Twelfth Children’s Jewish Work Commune Re-Enactment - Cups for All (2008)

What is it like not to have enough food or bedding and only one set of clothes, to collect food rations each day from the local village supply depot, to have no running water or overhead lights, only four cups to go around and no parents on hand to tell you what to do? What was it like in the early days of the Russian Revolution really to believe - despite great deprivations - that a new “younger” world was possible, that Utopia was just around the corner and that you were part of making it happen?

Photograph by M. Otto

For one week in July 2008, at Camp Naivelt, under the guidance of Jumblies artists, 27 teens and children entered into a live-in scenario of a 1920’s Russian work commune for orphaned or dislocated children, in order to explore these questions. The story they inhabited came from the memoirs of Manya Lipshitz, an early Naivelt member, which includes excerpts from an over-eighty-year-old handwritten journal, chronicling the two-and-a-half years she spent in the Twelfth Children’s Work Commune before migrating to Canada. The commune re-enactment experience inspired the subsequent production of Oy di velt vet vern yinger - oh the world will grow younger.

Essay on the re-enacment by Shifra Cooper.

ViewThe Commune (Cups for All) Gallery.

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