“Poland 1990/91”
“It was already dark in Drzewica, nothing was to be seen. Only one restaurant was open, a vodka bar with drunken peasants and a landlady who kept the drunks at bay.
The men cheered, they raised their glasses, a toast to Eppstein, she’s from Drzewica – I was already gripped by a drunken childish fool. Piotr held my camera up to the scene and took three or four pictures. I didn’t see anything of the village. And certainly not of my grandfather’s shtetl. Like all the others, it has long since disappeared and life in it has been extinguished forever. I only have these four blurred pictures from the vodka cave in the Polish village where my grandfather was born”.
Esther Eppstein shows original photographs taken during a long stay in Warsaw in 1990/1991.
“Shpatsirn”
“My father Paul Eppstein was born in 1917 in Zurich Aussersihl, the “shtetl on the Sihl”. His parents Berek and Felice ran the Epstein kosher bakery on Zwinglistrasse. The Yiddish word shpatsirn means to walk or stroll. In 2001, Serge Pinkus accompanied the then 83-year-old Paul with his camera on a walk through the neighbourhood of his youth. He died just a few months later.”
Video by Esther Eppstein. With Paul Eppstein and Serge Pinkus, camera and interview Serge Pinkus, editing Esther Eppstein/Michael Hertig, 2009. ca 50 min., Ov.
The photographs and the video are linked by biographical, family and historical background. Esther Eppstein is showing the works as part of the “Ostblockade” festival, which uses art, actions, performances and a party to thematise Eastern Europe and the ‘Eastern Bloc’ in the broadest sense as a cultural and biographical imprint.