A Wandering Conversation on PreservationA Wandering Conversation on Preservation

An engraving of elaborate rooftop sukkahs built by the Sephardic community in Amsterdam, likely illustrated by Johann Georg Puschner and published in Jüdisches Ceremoniel by Paul Christian Kirchner (a later edition would be extensively edited by Sebastian Jugendres), printed and bound in Nürnberg in 1717.*

*Image 1, Rooftop Sukkahs: As a result of the 1492 Alhambra Decree, issued by the monarchs of Spain, and later the rise of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536, many Jewish communities across the Iberian Peninsula (a region referred to as ‘Sepharad’, a word that has similar origins and can be understood as a counterpart to ‘Ashkenaz’, referring to a southern-lying region) fled northwards — with many (including the parents of Spinoza) eventually arriving in the northern provinces of the Netherlands, re-establishing themselves in cities such as Amsterdam.As Kees and I crisscross the city, he occasionally gestures towards buildings, usually owned by or otherwise affiliated with the municipal authority, and remarks that beneath such buildings there are bunkers. As it happens, Kees is an expert – perhaps even the expert – on the whereabouts of Cold War bunkers, and so I don’t doubt his claim, despite the lack of any visible sign to testify its accuracy. These underground cavities, he explains, are scattered across most of The Netherland’s major cities, and are today something of a bureaucratic ambiguity where the duty of maintenance is concerned. Having never exercised their intended purpose of preserving life, they now serve to preserve only themselves, sealed off from the temporality of the world above. Sometimes they become flooded, other times squatted, but more often than not they are simply forgotten.

Kees describes how he’d recently received a phone call from a government official, asking if he maybe knows where one can find the key for one such bunker. The officer had only just discovered that his department is responsible for the bunker that lies a short distance (in other words, a few metres downwards) from their headquarters, having been wholly oblivious to its presence up until that morning. The key, apparently, was misplaced at some point during the last couple of decades, what with the threat of a nuclear winter having largely diminished from the forefront of people’s minds.

Thinking about shelters, I recount to Kees an exchange between myself and a friend, dating from early October of last year. Sipping lukewarm ginger tea in a café in The Hague — one of our last opportunities to do so, for some weeks later the Netherlands would commence its stricter, second lockdown — my friend was scrolling through a series of images that had just arrived from the other side of the world via WhatsApp. It was, she informed me with a voice shaded by lament, the perfect season for camping back home. As she glanced through the window, lacquered by a persistent cascade of rain, I saw her eyes reflect the grey of the heavens with a glaze of homesickness mingled with envy.

“It is indeed,” I responded, “an apt moment for setting up tents.” The festival of Sukkot was due to begin the following week. The festival entails building a temporary dwelling — a sukkah, which resembles a cross between a beach-hut and a tent — and spending as much time as possible over the course of seven to eight days in that dwelling: eating, sleeping, studying. The festival always takes place in the early autumn — curious timing, considering that the roof of a sukkah must necessarily remain unsealed, punctuated by gaps so that one may still be able to view the stars through it. A sukkah provides barely any defence against the elements — and yet, for all the flimsiness of its physical properties, it is believed to be a sacred architecture

Seemingly enchanted by the mental picture of a DIY sanctuary, my friend went on to suggest that we build a sukkah in the nearby dunes. Without wishing to amputate her sudden enthusiasm, I explained that making a sukkah can prove to be a rather complex undertaking — traditions determine copious guidelines for how many walls it may have, how tall it can be, what kinds of materials the roof can and cannot be made from.

“Surely we can find all we need at a hardware store — wood, nails, some string, and the rest we’ll find in the dunes,” my friend replied with convinced optimism.

I then explained that no sukkah is complete without four items: a branch from a myrtle tree, another branch from a willow tree, a closed frond of a date palm, and an etrog. Unfazed, my friend mulled over this list for a few silent moments. As ripples of concentration expanded across her forehead, a spark of inspiration seemed to descend upon her — perhaps it was even of divine origin. Contrary to common assumption, it would appear that the public relations department of the divine realm is actually rather pragmatic in its operations:

“Well, there are plenty of willow trees in The Netherlands, so that is no problem. At the seaside, on the boulevard, there’s a line of palm trees — and I’m almost certain they’re not plastic. I mean, they’re as real as the rest of the Netherland’s nature — so, given the circumstances, they’ll surely do. About the myrtle — we can probably buy a bundle of leaves from a florist. So, all that’s left is the etrog…What is it exactly?”

“A kind of citrus fruit,” I explain. A Google search on my phone reveals hundreds of examples, often featuring prospective buyers scrutinising the fruit’s bumpy, yellow or green surface. One particular individual looks especially satisfied with an enormous, polished specimen, gleaming almost as brightly as the owner’s overjoyed expression. “You’re supposed to select the one that looks the most beautiful. Though I guess that depends a lot on personal taste…”

“Well, that’s easy — we’ll just buy a lemon from Ekoplaza.”

“…But a lemon is far too small.”

“Alright — we’ll get a grapefruit instead then!”

It was then that I noticed that the rain had paused, and it struck me that we had in fact already built our sukkah — not out in the dunes, but there in the corner of the café, formed out of our words and yearning. There, in our sukkah, we would remain — eating, sleeping, waiting, dwelling — and not only for a week, but for months…

Gathering the Four Specifies, a woodcutting from Sefer Minhagim in Ashkenaz (Book of Customs in Ashkenaz) by Uri Veibesh, printed and bound in 1662 in Amsterdam.*

*Image 2, Gathering the Four Specifies: the Ashkenaz of the title is is a land first mentioned in the narrative of Bereshit (Genesis) — however, in this original context the actual location of Ashkenaz is never precisely clarified, beyond some indications that it lies somewhere northern — a kind of nebulous Elsewhere. This ambiguity would allow for a similarly malleable application of the word to develop. From the Middle Ages onwards, Jewish communities began to commonly use ‘Askenaz’ to refer to regions in western Europe — initially Rhineland and more broadly Germanic regions, where several significant Jewish cultural centres had formed (eg Mainz, Worms), and eventually expanding to include areas in France and England. When the governing authorities of such regions expelled these communities, resulting in eastbound movement towards regions that are today Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, the term ‘Askenaz’ broadened to encompass these regions. One could say that Ashkenaz remains a loosely-defined region — its borders are determined by differentiations in how customs (minhagim) are practiced, rather than by a strictly fixed, geographically-limited space.As Kees and I turn a corner, we find ourselves swept up in a tide of passers-by, tourists and eager shoppers. Unsettled, I start to wonder how long it will be before I need to purchase yet another grapefruit and retreat back into my sukkah.

“This matter of preservation,” I begin, as we slip off the high street and into a side alley, “it’s a peculiar thing. We often associate it with a kind of fixity — affixing something in one place, detached from a life-full tempo. Like a vitrine in a museum. But I have to wonder these days: why do we think it is only walls that are responsible for preserving us? Aren’t we also part of the architecture of preservation? And what does it mean to be mindful of that while in motion, while moving through different spaces — through these fluctuating vulnerabilities, both within and outside of oneself?”

“Well, you know, people often forget that they too are a part of space — we contain and compose it as much it contains and composes us,” Kees responds. He goes on to recollect his time spent in the study halls of various archives, examining bunker blueprints. These drawings delineate sites that he has never entered, and yet in his mind he can conjure a rendering of the space in pristine detail. In the terrain of his imagination, he has walked through many bunkers — far more than the number that he has physically visited, and that is easily several dozen.

Smiling, I tell him that I’m reminded of my mother’s childhood home — no. 6 1/2 Foster Lane, close to the harbour in Kingston, Jamaica. I’ve never been there, and as far as I am aware there is not a single photo of this house in existence. I highly doubt it is even still standing. Yet, having heard many descriptions of it — how it stood on stilts, how a hurricane once ripped off its roof, how it consisted of a single room — I believe I have seen it. Though she has never told me as much, I am almost certain my mother continued to sleep many nights there, exposed to the stars, long after she was sent to England.

“You know, it’s funny… My Scottish grandma always had this compulsion to make photo albums — I suppose because this is what her mother and grandmother did. In her attic, there’s this small mountain range of cardboard boxes, filled with albums. But then, when I think about my mother’s side of the family, there are barely any photos at all. I don’t think it’s even the case that they were left behind in Jamaica — there just weren’t many made in the first place. Everything I know about that ‘first place’ – that place back there, back then – it’s all been transmitted through conversations, images made up of words and affects and even silences.”

A pause expands between Kees and I — an ellipsis narrated by our footsteps.

“Does it frustrate you — that absence of documents?”

Without missing a beat, I shake my head.

“No, because it’s not really an absence as such,” I explain. “Here, in this context, there’s this tendency to think of an archivist and an archive as separate entities — my grandma and her photo album, for example. And when we talk about an archive we think of a literal structure, neatly arranged boxes and folders and databases. We think of chronologies in terms of linear time — and not in terms of time as experienced by a body traversing the world, or an exhausted body, a body mending its traumas, a dreaming body. See, the difference is that the archive of a diaspora is carried, not fixed. It is forever a temporary dwelling that is all too aware of its fragility. Its document and interface is the body, and one is both archive and archivist. Its database is oral, not written. Sure, I didn’t get photos from my mother — but I certainly got something: rituals, mood swings and resilience.”

We come to a standstill, having reached the edge of the city.

“Well, it seems you answer your own question then — yes, we are a part of the architecture of preservation. After all, architecture has never been solely a matter of what one can literally see, can touch. The matter of architecture is, first and foremost, one of imagination.”

We turn around and retrace our route, following the steps that brought us to this periphery.

For as long as we are in motion, the conversation goes on.

1. *Image 1, Rooftop Sukkahs: As a result of the 1492 Alhambra Decree, issued by the monarchs of Spain, and later the rise of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536, many Jewish communities across the Iberian Peninsula (a region referred to as ‘Sepharad’, a word that has similar origins and can be understood as a counterpart to ‘Ashkenaz’, referring to a southern-lying region) fled northwards — with many (including the parents of Spinoza) eventually arriving in the northern provinces of the Netherlands, re-establishing themselves in cities such as Amsterdam. 2. *Image 2, Gathering the Four Specifies: the Ashkenaz of the title is is a land first mentioned in the narrative of Bereshit (Genesis) — however, in this original context the actual location of Ashkenaz is never precisely clarified, beyond some indications that it lies somewhere northern — a kind of nebulous Elsewhere. This ambiguity would allow for a similarly malleable application of the word to develop. From the Middle Ages onwards, Jewish communities began to commonly use ‘Askenaz’ to refer to regions in western Europe — initially Rhineland and more broadly Germanic regions, where several significant Jewish cultural centres had formed (eg Mainz, Worms), and eventually expanding to include areas in France and England. When the governing authorities of such regions expelled these communities, resulting in eastbound movement towards regions that are today Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, the term ‘Askenaz’ broadened to encompass these regions. One could say that Ashkenaz remains a loosely-defined region — its borders are determined by differentiations in how customs (minhagim) are practiced, rather than by a strictly fixed, geographically-limited space.