I

When I was in elementary school, at the end of the third or fourth grade, the teacher put on a play with the class, based on the Book of Ruth. In the class, three of us were named Naomi, the two other 'Naomis' wanted to play the role of Naomi. I knew I would not get a significant role in the play, but had I been given the choice, I would pick the part of Ruth, who seemed to me much younger and attractive. Finally, along with some other kids for whom a suitable role was not found, I played a Shibboleth (a stalk of grain).

II

Many a time did I wonder what brought my mother to Israel. Mother was not Jewish. She was born in Switzerland to a protestant mother and a father of Italian Catholic origin, but when she grew up she defined herself an atheist and left Switzerland for a Jewish Israeli man who traveled to study in the united States. I always wondered how a young, educated chemist, who had already experienced immigration when moving to the United States in order to marry my father, left a comfortable country, where she was already familiar with the language, and came with a husband and two young children to a small and difficult country where she did not know the language and had no roots or acquaintances. The given explanation, that my father's mother lived here, did not rest my mind, along with the fact that my father claimed he was undetermined about wanting to go back to Israel. The explanation seemed even scantier since I knew that right after their arrival the two women ran into difficulties, and, to my mother's claim, almost destroyed the relations between my parents.

However, there was something in my mother's hazy gaze, while pronouncing the name Capernaum, in the enchantment she shared with me when she took me to "Stella Maris" monastery in Haifa, to see the small scale model of baby Jesus in the pasture among the shepherds, or after the six day war, when she took me to sleep in the 'Soeurs de Zion' monastery in the heart of the Via Dolorosa in the old city. In these acts I found something that revealed some of the inner motives for her decision. I sensed that her being here was a sort of continuous pilgrimage to the holy land. In her innermost, intimate sense she was wandering the land that Jesus Christ had wandered.This is the place where he walked on water, there he performed the miracle of the fish, and here he was extradited with a kiss by his friends. Through her eyes I saw, in every corner of the Galilee, in every mountain site covered with cypress and olive trees, the landscape visualized by the painters of the bible, setting pout to paint the settings of the stories of Jesus. The utter identification with his figure and his tribulations was inseparable from the course of her life. Mother was sickly and I remember how all through my childhood she repeatedly weighed herself, out of the fear she had gone under a certain weight. In time, she worked as a dietician with anorexic girls.

III

I was born in Chicago in 1956. At six months I moved to Boston and when I was three we went to Los Angeles. The first language I spoke was German. It was the language mother and father spoke among themselves? I heard English only when mother took me with her to the grocery store, and, as she had later told me, as we were going out I demanded that "Jetzt sprechen Wir nur Deutch" – now we will speak only German. I started speaking English only when I entered kindergarten, and I recall gaining my self confidence only in the second year of kindergarten, in Los Angeles, when I dared to pass intentionally near the current bully, as well as protect some of the smaller kids. The immigration to Israel was a blow to my self confidence. I arrived here in 1961. From the first moment I remember images, that in retrospect were prophecies of evil. The boat journey was stormy, and near Crete the boat was tossed from side to side, until dishes fell off tables, breaking into pieces. As we got off the boat, on a dark, rainy night, I remember the image of my grandmother, standing behind barbed wire, waiting for us. Against our expectations of a warm country, the first winter in Israel was a cold one, gloomy and rainy, without sufficient heating. Mother and father were busy getting adjusted, and mother was pregnant again, so I was left to struggle on my own, through kindergarten and then school. Mother brought me to the first day of kindergarten. I was a little girl, wearing a flowered dress, that could not speak Hebrew. The Israeli boys and girls were loud; they wore gym shorts, and swung high on big swings. Mother said a few words to the kindergarten teacher and then left and I was on my own. Two boys stood on play ladders, and attempting to befriend me, they pointed their toy guns at me, asking:

"You speak English?" Fear ruled me in those years, in kindergarten and then at school. The kids asked me that I show them my underpants. At lunch I would sit alone, for about an hour, in front of a plate filled with food that I disliked, forbidden to get up until my mother arrived. One girl in my neighborhood would take me out to the field, demanding that I showed her how I pee. For years I had been dreaming of returning to the United States. It was clear to me that when I get back there, my life will turn again into a world of total goodness; again I would be popular, and gain back my self confidence. Fortunately, I went back to the United States for one year in 1968, when I was in sixth grade. Then the illusion I built fell apart, and I saw that my personality structure had become innate, and that from I will have to deal with myself. One may say that the process of my inner rehabilitation had started that year. Accepting the life in Israel was the first stage.

IV

When I was ten, the "Shalit affair", which affected me and my family, exploded. Shalit, a major in the regular army, was married to a Christian woman. He demanded that his children will be registered as Jews, and the State refused. Consequently, his family emigrated from Israel. The affair, called to my attention, for the first time, the fact that we have a problem. Until that moment I was not aware that on top of my integration and adjustment problems there exists the main, most essential problematic of belonging. My father, a physicist whose roots were in the enlightened and assimilated German Jewry, was not at all aware of the fact that his children's Jewishness would be determined by the origin of his wife. Being the father of the family, he assumed that it was his own decision, and in the American hospital in which I was born her declared his daughter was a Jew. When we came to Israel, my birth certificate, in which the category of nationality was marked "Jewish" was translated, and that is how it was transferred to the Ministry of Interior. Only later, when my younger brother was born in Israel, the problem came up for the first time, and the category of his nationality was marked as "Swiss". The 'Shalit' affair intensified the awareness of my family to the issue. Years later, horror stories went around in the family, like that of the father whose son had died and he was forced to travel with his body in the trunk of his car, searching for a place that would consent to bury him.

V

Over and over again I revisit the "crime scene" of my childhood; a constant return to an intimate place which had become a sort of personal romanticism. In my paintings, the girls are covered- sheltered by their uniform, condemned inside them to anonymity and alienation. I take them out of their natural environment, into an open field – a vibrant, as well as intimidating place. In my internal iconography, based among else on Orientalist romanticism, the figure of Maria in its different incarnations, finds a place of honor. I waver between closeness and foreignness, between attempting to create identification and a feeling of alienation. Aside it, the simple country landscapes are portrayed through my personal filter – the landscapes of the holy land, the land of the bible, of A.A. Kebek's, "in the Narrow Path" and the landscapes of people that had walked the land in various periods of history, carrying the crops, the offerings to the temple. In time, my mother self diagnosed Celiac disease and could not eat bread. Fr my mother, who suffered from low weight all through the years, this disease intensified her internal struggle not to starve. Also the girls in my works are situated in the middle of a field of wheat, but doubtfully would they know what to do with the stalks in time of need.

Nomi Tannhauser

Text accompanying the exhibition Shibolet

Ein Harod Museum of Art, March 2006