Aloma Treister doesn’t remember much of her childhood. She recalls being taught Arabic at school and the fact that her family’s social life revolved around their immediate family.
“Our closest friends were our cousins,” she told The Australian Jewish News. It was how many Jewish families in the Middle East grew up – all related to each other and all friends. One big community.
Treister was born in Baghdad and explains that she was named after the film Aloma of the South. Her mother was pregnant when she saw it and immediately decided that if she had a girl, she would name her Aloma.
Treister explained that her family saw the writing on the wall before the Farhud – the outbreak of mob violence against the Jews in 1941, often described as a turning point for the history of Jews in Iraq. While some of her extended family fled Iraq for Israel, her family stayed behind.
“Although many Iraqi Jews began emigrating to Israel, my father decided not to because by that stage he was over fifty and not easily employed,” Treister explained. “We headed to Iran because my father had cousins there and obtained Iranian passports, perhaps forged.
There were four of us: my mother, my father, my brother and I. But the passports were for two boys and a girl. I remember my father and my mother wearing black, pretending their ‘third’ child had died and they were in mourning.”
After a few months, Treister, her brother and her mother headed to Israel where she embraced her artistic side.
“I’ve always loved art and painted from an early age. When I lived in Israel, I worked as a graphic designer at the television station,” she said.
“Visual art, like writing, is a lonely profession. You must be totally dedicated. It can be very frustrating and exasperating, but also very rewarding. You don’t become an artist thinking that it will be financially rewarding, making art is the reward.”
When she did her master’s degree in art, Treister spoke about how her Iraqi heritage influenced her art, particularly Islamic art.
“Since both religions are averse to figurative representation, Islamic art was easily adopted and became part of Jewish art and life,” she explained, saying a ketubah could easily be mistaken for a Persian miniature, and in the Middle East, synagogues were intricately decorated with mosaic mirror tiles in recognisable Islamic patterns.
Throughout the years she went back and forth between Israel and Iran, with a stint also in England, where she met her husband.
He was only in the UK for three weeks but during his time there they became good friends, and when he went to Iran, Treister gave him her family’s address.
“They invited him for dinner, and he met not only with my family but also with Iraqi Jews who had just escaped Baghdad. This contact opened his eyes and was his first contact with Sephardi Jews,” she wrote.
Eventually, the pair moved to Australia, where Treister said her art moved through several different stages.
“The subject of my master’s thesis was ‘Jewish Heritage, Islamic culture’,” she explained.
“Quite a number of my art works were based on old Jewish/Iraqi photographs taken from a magazine called The Scribe, a Jewish Iraqi magazine which was published in London, and Islamic designs.
I borrowed the images that were meaningful to me. I worked on them, changed them, and added to them, until they became meaningful to me.”
Islamic design is central to a lot of Treister’s art
“We grew up with Islamic design all around us. Middle East Jews appropriated these elements of design because they were not representational, and could be used in synagogues and in the homes,” she said.
“The Jews who came from Europe may have had Chagall paintings hanging on their walls; we hung carpets.”
The artist has had several exhibitions in Melbourne, interstate and overseas, and has been awarded prizes and grants for her works.
She also illustrated primary readers for Beth Rivkah Ladies College in Melbourne and recently published and illustrated a children’s book called A Home for Zac. It’s based on a story her son wrote when he was younger.
While she calls Australia home, she said she understands that her identity is fluid, often influenced by her connection to Iraq, Iran and Islamic culture.
As she wrote in her master’s thesis, “In the process of relocation, I rethink my connection to my roots.
The culture I belonged to is no longer a physical reality; it is not exclusive to a particular place but it is alive in my consciousness; it exists in my imagination, in my desires. It is formed out of abstraction and fantasies.
In relocating I disconnect my culture from its past roots, and re-figure it to satisfy my need within this culture … My original culture has not declined, but has reinvented and reconfigured itself in my imagination and through my art work. A new form of cultural expression has emerged.”
Indeed, it’s very much reflected in her beautiful and unique art.
.jpg)
0 Comments