Page - 26 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

26 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt of the Meisels’s addresses in Vilnius, on Jatkowa Street in the ‘small’ ghetto area. For the first time in our journey, a site of our family story intersected with a site of the Holocaust. The first attempt to locate their home on the street drew a blank – one side of the street was no longer there. Many buildings had changed. The Jewish quarter then was not the Jewish quarter now. Our experience of locating our ancestors was frustrating and disappointing. The archive records were often held only in Russian, a text we could not read. “As we attempt to locate and decipher traces of our ancestors, we hit many problems. We have to negotiate mul- tiple languages and translations, from Lithuanian to Russian to Yiddish to Hebrew, moving round and around in a never-ending circle of confusion. Names have been recorded in one language, translated to another, then another, through several scripts. We hit on using Google translate in a playful advertising campaign around Vilnius old town, pretty sure that the mistranslations offe- red by a cybernetic interpreter reflect the truth of our search.”35 We decided to make a performative and intuitive response to Jatkowa Street, in a two-part art- work we titled Ar pamenate į Meisels?36 (‘Do you remember the Meisels?’ in Lithuanian). For the first part, I dowsed with a crystal I had brought with me on the journey, stopping at each doorway on Jatkowa Street, asking it to indicate the threshold of our ancestors’ home (figure 11). When we had found what we thought was their doorway, I sprinkled salt we had carried with us from South Africa onto the grass (figure 12). This salting of the earth was both a ritual act and a form of memorial. It was the first act of marking the absences, which became increasingly familiar on our journey. At the thresholds along Jatkowa Street, archways lead off to courtyards. Under the arches, we had seen noticeboards layered with advertisements, which we couldn’t read. For the second part of the artwork, we created an advertisement asking: Do you remember the Meisels? If you have any information you can share with us, please contact us at: Beinart_beinart@hotmail.com 35 Katy and Rebecca Beinart, ‘De-Ciphering’, Origination (blog), 3 August 2012. 36 Katy and Rebecca Beinart, Ar pamenate į Meisels?, performance, photographic documentation, 27 July 2012.