This summer we have worked on the already sixth edition of the Borderland Fairy Tales dedicated to the persons connected with Sejny. Over thirty participants of all ages worked during two intensive workshop cycles. The originator of the entire Collection, Bożena Szroeder, supervised the whole project. She invited for cooperation the directors: Daria Kopiec and Joanna Polak who have been associated with Sejny collections from the very beginning, whereas artistic consultants for the participants were two other artists: Ola Kotarska and Dominika Ludwig. The fruit of the work are six stop-motion animations which contributed to one film. All of them were made using the same techniques: cut-outs and brown ink, sepia-toned paintings.
Bożena Szroeder remembers that there were many outstanding figures worth mentioning. So the materials were divided into small chapter-tales. The collection begins with a witty animation dealing with the phenomenon of Sejny, the place where various languages resound and mix, nature enters urban space: doves take possession of the attic of the White Synagogue, and a stork visits the Basilica. Other parts feature the founders of the town, its poets, priests, outstanding visitors and former inhabitants. Among those there will be: Moris Rosenfeld, Juozas Laukaitis, Arnold Markowitz and Józef Piłsudski.
The originator of the program adds that the short form of the film could not contain an entire biography, so the creators made use of beautiful paintings, collected clippings/crumbs/snippets that became part of the narratives of the town. Like the dreams of the founder of Sejny, Jerzy Grodziński, who moved by them embarked on a journey to Königsberg, from which he brought the miraculous Figure of the Shrine Madonna. Local threads of the tales get intertwined with great history - as it happens in the biography of the Lithuanian priest, Rev. Juozas Laukaitis, a teacher at the Sejny seminary and founder of the Lithuanian printing house Šaltinis (Source), which during the partitions printed Lithuanian books that were later smuggled into Lithuania by book-carriers.
The tales of former neighbours bring back old Sejny. Both the Borderland Centre and the local community owe a lot to them. Bożena Szroeder reminds about the fact that it was thanks to Max Furmansky that the topic of Sejny Jews could be relived.
- When he arrived - she attests - and sang Kaddish in the cemetery, it seemed that with his one voice he was able to fill the whole of Sejny again with the Jewish content.
Such moving moments and testimonies were many in the history of Sejny. The latest collection includes these crumbs of history - they return with Sara Szner, the founder of the Israeli Kibbutz of Ghetto Fighters, author of the memoirs recently published by Borderland, and with Arnold Markowitz, a researcher of Jewish genealogies who once wrote about Sejny:
"When I was a little boy, my father did not tell me stories. I fell asleep listening to his tales of Sejny, the enchanted town of good people, surrounded by vast forests full of wild animals and with a church so wonderful that the big one in our neighbourhood in Brooklyn seemed to be merely its pale shadow.“
Working on the town narratives evoked also emotions among the workshop participants. The oldest of them, 75-year-old Mr. Mieczysław Mieczkowski, tells the story of the life of Moris Rosenfeld, a Jewish poet born in Sejny, one of the precursors of poetry written in Yiddish who emigrated to the United States, where he wrote poems about workers’ lives. Mieczysław, who himself worked for many years in a factory, during the workshops discovered his so far hidden artistic talents.
- There is a lot to do - he says. - We cut and paint a lot, you need to prepare as many as 24 frames per second. I have never had any contact with drawing before, but it turned out that I feel comfortable in large formats. They say that they won’t let me go away from here.
Text: Marta Kowerko-Urbańczyk
