Page - 16 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

16 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt Introduction My great-grandparents, Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe and Russia, left their homes in the late 1800s and early 1900s, never returned, and through a series of migrations ended up in South Africa.2 From discussions with my family, I understood that, through stages of assimila- tion, aspects of our connection to our past had become less visible. While personal records of family history were kept, religious and cultural practices were not. And languages and voices had been lost too: no one spoke Yiddish or Russian anymore, although my father knew a few words in Hebrew. The fate of distant family members who had not left Eastern Europe was not something with which our immediate family seemed to feel a direct connection. I felt that there had been a deliberate attempt in our family to leave aspects of Jewish culture behind, and that they preferred the comfort of assimilation. That they escaped the fate of those who stayed behind was not something openly spoken about. In this article, I describe a journey my sister Rebecca and I made in 2012 to Eastern Europe, part diasporic return/roots journey and part artistic residency, as part of which we developed artworks in the form of ritual, performative practices with salt; through these practices, I ask 2 I refer to my father’s side of the family here, and have written elsewhere about my mother’s side of the family, one side of whom were Jewish migrants from what is now Belarus and the other from the English midlands. Figure 1: Family tree. Source: author.