ARCHIVO + ARTE / ART + ARCHIVE

Immigrant Archives: The Afterlives of Objects/ Nancy K. Miller

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VER COMPLETO: http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/es/e-misferica-91/miller
NANCY K. MILLER | THE GRADUATE CENTER, CUNY

My paternal grandparents left the town of Kishinev (now Chisinau, the capital of Moldova) for New York in 1906. They belonged to the massive wave of emigration from Eastern Europe that brought two million Jews to America between the 1880s and 1924. Although I had known my grandmother, who died when I was almost thirteen, she rarely spoke; I do not even remember her voice. I saw her as a dark, distant figure, a lonely widow in a family dominated by my mother’s boisterous relatives. Neither she nor my father ever shared any stories from their past, and I grew up in almost total ignorance of their history. But in the year 2000, through an unexpected phone call, I discovered that I had in my possession a cache of documents, objects and ephemera, that would allow me to penetrate the silence of these missing people—some of whom I could have known.

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