Russian Face

"…they told you that if you wanted to be an artist you shouldn’t have children.

And now you tell me this, how am I supposed to feel?" My mother was born in Moscow to a family of a physics professor but chose to become a painter.

I grew up in Jerusalem, an immigrant’s daughter, in a home that doubled as a studio.

When I was a child I dreamt of working in a fully stocked supermarket where all the products were neatly organized.

I wished my mother worked in an office, and that we had no financial worries.

Is it possible to be simultaneously successful in art and in parenting? Two years ago I found myself pondering this very conundrum.

Looking through the camera lens I am looking for my mother within her paintings.

Picking mushrooms in a Russian forest, meetings with old friends, reading poetry and listening to the familiar sound of her mother tongue take me back home.