On February 21, 2019, during a dinner at the La Boussole travelers club in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Dan Lande broke five gold-rimmed plates that had been with his family for more than 70 years.
When a plate slips and falls to the floor, we feel that everything happens in slow motion, leaving behind a trail of extreme fragility as we watch it immersed in guilty silence.
Then the turntable explodes, the noise returns, life slowly returns to cruising speed and it's as if nothing had happened.
That night, however, Lande (Buenos Aires, 39) could not stop thinking about that incident.
“I had dishonored the memory of my grandmother Jana.
It was a drama,” he recalls.
But he came up with an idea to redeem himself:
This is how La Ruta de las Bobes was born, a journey through seven countries (Belarus, Moldova, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Lithuania and Poland) that pays tribute to the men and women who emigrated from Eastern Europe to Argentina between the beginning and the middle of the century past to flee poverty and war.
Bobe
, in Yiddish, means grandmother.
And Dan is a biblical name that means justice.
In the image, a box with portraits of Dan Lande's grandparents: Jana and Joel.Mariana Eliano
The adventurous DNA of Dan Lande, also known as Travel Roller —because of his curly hair— on Twitter and Instagram, is more related to emotions than tourism.
In 2011 he left the office where he worked as a creative, began to travel and began to shape Mundo Sandía, a project with which, by portraying people who carry, bite or share watermelons, he demonstrates that a fruit is enough to empathize with people from all over the world. other cultures.
And in recent years, La Ruta de las Bobes has led him to discover stories that help to structure memory, his own and that of the collective.
A surname that his sister rescued from a book written by a relative allowed him to find the house where his paternal great-grandparents hid before the Nazis shot them.
And thanks to a crowdfunding campaign that is still open,
He has been able to trace other clues provided by descendants of other Eastern European emigrants from Argentina.
Sometimes, you just have an address or loose data to pull the thread.
In Romania, a boy named Dragos picked him up at a lost gas station and was his compass in a little town between mountains that was difficult to access.
In Warsaw, petrified, he attended a minute of silence, with sirens in the background, in memory of the city's uprising against the Nazis in 1944. And he has taken dozens of photos and videos to move the descendants of his grandfathers and grandmothers to the corners where these grew.
a boy named Dragos picked him up at a lost gas station and was his compass in a little town between mountains that is difficult to access.
In Warsaw, petrified, he attended a minute of silence, with sirens in the background, in memory of the city's uprising against the Nazis in 1944. And he has taken dozens of photos and videos to move the descendants of his grandfathers and grandmothers to the corners where these grew.
a boy named Dragos picked him up at a lost gas station and was his compass in a little town between mountains that is difficult to access.
In Warsaw, petrified, he attended a minute of silence, with sirens in the background, in memory of the city's uprising against the Nazis in 1944. And he has taken dozens of photos and videos to move the descendants of his grandfathers and grandmothers to the corners where these grew.
In the image, a plate that Lande left in the Polish village of his grandfather Srul.
The ritual every time he goes through a place is almost always the same: he gets a plate, paints it, breaks it (or breaks it and paints it) and places the pieces next to a tree or next to a grave, or improvises a kind of memorial. guided by instinct.
The fragments in honor of two grandparents, Mair and Sultana, for example, were placed in a park in Plovdiv, in southern Bulgaria, as a way of publicly claiming their identity in the country where they were born —in Argentina, this couple never wanted reveal their Jewish origin.
"I have broken dishes and I know how to use them," says this curious professional on social networks where he shares stories related to his project.
We should take the warning seriously: Dan Lande has managed to endow each of them with a unique beauty.
Exclusive content for subscribers
read without limits
subscribe
I'm already a subscriber
