Rayanne Tabet and Tel Halaf

Nov 25 2019 18:03

Faik Borkhoche was a civil servant in the French Lebanon-Syrian mandate, a translator of documents from Arabic into French. He was sent as Secretary to Baron Max von Oppenheim, a German banker and amateur archaeologist who spent considerable time at Tel Halaf on the Syria-Turkey border and was therefore suspected of drawing up maps of the region for military purposes, as many German intelligence agents operated as archaeologists and ethnologists.

Faik Borkhoche’s great-grandson Rayyane Tabet is a Lebanese artist who has followed his great-grandfather’s trail. Four artifacts in his maternal grandparent’s Beirut apartment were doubled in the course of his investigation: a photographic portrait of the Baron, on the back of which Faik wrote an arabic proverb: an orphan is not one without a father, an orphan is one without manners; a bright yellow copy of Der Tell Halaf, the Baron’s popular book on his work; a New Year’s greeting from the Baron to Faik on the back of a postcard issued by the Tell Halaf museum he founded in Berlin; and a photograph of Faik holding up a dead snake, which Faik sent as a postcard to his wife, writing, my dear Victoria I kiss you and the the children (names them, they have french names too) … I caught a snake under a Beduin’s tent… I miss you and the kids, love, yours, Faik.

Rayyane Tabet found another copy of the Baron’s portrait in the German Federal Archives, another copy of the Baron’s book withdrawn from the Metropolitan Museum Library, of the Museum postcard on which the Baron had typed his New Year’s greeting in a collection of papers bought by the Met from Ernst Herzfeld, a senior scholar departing the Princeton IAS, and of the photograph of his great-grandfather in the National Geographic archives for an unpublished article solicited from the Baron.

When the Met Bulletin arrived in the mail I intended to add it to the pile of unread Bulletins and New Yorker magazines sitting on the coffee table. This table comes from my maternal grandmother’s apartment. It is a low wooden table with a glass top protecting an Indian scarf or tapestry of elephants and peacocks done in sequins. Disconnected from my grandparents and self-alienated from my parents, I will never know the full story; where and when it was acquired, who commissioned the table built around it and why (that much I vaguely remember my mother mentioning.)

I was attracted by the cover showing a youngish dolicephalic man with a nice mustache holding up a snake; his clothes were “1930s adventurer”; beside him stood another similar man but sashed and kafiyyaed; what seems to be the hilt of a dagger protrudes from the sash. I was looking at a TinTin illustration and thought, how quaint. But I began to wonder who the man was - the person. So I decided to read the story.

I flipped through the magazine - I was prepared to dismiss it because I do not think much of modern artists and their self-conscious rhetoric: the oppressive colonializers the diachronic nature of artifacts and so on. But I was caught by the lovely arabic handwriting on the backs of the photograph and the postcard; and so the grandparents in their apartment and the quaint man holding the snake suddenly became literate and interesting to me. They were educated. They had thoughts and feelings and could express them. Then the letter to his beloved Victoria and their kids. Now I was committed to his story.

This is unlike me. I’m usually drawn in by colder intellectual abstraction, or by the yellow and sepia of a dry historical account, not by personal accounts. I am pleased.