Ισνάφι

I first came across Rae Dalven without even knowing it, at the opening of one of my art school graduation exhibitions in Berlin, 2012, when I read Constantine Cavafy’s “Ithaka,” a poem about missing a home one could never reach. This poem was translated by Rae Dalven into English in the late 1950s and is one of the reasons why she is still known in some circles today.

A few years later, in 2018, I, like Cavafy’s Odysseus, reached an old-new discovered home when I first visited Ioannina while researching an ongoing art project about the Romaniote community of Ioannina. The city of Ioannina, or, as some write, Janina, was home to the largest Romaniote community in the world prior to the Shoah, and among its residents was my mother’s family, the Levis. Re-discovering this place, I felt a deep connection to it, and to my family who had lived there: it gave me an explanation for the many questions I had about my identity, my sense of belonging. […]