SIX THOUSAND YEARS OF EVICTIONS

Preface for Curatorial Context – A Section of The Madman Chronicles

As a Jew, I carry generational trauma rooted in six thousand years of violent racism, forced evictions, and systemic erasure. My people have been driven from homeland after homeland—from Babylon to Rome to Spain to Russia to America. The world forgets this history even as it continues.

In an era where the art world has rightly turned attention toward the African and Asian diasporas, the Jewish diaspora is often rendered invisible, assumed assimilated, or dismissed altogether. But the trauma remains—intimate, cellular, and inherited.

These stories are not abstractions. They are lived memory. My great-grandmother survived because, as a beloved tavern keeper, her Christian regulars would hide her every time the Cossacks swept through Kishinev murdering all the Jews. My family name was rewritten by strangers at Ellis Island. My father never bought anything German, ever. I was told who we were. My father was a bitter man—his last name was originally Katz; mine is Herbert.

This section of The Madman Chronicles does not seek sympathy. It offers truth. It is a reclamation. A reckoning. A refusal to forget.