JAY— Jay resident Nathan Farb is the subject of director Nathanial Knop’s documentary, “Nathan Farb and the Cold War,” which screens 3:30 p.m. Sunday at the Palace Theater during the Lake Placid Film Festival.
The film traces Farb’s role as host for United States Information Agency cultural exchange exhibition, “Photography in the USA,” which took him to Siberia in 1977, and his return 40 years later, just before Russia invades Ukraine, to rephotograph ordinary Russians he first captured in Polaroids.
The layers of Farb’s life — Adirondacks, New York City and Novosibirsk — converge in the film during a time when the renowned photographer examines his personal odyssey and ancestral roots that propelled him to this point.
“My grandfather was a greenhorn and came from Romania in 1900,” Farb said.
“He married into a family that had lived in Arkansas for a generation. That’s the history of my family. Always some greenhorn comes and marries into the family. My own father, who committed suicide before I was born, was an immigrant, which I never knew about. My mother never told me that.”
His father’s mother was a Russian Jew.
“However, some grandmother previous to her was raped by a Visigoth, one of the Scandinavian people who swept across Europe,” he said.
“They swept across into England and were pushed out to the Aran Islands. Because I carry that gene with me that gives me what is called trigger finger. I know a lot of Irish people, but recently they say we call that an Irish gene. But the Russians and the Irish are very, very connected.”
Farb never understood his family history because his grandmother was an Orthodox Jew.
“If you committed suicide, they automatically wrote you off out of the family,” he said.
“You were considered dead, and they said Kaddish for you. At 83 years old, I’m finding out that I have a lot of cousins who I never knew about. All these cousins that I’m finding about now didn’t die when they were young, you know. I was never allowed to meet them. It’s really weird.”
Half of his cousins are Hispanic, and half of them are African American.
“Not my generation, but the next generation down,” he said.
“You saw that little film that I did on my family in Arkansas. I’m very typically American, just a complete mix of everything.”