Delta-haggadah

Family memory often carries the traumas of several generations – imprints of a history that interrupt the continuity of common remembrance. Silence swallows up stories that are difficult to tell, but trauma and persecution might take on the form of a tale, a family myth, or an anecdote which make the process of handing down, of passing on, easier. Silence, unfinished sentences, legends, a few objects, photos – this is what the one who remembers receives.

The region of the Baragan, the site of a Romanian penitentiary colony, which we are trying to recall together with the main characters of this book and exhibition, was a real cultural and social patchwork, where different groups persecuted for ethnic, political and economic reasons were forced to meet and live together.

Delta-haggadah is a unique venture. It’s a Gulag-narrative, fiction, factual literature, a picture book, and an art book. Péter Szabó’s drawings “break through” and put an end to categories such as adult versus children, reality versus fiction, photography versus drawing. The form becomes more interesting as Teri Szucs’s composed text-factures dissolve into each other; as far as the text is concerned, their polyphony tip the scales in drama’s favour in a very interesting way.