“Dreaming in Spanish”

Characteristic Features of the Cosmopolimmigrant

“I think and I write in Hebrew quite effortlessly,

And I love to love you in Hebrew exclusively.

It’s such a wonderful language, I shall never have another

But at night I still dream in Spanish.”¹

In the instructions given to the students at the beginning of the Curatorship course 2004, they were asked to curate a group exhibition that would feature the works of several artists who came to Israel from the Former Soviet Union in the immigration waves of the 1970s and 1990s. The students, some native Israelis, others immigrants from the FSU, were asked to explore and examine, observe and interpret the artists’ gazes at life in Israel and their possible yearnings for the homeland they left behind. Has their art influenced and contributed to the artistic discourse in Israel, and if so, in what ways (stylistically, contextually, ideologically)? Is their work a synthesis of the past and present, or is it a new work that has erased the past? Does it articulate a sense of “ghetto-ization” (if such a feeling indeed exists), or the lessons of their encounter and interaction with the Israelis?

Potential working titles for the exhibitions were “Red in Blue-and-White” or “Isra-Russian Art.” Eventually, the title “Cosmopolimmigrant” was selected.

*

The Hebrew word for “Cosmopolimmigrant,” CosmoPalit, is a slip of the tongue, a verbal distortion of the word “cosmopolite,” made by one of the artists. For us, the curators of the exhibition, it was a highly significant lapse that succinctly defined and characterized the components of the participating artists’ identities. It encapsulated – as a hybrid and an antithesis – both the cosmopolite and the immigrant or the refugee (Heb. palit).

The cosmopolite perceives himself as a professed and legitimate citizen of the world, who moves in all parts of the world as if they were his own, as if he were in his own home, in his homeland. “I am a citizen of the world.”

The immigrant or refugee regards himself as redundant, detached from the world, wandering from one place to another, a stranger, distant and distanced from his homeland. The cosmopolite’s natural habitat is global, as large as the expanses of the physical-corporeal world or as the virtual realms of the Internet.

The immigrant’s habitat is minimal, as big as his footprint on the temporary ground that he traverses.

“And since it was decreed that he is to be a wanderer, / he wanders diligently. Each morning he changes horizons. […] the earth tricked him all those years. It had moved, while he […] had walked, jogged, run, on a single piece of ground exactly as big as his sandals."²

What is the “cosmopolimmigrant condition”? What happens to a person when he exchanges one landscape for another, one light for another, one language for another, one culture for another, one home for another? Does “homeland” become a dual designation, or does he remain dissociated and devoid of a homeland, hovering in a territorial/consciousness “limbo” between and above two continents-lands that remain “there”? Does he adopt the macrocosmic cosmopolitan field, or does he choose to migrate from all geo-political spheres, to remain a stranger and an exile outside himself or within himself (internal emigration)? Does this psychic-conscious-physical condition elicit feelings of liberation and freedom in him, or does it instill feelings of confinement and otherness in him?³

To my mind, the “cosmopolimmigrant condition” is not constant.

Each participant has a temporary profile of his own. This profile consists of different blends and interrelations between the problematic, evasive notion of “collective-tribal mentality” of his country of origin and the artist’s personal character traits; of an ability or inability, desire or lack of desire to assimilate or integrate, isolate or distance himself from his old or new “habitat”.

The “cosmopolimmigrant condition” is a state of constant movement on the axis of time-place-consciousness. It enables one to choose and define one’s identity in the sequence-range of possibilities between refugee, immigrant, exile, tourist, outsider, detached, citizen,and prodigal son who has returned home.

It is not only a “mental” or “physical” condition, but a combination of the two. Can the body exist in one place, and the dreaming soul hover in another? Does exile (galut) lurk at the end of all revelation (hitgalut) (as noted by writer Yitzhak Orpaz-Auerbach in a press interview)? Does the transition from one place of residence to another embed a certain dimension of “pilgrimage” in the secular sense? Could it be that “immigration” contains a facet of intentionality and an intention to reveal that one’s past was exile, and one’s future is a vision of the revelation of one’s secret dreams and ambitions? Or, perhaps it is vice versa – when the euphoria of revelation dissolves and its haze disperses, you reveal that you were left in exile, imprisoned within your own body/consciousness, within the never-ending grayness of human compromise, unable to realize your dream in its totality.

When does the cosmopolimmigrant cease to be so and become an “Israeli” (or any other distinctive national identity)? Does it happen when he becomes fluent in his new language as it rolls smoothly off his tongue? Does it happen when his appearance and clothing have become assimilated? Does it occur the minute he can overcome the gastronomical or cultural delicacies of his new home, even crave them? Or, perhaps, when he stops thinking, dreaming, counting his money, or whispering words of love in his mother tongue?

And perhaps this is entirely impossible, an attempt doomed to fail, for the deepest and most concealed inner nucleus of his new shell forever projects and “exposes” his nuclear-primary identity. Hence it does not matter how many “language courses” he attends and how fluent and up-to-date his speech, his “mother tongue” will always flow from the gut, from an authentic, unveiled sentiment, whereas his “father tongue” will come from the head, passing through the filter of thought.

Furthermore, since the process of socialization occurs in the early stages of the parents’ home, kindergarten and school, a person assimilates them as his basic norms: values, tradition, and conduct. Is this the reason why the COSMOPOLImmigrant is doomed to be identified as an “eternal other” in his new society? Will this otherness be reinforced and surface precisely when he becomes an integral part of the new culture?

There is no single formulary answer to these questions.

The number of physical/mental reactions to this fluid state is like the number of COSMOPOLImmigrants.

It seems that the difference between one COSMOPOLImmigrant and another lies primarily in one’s response to the reality of his life. His condition is a reflection of his choices: living in a delineated and enclosed space or in a network that stretches out arms and extensions to those near and far.

To wit:

There are those who choose to enjoy both worlds, taking the good from each of their “worlds” and finding the sweetness of their life in them. There are those who hover between the two worlds, “stuck” in the limbo of a continuous present in-between the previous and the new life, failing to find their place in either the past or the future.

There are those who choose to erase the past entirely and assume a new local cloak, and those who opt for remembering and reminding their past, living it on while missing the life of the present and future in the new locale.

There are those who have effaced their previous, East European identity, which had been “mobilized” for the collective that comprised the Soviet Union, and similarly refuse to adopt the Israeli identity that seems to them ”inferior” or too “American.” Such individuals have constructed their new identities by fusing these two “erasures.” That identity may be strictly professional (“I am a painter”), uninterested in additional aspects.

There are also those whose identity is entirely dissociated from a concrete-physical place, and relates to a virtual community in cyberspace. In the Internet they find their personal-social-professional-cultural interlocutors, who are above and beyond traditional identity (nationality and/or religion), an identity that ostensibly does not occupy them in the cyber world.

Perhaps, instead of blurring, stitching, or changing identity, the cosmopolimmigrant prefers to remain who and what he is. Perhaps he is content with his indefinite situation and eclectic consciousness. He perceives them as the very source of his happiness, strength and singularity, as furnishing him with a sense of inner freedom. This view is echoed, for example, by R. B. Kitaj, a Jewish-British artist who presented his own preferred option out of a “diasporist stance” in his First Diasporist Manifesto: an option of life in two or more worlds, existential and stylistic wandering as freedom. As if saying “Lucky me for being an exile!”

According to Kitaj, Diasporist painting occurs under unique historical and personal circumstances. The Diasporist lives and paints in two or more societies simultaneously.

“Diaspora is most often associated with Jews and their two thousand-year old scattering among the nations (longer by other accounts). Exile.., has become a way of life and death – consonant with Jewishness itself, even though Israel is reborn.”⁴

In this respect, the cosmopolimmigrant defines himself as a “projector of consciousness,” casting his images from his reservoir of data-memories, images that have cumulated during his progression on the axis of time-place-consciousness and been processed in his unique psychic program for his congregation-community.

The exhibition cosmopolimmigrant is, first and foremost, an opportunity to take a break, to look back, to review the great, rich contribution of these artists to the local artistic discourse. It is a modest homage to the contribution of this immigration to Israeli culture as a whole.

In addition, the exhibition introduces the viewer to a different type of “Israeliness” that neither settles for nor desires narrow, superficial and short-lived identity traits, but rather enriches its constituent elements with the basic experiences that the immigrant brings with him, and with what is constructed, encoded, and split within him. It is an identity that embeds wide knowledge and historical depth that transcends the boundaries of “here” and “there,” “then” and “now.”

1. “Dreaming in Spanish”: lyrics: Ehud Manor; music and singing: Shlomo Yidov. [Hebrew]

2. Dan Pagis, "Brothers," in Points of Departure, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), p. 5.

3. For an elaborate, fascinating discussion of exile in philosophical, theological and artistic contexts, see: Gideon Ofrat, In Praise of Exile (Jerusalem: Carta, 2000) [Hebrew].

4. R. B. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), quoted in: http://www.jameshymanfineart.com/pages/archive/information/72.html