Threads of Life

by Clare Hunter

  Protective hats for small children are evident in many different cultures: hats with tassels, triangular ear flaps, adorned with glinting shells, beads and mirrors. Some have long protective cloth shields that hang down from the nape, heavy with stitched decoration. Others have padded flowers over the fontanelle. In China they disguise their children as animals so they will be overlooked by natural and supernatural predators. Their children’s hats ape ferocious creatures like dragons, lions and bats. Tigers are a popular choice. Brightly stitched with popping eyes, flapping ears and wide snarls of appliquéd teeth, the sewn tiger headdress is often accompanied by other protective symbols to offer double immunity from harm: Double Tiger, Lotus Petal Tiger, Flower Tiger.

  Chinese children’s shoes are similarly animal inspired: little feet are disguised as pigs with bright pink snouts, or cats with threaded whiskers and pricked-up ears that tremble when children start to walk. In Chinese embroidery, symbolic sewn duality can be visual and aural. The peacock, representing love, and the cockerel, representing strength, also carry auditory alarms because of their loud cries. Homonyms are stitched to ward off evil and bring good fortune to the wearer: an embroidered tiger, lu, acts as a warning but is also the homonym for wealth; a bat, fu, is the homonym for good fortune.

  The tradition among German Ashkenazi Jews is to sew wimpels, or binders, made from the swaddling cloth a baby boy is wrapped in when he is circumcised. Washed and torn into four strips, the strips are sewn together to make a long ribbon of cotton and on this a mother or grandmother embroiders protection for the newborn. It starts with symbols – a lion for the tribe of Judah, a tree of life perhaps, a bird, a harp – which are followed by a blessing stitched in Hebrew: May God bless this young man (name of child), son of (name of father), born under a good constellation (zodiac sign), on the day of (date of birth). May God raise him to a life of Torah (Jewish faith), Chuppah (a good marriage), and good deeds. Amen.

  Wimpels are not showpieces of fine stitchery or public boasts of wealth and status for display in the synagogue, but family registers used at significant events in a boy’s life. They are tangible personal records of provenance and identity, sewn in images and text that document genealogy and community belonging. They provide a connection between generations, representing the bond between fathers and sons, sons and mothers and families and communities. Wimpels bind not just the heart of a child to his people, but also represent the offering of his soul to God as a covenant with the Almighty that promises lasting allegiance to a faith and a people. In some Ashkenazi communities, a wimpel follows a boy through life. Redolent with images pertinent to his hoped-for future, for example his zodiacal sign, a wedding canopy, the tree of life and knowledge, or a bridal couple, the wimple is presented to the synagogue on a boy’s first visit there when he is three years old, where it is used to bind the Torah scrolls, a ritualistic act of faith that ties the child symbolically to the service of and devotion to his God. It is unfurled again at his bar mitzvah and again on the Sabbath preceding his wedding when it is wound again around the Torah to confirm his faith. On his wedding day, the wimple is wrapped around his and his wife’s hands as a physical manifestation of their ties to each other, their community and Judaism.

  The process of making a wimpel is as important as the cloth itself. The rituals of purification, of piecing and re-joining, the embroidering of the litany of familial and religious lineage, transforms a simple cotton cloth into a sacred scroll. As sacred objects, wimples were often stored in a hidden place in the synagogue along with prayer books and other artefacts that bore the name of God. These stitched avowals of religious adherence were conserved as individual and collective vows of loyalty to the Jewish faith, community and culture. More than 500 wimpels dating back to the sixteenth century used to be stored in the synagogue in the city of Worms on the Upper Rhine in Germany. But at the start of the Holocaust, they were destroyed in just one night.

  On 9 November 1938, the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, began. German Nazi troops and their supporters unleashed their hatred of the Jews. Among the smashing of windows of Jewish shops, the burning of books by Jewish authors and the rounding up of Jewish civilians, 191 synagogues throughout Germany were set alight and 76 were left in ruins. One of those reduced to rubble was the synagogue in Worms, one of the most significant sites of the Jewish religion in central Europe, a place of Jewish pilgrimage for over 900 years.

  The Worms synagogue had been a symbol of survival in the narrative of persecution and exile that had haunted European Jews since the first crusade in 1096. It was built in 1034, when the city was home to the third largest Jewish population in the Holy Roman Empire. In Worms the Jewish merchants proved to be an asset to an empire set on not just commercial but also cultural progress, and their contribution to the city’s prosperity had been rewarded by royal protection. Jews were granted the right to trade, own property and have judicial independence. But such privileges were short-lived. The First Crusade brought prejudice and siege, and 800 Jews died as martyrs in Worms, a tragedy lamented in the Memorabuch, the Jewish Book of Memories. In 1348 the Black Plague, an epidemic that decimated populations across Europe and Asia, took hold. In Worms the Jews were blamed. They were driven out and their royal protection revoked. Rather than leave, 400 of them resisted exile and set themselves alight, burning themselves to death. The Memorabuch recorded their martyrdom, their names read aloud in the synagogue to those who returned once the crisis had passed. Worms’ Jewish cemetery, the oldest in Europe, became a place not just of burial but also of heritage.

  The synagogue was destroyed again during the Nine Years’ War (the 1688–99 war between France and a European coalition that included the Holy Roman Empire) but was restored, rebuilt from old stone, and continued to be a place of worship. The cycle of growth and reduction, exile and return of the Jewish community in Worms was repeated throughout the following centuries. Religious artefacts often had to be removed to safety and then re-installed, but they were always safeguarded. No matter that the martyrs’ tombs in the cemetery were recycled into new paving stones for city pathways, nor that the synagogue’s pulpit became a patchwork of stones from centuries of assault. The Jewish community in Worms prevailed.

  By the eighteenth century, Worms had become a place of Jewish pilgrimage. Travel writing promoted its worth as a harbinger of scholarly tracts, historical artefacts, architectural sites and ancient customs. With its continuum of Jewish tradition and identity, it gained iconographic status. Then, in 1938, came Kristallnacht, and with it the destruction of Worms’ synagogue and its 900 years of settled faith.

  There are black and white photographs of its torching: the roof caving into the synagogue’s interior, billows of smoke rising to a winter sky while its congregation watch as the flames lick around the architecture of their faith. And there are photographs of the synagogue the following day: interior shots showing its shell of ruination, a building crumpled in on itself, its floor littered with the debris of devotion – shards of smashed statues, ripped-up paintings, trampled cloth, the burnt remains of prayer books. Left smouldering among the wreckage were the wimpels, the 500 embroidered cloths that traced the ancestry of the Worms community family by family, birth by birth. This archive of human heritage, with its embroidered names and sewn blessings, was obliterated.

  There is no one left from the original Jewish population of Worms. Those who lived there in 1938 were exterminated in concentration camps or escaped elsewhere. The synagogue has been restored, despite a proposal that it should remain as a ruin as a symbol of a lost history and a destroyed community. While a new Jewish community has begun to emerge in Worms, the synagogue has become a heritage site with only the occasional service. It houses historical objects and sacred artefacts, many of which have been donated from elsewhere. Among them are the charred remains of a Jewish wimpel: the relics of family bonds with no one left to claim them. Worms synagogue has become a place of remembrance.

  In 2016 I went t
o visit the Jewish Museum in London. There, displayed among the grand trappings of Judaism, the giant, shining torahs with their velvet caskets, the silver-gleaming Hanukah lamps and Passover plates, was an embroidered wimpel made in Germany in 1794. Its narrow stretch of cotton was embroidered with motifs and Hebrew text: ‘Joseph – son of Joshua – may he live under a lucky star.’ Around and between the words was a medley of symbols: birds, snakes, a man and a woman, foliage and the sun. It seemed sewn by a hesitant hand, in rudimentary stitches: a labour of love more than expertise, but it spoke of maternal care: a desire to protect, a blessing of hope. As I left, I noticed another embroidery, a small sampler hanging on the gallery wall. Its maker had stitched her name, its dedication and a date: ‘In memory of Hyam Moses, who died March 4th, Mary Myams, July 1825.’ Its stitched text seemed prophetic:

  Time itself shall shortly cease, the sun look dim with age and nature sink in years, but thy soul shall still remain unhurt amidst the war of elements the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds.

  8

  Journey

  It is Christmas Eve in China, 1995. I am staying in the Hotel for Foreigners in Kaili, southwest China, a dismal place of dark corridors and dangling electrical flexes. I have strung up an arm-length of tinsel and hung a golden star at the window, much to the glee of passing children. Now all is quiet. In my small room, the naked lightbulb casts shadows over a pile of faded quilts folded high on two iron beds. Just as I am starting to feel homesick, the door opens to a sliver of light from the hall and in slides a woman, blurred in the low light, the hump of a bundle on her back. She is rounded in layers of indigo cloth, her hair tied up in a circle of woven red cloth, the traditional headdress of the Miao, one of China’s minority ethnic groups. Pressing her fingers to her lips, she lightly closes the door behind her. She looks around, points in silent delight at the tinsel and fingers the star. Then she swings her bundle onto an empty bed, sits down beside it and considers me with interest. I am sitting on the other bed, and look back at her with similar interest. We just sit for a while, studying each other.

  She leans over and touches my skirt. I have appliquéd Glasgow-style roses around the hem especially for this trip and she smooths her hand over the satin flowers and their wool background. She sits back and gives me a thumbs-up sign. I point towards her embroidered jacket and return her approval with my own thumbs up. The woman gets up and reaches for her bundle. I think she is about to leave, but instead she unties its knot and lets it spill out textiles, which she then lays out one by one onto the bed: a red woven sash, a bronzed jacket cradled for a second before being laid down, two baby carriers, their tying ribbons embroidered with tiny symbols, an apron thick in black stitchery. There is more. The bed becomes canopied in encrusted cloth. She beckons me over and we examine the textiles together, her touching and stroking, lifting up this corner and that, willing me to see an intricacy here, wanting me to notice a technique there. She picks up the jacket and tugs it over my shoulders, then raises her arms and starts to dance in slow motion, turning heavily. She pulls at my arm to join her and we twirl together in the low light of the room. I put my arm around her waist and dance her through a Gay Gordons, a popular Scottish country dance, in steps suppressed of sound. It is obviously illicit, this visitation, and she is my Santa Claus. I have become a child again. She criss-crosses a baby carrier across her chest, ties it at the back of her waist and mouths tiny baby cries. I laugh.

  Grinning, we sit down on the bed together. I pull out my folder of photographs of Scotland, of hills and lochs, ceilidhs and Highland shows and we sit close, turning the pages. She likes the men in kilts but puzzles over the landscapes. I realise that these scenes of Scotland are not so dissimilar to where we are now, in rural China: familiar misty hills fringed with pine trees. But in my photographs the hills are unterraced, the land empty of people, and these differences suggest an elsewhere which mystifies her. I show her photographs of the community banners I have helped to make: appliquéd collages of everyday life in Scotland, featuring dancing couples, fish and chips, grand sandstone buildings, children in play parks. She pours over these, her fingers tracing their contours in deep concentration, sighing and nodding, trying to read their meaning, searching for clues to the world I live in. I mime hand stitching, machine sewing, threading a needle. She mirrors each mime with one of her own. We both do these things. We both sew. We are like each other.

  Then she mimes putting something in her mouth. I offer her some chocolate, which she refuses. An orange is also declined.

  There is a moment of confusion, of disconnection, as I try to work out what she needs. She gives a tiny nod in the direction of the textiles on the bed and repeats the mime of eating. I pull out my wallet and offer her a note. She doesn’t take it, but gestures instead towards the bed. She wants me to choose something. With a play of impossible decision, I take up a small embroidered bag, nothing too flashy, not too expensive. I proffer the note again and this time she does take it. I start to take off the bronzed jacket but she pulls it back around me with a thumbs-up sign. I offer another note, which she waves away. I dig out a tea towel emblazoned with an entire Scottish pipe band resplendent in kilts and bearskin hats and give it to her. She is astonished. She scoops up a long red woven sash and wraps it around my waist, tying it carefully and smoothing down its fringes over my woollen skirt. She steps back and claps her hands, then gathers the embroideries back into their cloth and ties up her bundle. We smile at each other; we embrace in a hug that lasts long enough to tell of the frustration of friendship without words. I mime writing, and she shakes her head regretfully. We clasp hands, holding on tight. Then, with final smiles to each other, thumbs-up signs and jig-jigging with our arms raised, we separate, and she is gone, slipping away in the shaft of the hall light, leaving me alone.

  Some years earlier I had visited a textile exhibition in Glasgow and become transfixed by a rectangle of embroidered cloth no bigger than a placemat. On it was sewn a scene from a summer’s day, villagers out and about, relaxing by the river, some carrying babies on their backs and others laden with bundles. They were making their way to the cool grey drift of water, where more villagers were already swimming and floating in the heat of a sewn sun. But, when I moved in closer to examine its detail, I found soldiers crouching behind fronds of silk-sheened grass, their embroidered guns trained on the swimmers. This was no idyll of summertime frolics. This was a war documentary. It was a sewn snapshot of carnage: terrified villagers trying to escape, their possessions on their backs, children being hurried along, people plunging into waters already clogged with the floating dead.

  Among the splendour of the other larger textiles in the exhibition – the mosaic quilts crazed with pattern and the weavings of intense colour – this tiny stitched picture held its own power. It had the intensity of actual tragedy. Its label read: ‘The Crossing of the Mekong River. Hmong. Story Cloth’. A simple title for a complexity of the community dispersal which took place from 1975.

  The Hmong are an Asian ethnic group of undisputed cultural antiquity. They trace their ancestry back to the Miao (also known as the Meo or the Maew) said to be the first settlers of present day China. Centuries of ethnic division, warfare and enforced migration pushed them south and south again, until they inhabited the remote and barren uplands of South West China. Through time, the main group splintered and different clans were formed. One of these was the Hmong. They eventually settled in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Those in Laos found themselves caught in what became an increasingly complex cycle of political upheaval: Laos’ colonial French rule was lost, regained and lost again during and immediately after the Second World War. The Lao royal family, and the nationalists who allied themselves with the royal cause, sought democratic independence in the face of a communist threat. In 1955 America entered the Vietnam War to fight against a communist take-over of Indochina. It recruited Hmong men as its secret guerrilla force. By 1975, when the war ended, the Hmong faced reprisals for their
collaboration with America. Although statistics vary, it is reckoned that over 100,000 Hmong lost their lives during the Laotian Vietnam Wars, 30 percent fled the country and 120,000 became homeless. Many hundreds of thousands of them, displaced or under attack, fled their villages, hacking and marching through treacherous jungle to attempt the dangerous crossing of the Mekong River and reach safety. Many died on the way. Those who survived became refugees in Thailand before being re-settled there or in America, Australia, Canada, France and South America. The Hmong were fragmented across borders: a culture uprooted and a people dispossessed.

  The two decades of war destroyed family and community life. Those who escaped the terrors, now regrouped in Thailand’s refugee camps, had little in the way of resources to find an alternative way to survive. Hmong women, many of them widowed and in desperate need of income, were encouraged by aid workers to use their traditional craft of embroidery to make products that might find a market. This was not uncommon in refugee camps. Aid associations were linked to networks of international charities through which sales outlets for ethnic needlework made by refugees could be arranged. But the Hmong women did not replicate the traditional colourful patterns that adorned their own clothes. Instead they devised small sewn narratives in appliqué and embroidery, story cloths which told of their recent experiences: of stable rural life, village bombardment, jungle marches, the treacherous crossing of the Mekong River and their meagre existence in refugee camps. In time, they would also tell of exodus, repatriation, of finding their way in a different culture. What the women stitched were their stories of trauma and survival.