Talking Location With author Yaniv Iczkovits – BELARUS

16th March 2020

#TalkingLocationWith… with Yaniv Iczkovits, author of The Slaughterman’s Daughter (translated by Orr Scharf)

When I wrote The Slaughterman’s Daughter I didn’t want to visit Belarus. I wanted to sketch these lost worlds from my imagination and support the story with thorough historical research. I thought that if I travelled there, I would find a totally different world with no Jews, no Shtetls, just a standard Eastern European country with one Jewish museum and a desolate synagogue.

One month before the book was supposed to be printed in Israel, I decided I needed to do some fact-checking. So I travelled to Belarus and hired a guide by the name of Andrei Burdenkov. I told him that I wanted to follow the journey of the protagonists of the book, Fanny and Zizek, starting in Motal and ending the trip in Minsk.

I didn’t have high expectations for the journey. I knew that the world today is entirely different from what it was. But then, as we arrived to Motal, I asked Andrei if we could see the Yaselda river, and as we approached the riverbank I saw this:

I was amazed to see this boat because it perfectly matched my vision of Zizek’s boat. It was in this moment that I started to realise that maybe the old world and our world are not so very different. It occurred to me that maybe I was not just following the protagonists of my book, I might actually meet them. Maybe Zizek was still there, waiting for the people of Motal to cross the river on his boat. Maybe there would be a RUM barrel hidden somewhere. Who knows?

I asked Andrei if I could speak with the people of Motal. We went to the supermarket and met some nice ladies:

They were very generous and invited us to their houses. I asked them what they remembered of Jewish life in Motal, but they only told me about their memories from the terrible events of WWII. Andrei explained that I didn’t want to hear about the Holocaust, but rather about Jewish life in Motal before the war. They were very surprised. They were used to people coming from Israel to learn about the Holocaust, but they were not used to people asking them about day to day life before the war. But once they understood my motives, they became extremely jolly. They told me about Jewish weddings, and about the Jewish folk musicians who used to play even at Christian weddings. They told me about the Rabbi who was very wise and how even the Christians consulted with him (which, of course, the priest didn’t like). And then, after we said goodbye, one of the women approached me and said sadly: “You know, since the Jews left, this place is almost dead.”

I then went to see the house of Haim Weizman (the first Israeli president). Weizman grew up in Motal, but not much is left to see of his house. A nice lady next door had the key to his house, and she let us in:  

We found some pictures, books and leaflets, but it was clear that this place was more of a museum than a house. The cemetery was also abandoned, and as you can see behind us, not much is left of the stones:

But when we left Motal for Baranavichy, I looked at the sign and I knew that people may remember certain things and forget others. Burial places might be well kept or abandoned. Houses might be occupied by new people or become museums. But this boat, Zizek’s boat, made it clear to me that places have their own memories. And even though today there are no Jewish people living in Motal, they are still present.

Thank you so much to Yaniv for sharing insights into such an interesting part of the world.

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