Distant Trains: A Small House in Kfar Saba, Savta Sarah
A tribute to my Savta (Grandmother) Sarah, with my cousin Ayelet, with whom I had little direct contact but about whom I heard a lot of stories. I’m using the art and animations to recreate – and recover – my family history.
A Small House in Kfar Saba, Introduction
I started working on the Distant Train project at the end of 2022 as a way of looking into the mysteries of my father’s family. Then, with the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 and the ensuing war, and the rise in antisemitism, I felt the need to tell part of my mother’s story.
They fled antisemitism in Poland in 1932 or 33 and migrated to Palestine in the hope of a better life and the dream of forming the State of Israel which would give them that dream.
The region is probably the most complicated in the world with, not two or three or four “sides”, but many groupings, divisions, attitudes and interests in Israel, Palestine and the surrounding region, but is usually represented in a simplistic, binary way that only polarises and deepens divisions.
This is just the introduction to what will be an approximatly 30 minute documentary telling my family’s story and the formation of Israel in the hope of creating a greater understanding and the possibility of dialogue.
The 28 minute video of The Legend of My Uncle Arthur is now complete and up on Vimeo. Still a few tweaks to do, maybe a bit more artwork and animations, but the narrative is done. I’ll now be looking to screen it in various cities.
This is the 2 1/2 minute trailer:
Trailer for The Legend of My Uncle Arthur, which is part of Distant Trains, a series of documentaries unraveling the history and mysteries of my family. The intro video giving an outline to my paternal family’s story can be seen here https://vimeo.com/1002881910
Distant Trains – Introduction from Zev Robinson.
Around the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022, I suddenly found myself watching documentaries and fiction films about the Holocaust, one after another, for reasons that I’m couldn’t fathom. Then, I started a series of drawings based on the documentaries, again for reasons I couldn’t fathom.
That led me, somehow, to look into my own family history which has gone through pogroms, the Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II and the formation of Israel, not to mention thousands of miles of train (and ship) travel, and which in turn caused me to start an ongoing documentary project.
I’m currently working on other videos looking in more depth at each of the main protagonists.
