The Rug: 1920s Ukraine
This handcrafted textile rug was made by the sister of my great-grandmother in the 1920s, at the beginning of the Soviet era. It features young pioneers marching with red flags and rifles — a naïve, celebratory vision of a new ideological future. Woven with care and pride, it reflects the optimism of its maker at a time of radical political transformation.
Yet for me, the rug has become a fragment of a more complicated inheritance. As I went through multiple migrations — from Ukraine to Israel — this object travelled with me, carrying the weight of history and ideology stitched into its pattern. Once a symbol of hopeful belonging, it now resonates as a layered emblem of displacement, reorientation, and the silent influence of the past. It reminds me how domestic objects not only survive regimes but absorb them — becoming carriers of cultural identity that continue to shape us long after we’ve crossed borders.
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Vera Gailis