ABSTRACT
A term derived from the Greek algia (longing) and nostos (home), nostalgia means ‘a longing for a home that no longer exists or never existed’.1 As a pseudo-classical concept of early modern times, nostalgia, explains sociologist Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), referred to a medical diagnosis given to displaced persons during the seventeenth century. It was not until the eighteenth century, during the age of the Romantics, that symptoms of nostalgia came to be seen as a sign of sensibility and of patriotic feeling. Hence, from denoting a state of ill-health, nostalgia came to represent a ‘historical emotion’, and a generalised condition specific to a culture or an era. This particular understanding has captured the imagination of Janelle L. Wilson, whose book Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning (2005) proposes that nostalgia is intricately related to the notion of individual and collective identity. Wilson explains that:
Hence, by the very fact of experiencing this sentiment, one may be able to restore both a sense of meaning and identity that is lacking.3 In the context of this article, nostalgia will conceptually underpin the discussion about Polish-Israeli cultural dialogues realised
through the medium of visual art. Poles, much like Israelis, have reckoned with the traumatic history of their homelands, at both a national and a personal level. Moreover, in both countries artistic expression has, on numerous occasions, provided the means by which younger generations of artists voiced viewpoints that depart from mainstream collective mentalities or that challenge national myths. For my own purposes, I will endorse German historian Hans Jaeger’s interpretation of generational contrasts, which, he explains, ‘are not – like class contrasts – expressions of a deep-reaching cleavage in society’, rather they refer to ‘a difference in opinion on the basis of existing circumstances’. In particular, these contrasts are ‘likely to find expression in areas of little social consequence, as in fashion or the arts’.4 It is indeed within the sphere of the latter that I shall locate my discussion of the relevance of nostalgia for younger generations of artists in Israel and Poland. I will draw attention to the ways in which a selected group of artists born in the mid-1960s and early 1970s in Israel and Poland have contemplated the traumatic past through the lens of nostalgia for a lost homeland. Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus in ‘Theses of the Philosophy of History’ is suggestive in this respect. Benjamin describes the ‘angel of history’ as taking a typical nostalgic pose with his face ‘turned towards the past’ while the force of an onrushing storm tosses him ‘into the future to which his back is turned’.5 The artists discussed in this article validate Benjamin’s interpretation as they too gaze contemplatively at the land of destruction created by the Holocaust.
