A collection of short stories about childhood, war, loss, and the passage of time.
This project endeavours to investigate my personal family history through publication design that draws on warmth, language, and memory. Mainly, it is an exploration of storytelling through translation and re-interpretation.
My grandfather, Alex, was born a Jew in Warsaw in 1936. In a collection of 13 short stories, he wrote about his childhood, his family, and the state of the world for the Jewish People during the Holocaust. I collated these moving, funny, honest stories into a larger-than-life publication that contrasts the temporariness of my grandfather’s childhood.
The true translation of the Spanish title Cuando Tenía Tus Años is ‘when I was your age’. I was interested in how layers of meaning can tell new stories, and I used images from an extensive family photo archive to explore this. Using my own spin on photomontage, I ‘played God’ by rearranging certain photographs to combine my grandfather’s life with my own, and convey the past, present, and future.
By pursuing this project, I developed an understanding of my personal family history and the broader experience of the Jewish People through a new lens: resilience in the face of grief.
