Larry Schwartz
ALOMA Treister was seven when she sat in the back seat of a black sedan that took her family from home in Baghdad in the early 1950s to the Iranian border.
She was with her parents and brother, Menashe, among thousands leaving the world’s oldest Jewish community outside Israel. A driver bribed border officials on their behalf before ferrying them on through the city of Hamadan, in western Iran, to relatives in the capital, Tehran.
They had been anxious. “The Iranian passport that we purchased had another child, a son on it,” says the Melbourne artist who has titled her latest exhibition The Art of Memory. “The child of a friend of ours was going to come with us. But last minute he opted out. So my father grew a beard and my mother wore black and we killed him off. We said he died. So we were all in mourning. That’s why there were four and not five of us.”
Her artwork, now on display at a Flinders Lane gallery, reflects the strong influence of Islamic culture. Muslims and Jews were both averse to figurative representation, she notes, and it was “very easy then to adopt this artwork as our own”.
The synagogues in Baghdad and Tehran of her childhood were decorated with mosaic mirror tiles in Islamic patterns. Silk carpets from Meshed, in north-eastern Iran, were displayed on lounge room walls.
“The focus of my art, then,” Treister has written, “was to re-establish my Jewish relationship to Islamic culture, and allow myself to use their symbols, both culturally and aesthetically, as my own.”
She has incorporated old photographs of Iraqi Jews from magazines or relatives and friends in intricately patterned, exquisite work. “This one behind me here is a photograph of a dear friend’s grandparents’ wedding,” she says of the image of a couple, the groom sporting a cone-shaped red fez of a kind she recalls her paternal grandfather wore the day she saw him sitting in bed, ill.
“So I scanned these and manipulated them on the computer and then I started collaging them with Middle Eastern patterns which I cut, pasted or painted on top of the images of the photographs. Sort of a layering. Almost like the history itself of so many generations of Iraqi Jews.”
Her maiden name is Nagar. Her father had imported precious stones from Europe. They were among the last in a once-vigorous Jewish community dating back to the 6th century BC exile from Jerusalem by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar.
She says there were “80,000 to 100,0000 (Iraqi) Jews in the 1890s and 1900s”.
Now 61, she grew up at a time of fierce antagonism.
“During World War II, Iraq sided with the Nazis and life became increasingly intolerable for the Jews,” says Treister.
“At one stage, there was a rampage where 200 Jewish people were killed and after that it got to be quite unsafe.”
Most of about 6000 left after the Baath Party publicly hanged 11 Jews in 1969 on false spying charges.
“When the Americans went into Iraq a few years ago they found a few families . . . people who were even scared to admit that they were Jews.”
According to a 2003 report, six went to Israel and just 28 remained.
“People ask me, ‘What’s your homeland?’ ” Treister says. “I have no homeland. My culture has gone. It’s disappeared.”
She has lived in Israel, Switzerland and London where she met her cardiologist husband, Bernard, a New Zealander with whom she came here in 1973. They have a son, Bijan, working in information technology in New York and an interior designer daughter, Nadine, who lives here.
She says Jews lived well in Iran during the Shah’s rule. Her mother was with her in Melbourne during the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and remained.
From a Sephardic (Eastern) background, Treister found little in common with Australia’s mostly Ashkenazi (European) Jewish community.
“Ninety-nine per cent of the Jews in Australia are European,” Treiser says.
“So not only did I come here to a totally foreign land, but the Jews were not exactly of my background.
“In my own imagination, I’ve got my own sort of culture and home,” she says.
The Art of Memory is at Span Galleries, 45 Flinders Lane, until April 22.
Larry Schwartz Writer 