The last supper
It’s our final weekend in South Africa and we are hosting an event at Malmesbury Museum: the old Jewish Synagogue where our family used to worship. We spend Saturday evening preparing borscht and black bread for the performance. Dad is in Cape Town for a few days and we keep him busy chopping vegetables and making almond biscuits.
A group made up of family, members of the Museum’s management committee, and artists from Greatmore studios join us for the event. We set up a dinner table at the far end of the museum, where a board displays information about the Beinart family and the rest of Malmesbury’s once-flourishing Jewish community. There is something very special about being able to perform an event in this space: it is a site that is so strongly connected to the stories we have been hunting, a space at once familiar and strange to us.
Katy and I read texts taken from our letters to each other. The words feel particularly resonant in this place, and frame the conversations that follow as we share borscht and black bread with our guests. The simple act of eating together and asking each person to propose a toast to one of their ancestors forms a ritual in which significant fragments are shared. It is a moving and meaningful way to close our time here.
http://www.malmesburytourism.co.za/malmesbury-hist…
