5 minute read
the certificaat
Yvonne Singer
A red line. I stare at the map. It looks so simple; a flat outline of water and land, fragments of western Europe, Africa, North America in light beige and shapes of blue grey waters in between designating the Atlantic ocean, the Mediterranean and the Great Lakes. Words are grey blue like the water. Key ports are in black, with touches of orange for the Orange Line. There are no co-ordinates the ship can use to navigate on this certificaat. I guess this is not its purpose.
Using google translate’s awkward translation, I translate the document to discover that Neptune is taking me across the ocean.
It has pleased Neptune, God of the Sea, Ruler of the Oceans, etc.etc, to issue this certificate to Yvonne M.E. Vandor (carefully handwritten) on the occasion of crossing the North Atlantic from Rotterdam to Montreal in the month of July 1949 with the m.s. Prince Johann William Friso. It has further pleased Neptune, after meeting with his counselors, to award the sea-fastness rating the figure 8. Thus done in the year of our honor, 1949, July, at Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Neptune and his Counselors
Below are three different indecipherable signatures with no titles. Neptune’s counselors, perhaps?
On the back in blue: a list. Degrees of Seamanship
According to this chart, Neptune is awarding me an ‘8 = good sailor’. What an honour to be personally escorted by Neptune and to be awarded an 8 for being a ‘good sailor’. How do I thank you Neptune? Mr. Neptune or is it Sir or maybe King Neptune. What is the proper way to address a god? This is like getting a letter from Santa.
_______________________
I was five years old when we arrived to Montreal in 1949. A memento of the trip, the certificate, tells us that the ship was called the Prins Johann Willem Frisco, part of the Orange Line. What it does not tell us is that the ship was a freighter with only 12 passengers and my family were four of the 12 passengers. It also doesn’t tell us that we were emigrating to Canada, leaving post-Holocaust, war-torn Budapest, Hungary, our Jewish identity, our past. I have no memory of the trip or the arrival and I did not know about my Jewish identity for many years. But I have this certificaat my mother kept and gave to me. For years, it languished in a filing cabinet, a curiosity that I just filed. By the time I re-discovered it about two years ago, my mother had died.
There is no one to ask…no one left of the handful of family and relatives to ask… how/why did you choose to travel on a freighter? Why that freighter? Why depart from Rotterdam? Who were the other passengers? Who took the photo of our family at the railing as the ship left port? How much luggage did you have? How much money did you have? What did you bring with you besides clothes for you and the two young children? How was the voyage ? Did you get seasick? Was there a doctor on board? What did you eat? Where did you eat? What was the food? So many questions…so few answers.
I look at the map and I see my name and I feel very distant from it…like it is someone else’s story.
I search the internet and to my surprise I find a photo of the ship, MS. Prince Johann William Friso from the Orange Line. It is not a very large ship as freighters or oceanliners go. The photo seems to make it more real to me than the certificaat. It is evidence the certificaat belongs to the ship.
I remember my first English words, standing on the small balcony of our second floor duplex, I call to the girl I see next door. 'What is your name?'
Walking to school; ‘step on a crack, break your mother’s back’. They call me names and taunt me by insisting I stepped on a crack and then running away.
What did that certificaat bring about? That fateful trip, the choices made.
Fresh start, new life, new country, new language, new identity…who will know anyway; a decision is made, a choice is made. A choice that will haunt them and boomerang….I am their nemesis. In my innocence I converted to Judaism to marry my Jewish husband, then discover I am Jewish by birth, my rightful birthright as established through my Jewish parents and grandparents. I find proof in the Budapest synagogue records…but this fact is never acknowledged. I am trying to map my past, to navigate my history. What are my co-ordinates? How do I navigate? Who is my guide and protector?
There are so many stories; people fleeing, escaping, hoping, fearing, searching.
Yvonne Singer, born in Budapest, Hungary, is interested in everyday language and the intersection of public and private histories. Her installations employ multi-media techniques, often with cryptic texts using everyday language to articulate issues of disjuncture and perception.
