Vu Bistu Geven?/Where Have You Been? is an adventure parable that asks urgent and timely questions about diasporic Jewish Montrealers’ relationships to land and colonialism.

Earlier iterations of the project include a film premiered at Klezkanada’s 2020 online summer retreat for which the team conducted interviews with Indigenous cultural leaders and historians, a local Québécois farmer, and staff from the beloved summer utopia, Camp B’Nai Brith. They pursued historical and archival research, and built relationships with Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) collaborators. Vu Bistu Geven? weaves together original music and songs in Yiddish, English, French, and Kanien’kehá:ka; characters penned by Yiddish Montreal writers; colourful, original narrative film sequences; and a collage of documentary and pop-culture material. With humour and loving curiosity, we walk the audience through realms of Jewish and Kanien’kehá:ka storytelling. Our playful aesthetic opens up to self-reflexive inquiry about Jewish participation in Canadian settler-colonialism and leaves us with the refrain: “Ikh hob nisht gevist, nor ze ikh itst! I didn’t know, but now I see”!.

In her online performance Jenny Romaine will present an excitingly abridged one-person version of the project with clips and live commentary.

Great Small Works

2:00 P.M.EDT
20:00 CEST

may

26

2020 artistic team
Geoff Berner, Sadie “Zeydi” Gold-Shapiro, Rachel Lemisch, Simone Lucas, Jenny Romaine, and Ira Temple, in collaboration with Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) artist-scholar-historians Trina Stacey, and Don Patrick Martin.

Content Providers
Toino Dumas
Trina Stacey
Camp Director, Mike Benchimol Lambersky
Eric Pouliot-Thisdale
Irving “Iossl” Massey
Camp B'nai Brith Nurse, Bonnie Rubenstein

2021 Klezkanada Workshop participants
Maia Brown, Hannah Rackow, Carmelle Wolfson, Simone Lucas, Court Surmanek, Jenny Romaine, Rosza Lang/Levitsky, Em Hirsch, Sadie “Zeydi” Gold-Shapiro, Deborah Rosenstein, Geoff Berner, Trina Stacey, Frank London , and the Klezmer Picnic band, Peter Horowitz, Ariel Shapiro, Noam Lerman, Judith Berkson, Dade Lemanski, and Rivka Augenfeld

Vu Bistu Geven team access statement:
We apologize that this event is not fully accessible. There will be no captions, ASL interpretation or audio description of this session. We plan to include these aspects in upcoming iterations of the work. We invite you to talk with us about this here.

Online talk

VU BISTU GEVEN?
/ WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

Jenny Romaine