21 October 2017. I’m searching for more information on Sorel and I find a detailed article written by a German historian published on the website of the American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies. In the footnotes I stumble upon the name of my deceased friend Roman Arndt. The text cites an article by him titled “Ruth Abramowitsch Sorel,” published in a German dance magazine in 1998. I stare at my computer screen for an indefinite period of time and then the memory slowly trickles in:
A few months before Roman’s death we had talked on the phone and he had asked me what I was working on. I told him about my reconstruction of early dances by the choreographer Jean Weidt – another figure who today only appears in the margins of dance history. In return, Roman mentioned his research on a German dancer who had emigrated to Warsaw and had been very successful there at the time, but till now had hardly been received in dance history. He had been to the archives in Cologne and Warsaw and was planning to use his contacts in Poland and Germany to search out contemporary witnesses.
So I had already known about Sorel
and I had already forgotten about her.