within every one of us.
How to live in all this, which is Post-Harmony? Post-Normality? Post-Mercifulness?
I have no other recipe of survival in this pulsating turmoil of the XXI century than our ‘Chazak!’ attitude, which has been proved right by the entire history of our people.
Michael Rogatchi ©
August-September 2024