Page - 18 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

18 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt In a conversation between Eva Hoffman, Sadiya Hartmann and Daniel Mendelsohn, all of whom have taken roots journeys, Hoffman said: “I do think there is a need to sort of locate, locate something, locate the past which you have known about, but which you don’t know. I’m actually thinking about Freud’s formulation of melancholia, a sort of depressive melancholia. He says that mourning in which you know the object of your mourning can come to an end, but mourning in which you don’t know the object you have lost cannot come to an end. And in that sense, the second generation was placed in a melancholic position, a kind of placelessness, a kind of nameless, placeless loss. So you know, I think that locating something does matter a lot.”3 In locating the past, emotions are often brought forth. Hartmann describes how her act of journeying along the slave route required her “to be the receptacle for foreclosed and prohibited emotions – rage and grief and disappointment”.4 Disappointment echoed with us too, as we struggled to find a concrete link to our family’s past. We had also met with disappointment in the process of undertaking this journey, as our original plans had to be reshaped. Discomfort was another emotion that emerged on the trip, both in the physical sense of ongoing travelling, and in the awkwardness of not knowing languages or the right words to try to explain what we wanted to find out. We had first proposed this trip in 2008, before our South Africa journey and residency, but we ran up against discouragement: “as you may imagine the emigration is a very over- used and active topic in Lithuania”.5 It is old news, travelling back to find one’s Jewish roots in Eastern Europe. We were just two more pilgrims on a well-worn trail.6 In the context of others travelling on roots journeys, here I will specifically refer to the work of the South Afri- ca-born writer Dan Jacobson, whose book Heshel’s Kingdom is about a journey he undertook in search of his grandfather Heshel Melamed, similar to our journey to Lithuania.7 In this ar- ticle, I also draw on texts which hold memories of the life of the Jewish communities prior to World War Two and are known as Yizkor books, which, according to the JewishGen website: “were written after the Holocaust as memorials to Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. They were usually put together by survivors from those communities and con- tain descriptions and histories of the community, biographies of prominent people, lists of people who perished, etc.”8 This search for roots felt more obscure and unknown than a previous trip to South Africa we had made in 2010.9 Our connection to Eastern Europe was tenuous, based only on the handed-down fragments of family stories. But it also felt necessary and obsessive, a calling we 3 Sadiya Hartman, Eva Hoffman and Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘Memoirs of return’, in Rites of Return: Diaspora Poet- ics and the Politics of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), edited by Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller, pp. 107-23, at pp. 116-17. 4 Hartman, Hoffman and Mendelsohn, ‘Memoirs of return’, p. 115. 5 Email correspondence between author and curator, September 17, 2009 6 I write more extensively on the literature of roots journeys in Chapter 1 of the thesis. 7 Dan Jacobson, Heshel’s Kingdom (London: Penguin, 1998). 8 ‘Yizkor Book Project: Frequently Asked Questions’, JewishGen website: <http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/> [accessed 10 August 2017]. 9 See: Katy Beinart, ‘Origination: Journeying In The Footsteps Of Our Ancestors’, in Sacred Mobilities: Journeys of Belief and Belonging (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), edited by Avril Maddrell, Alan Terry and Tim Gale, pp. 165-180.