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Dancing Stitches Socks
A number of the collections of writer, political activist, and ethnographer S. An-sky (1863– 1920), born Schloyme Sanvl Rappaport, are now in the State Ethnographic Museum at Saint Petersburg. He did collect clothing in his travels through Belarus and Ukraine, although this pair of socks, as well as the Flying Fish socks on page 34, were collected by a different ethnographer in a shtetl in Vitebsk province, the part of the Russian Pale of Settlement (now Belarus) where An-sky was born.
I still haven’t seen this pair of socks, mentioned in Tracing Ansky:
Jewish Collections from the State Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg; Catalog of the Exhibition in Joods Historish Museum, p.106 (Amsterdam, 1992):
“One pair of knitted red and white cotton woman’s socks (local name: zogny). The geometrical pattern is characteristic of Byelorussian-Lithuanian knitting. At the top there is an unidentified monogram (E3) and crown,” knit in Belarus in the first decades of the twentieth century.
This design is entirely mine, based on motifs from Belarusian Ornaments in Weaving and Embroidery (Беларускі арнамент: Ткацтва. Вышыўка by M. C. Кацар, Minsk, 2009) and inspired by my Belarusian friends Olga and Irena. Today in Belarus, this diamond motif is seen as the sun or fire and represents the ancient East-Slavic Sky God, Svarog. Variations may also represent the union of the sun and the earth, giving birth to life and the harvest.
I imagine my great-great grandmother might have made socks like this for her daughters.
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- First published: May 2014
- Page created: April 24, 2014
- Last updated: November 20, 2022 …
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