Yearning for a better life

Intercultural Interaction Support program

 

The program invites its participants to engage in a conversation about the feelings and thoughts of people who, for one reason or another, find themselves forced to live between two worlds and cultures.

The program is based on:

  1. Photo exhibitions:

  • “Yearning for a better life” based on “Letters to Eretz Israel” by Janusz Korczak,

  • “On the same wavelength. A look at St. Petersburg through the lens and texts of Joseph Brodsky,”

  • “Parallel Worlds”, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Naomi Frankel.

What do these exhibitions have in common?

Each of these exhibitions offers visitors an encounter with a well-known, internationally recognized personality, multifaceted and controversial.

  1. Korczak, I. Brodsky, N. Frenkel are the authors of texts, many of which are included in school curricula and are studied at universities. But at the same time they often remain little known to many people, even in the countries where they were born.

All three are, in one way or another, connected with Palestine, modern Israel. Janusz Korczak visited here twice and contemplated moving to Eretz Israel just before the outbreak of World War II. Joseph Brodsky was deported to Israel by the Soviet authorities, but he ended up living and working in other countries. Naomi Fraenkel fled to Palestine from Berlin in 1934 after Hitler came to power, and was among those Jews who created and fought for Israel

All of them were or were going to become emigrants, had experience of living “between two cultures”, were heirs and bearers of several cultural traditions at the same time - both those given from birth and those in which they happened to live.

They were born into Jewish families, but each perceived their Jewishness in their own way. Janusz Korczak considered himself, first of all, a Pole, a Warsawian, and then a Jew. Joseph Brodsky - a citizen of the world, born into a Jewish family, Naomi Frenkel first of all considered herself a Jew, and then an Israeli, and all her life she tried to understand what it meant to be a Jew.

The organizers of the project do not set themselves the task of talking about the life and works of their famous heroes (although for many visitors such an acquaintance also occurs). Exhibitions are an invitation to shared reflection based on texts and images created by writers through the prism of photographs. This is an invitation to correlate what you see with your own ideas, thoughts, experiences, with your experience of existing “between two cultures.”

 

  1. A number of cultural and educational events,

held on the territory of exhibitions and in connection with them.

The events invite participants (children, youth, adults) to comprehend the topics proposed by the exhibition from different points of view, in different ways, in different languages: look at and create photographs, listen to music and sing songs, participate in round tables, watch films, participate in theatrical performances, read poems and discuss texts. And the main thing is to meet with each other and find interested listeners and interlocutors. And the voices of J. Korczak, I. Brodsky, N. Frenkel are among the leading ones in this polyphony.

 

Author of the photo exhibition: Galina Zernina (https://www.galina-zernina.com/)