Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue 21. L'Affiche contemporaine : Discours, supports, stratégies |
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They Called Me Mayer July. Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust |
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Author:
Kris van Heuckelom Kirshenblatt, Mayer & Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July. Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust |
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During the past few decades, extensive scholarly and archival research has provided a wide range of documentation on the everyday life of Polish Jewry in the interwar period. It has amounted to the emergence of large public collections (such as the YIVO archives in New York) which not only contain thousands of private and organizational papers and records, but also preserve a large amount of film, photographs, and sound recordings related to the Jewish population of interwar Poland. Yet, while most of these materials originate from the pre-Holocaust period, there are also significant Jewish testimonies and artifacts which have been created post factum , in a justifiable attempt to envision a world that suddenly had ceased to exist. Such is the case with the artistic output of the Poland-born Jewish-Canadian painter Mayer Kirshenblatt.
Kirshenblatt was born during World War I from a Jewish middle class family and grew up in Opatów, a small town in the Polish province. At the time, Opatów (or Apt, as it used to be called in Yiddish) was known for its large Jewish population, which outnumbered the local Polish community. Jewish immigrants settled in the town of Opatów as early as the 16 th century, turning it over the centuries into an important rabbinic town and a center of Hasidism. In the interwar period, part of the Jewish population left Opatów and moved to Canada , the US or the Near East. Most of those who remained in Poland perished during the Holocaust. Mayer Kirshenblatt's fate was decided when his father, after immigrating to Toronto in the late 1920s, managed to reunite his family on Canadian soil in 1934. Kirshenblatt started a new life across the ocean, raising a family of his own and enjoying a long career as a specialist in house decoration. His prewar youth in Opatów would come to the surface again in the 1960s, when his daughter Barbara (at the time a folklore and anthropology student) started asking questions about traditions and customs common among East European Jewry. What began as a form of storytelling about interwar Apt, gained another dimension a couple of years after Kirshenblatt's retirement, when he took up painting and decided to put on canvas scenes from his Polish childhood and youth. So, after telling his daughter over the years what things were like in Apt, he decided to show her (and the world) how things looked like. At the age of 73, the former house painter Kirshenblatt turned himself into a hometown painter.
Kirshenblatt's Opatów paintings have been recently collected in a massive volume which also serves as the catalogue of an exhibition held in Los Angeles in 2007 (and to be shown in Amsterdam in 2008). Its main title, "They called me Mayer July", refers to the Yiddish nickname Kirshenblatt was given during his Opatów years. Because of the youngster's easily excitable character, people from his hometown used to call him "Mayer tamez" (literally "Mayer July", metaphorically "Crazy Mayer"). This "Mayer tamez" was a rebellious and hyperactive child who did not like school and was always on the go, avidly observing life in and around Opatów. It is precisely this attentiveness of an outdoor kid to the outside world which lies at the heart of Kirshenblatt's "painted memories" of his Polish childhood. The subtitle of the volume is, however, somewhat misleading since the book contains not only images, but also a large amount of text. Whereas the paintings are Kirshenblatt's own work, the accompanying text is the result of the decades-long collaboration and discussions between the artist and his daughter Barbara (currently a Performance Studies Professor at New York University), who compiled the manuscript from their conversations and Kirshenblatt's own writings. As a consequence, the text combines a vivid (colloquial) tone with a more elaborated written style.
As a self-educated painter, Kirshenblatt is not particularly concerned with technique or style. This results in a somewhat naive and rudimentary painting style, permeated with earth colors, which aptly coincides with the childish perspective the artist seems to adopt. The paintings draw their inspiration mainly from Kirshenblatt's childhood memories (and to a lesser extent from what he heard from friends and relatives or read in chronicles and memorial books) and usually evoke this world through the prism of childish perception (which means, among other things, that adult persons, rooms, buildings etc. tend to take on huge proportions). Interestingly, a large part of the paintings carry the date " 1934" , regardless of the exact chronology of the depicted scenes, as if it were to suggest that the Apt scenes form a closed universe of cyclic events which suddenly stood still at the moment when Kirshenblatt left Poland and immigrated to Canada. Whenever Kirshenblatt himself appears on the paintings, he is depicted in the "static" form of a little school boy wearing a blue hat and uniform.
The volume opens with a self-drawn map of interwar Opatów and is divided into four sections. The first part, "My Town", reconstructs the topography of interwar Apt and provides town panoramas, depictions of various locations and buildings, (Jewish and non-Jewish) professions and occupations, commerce and entertainment on the street, crime and prostitution,... Moreover, it offers a detailed insight into the infrastructure of Jewish religious life in interwar Apt. In section II, Kirshenblatt moves to the private sphere and focuses on his ancestry and family, on both the paternal and maternal sides. This part contains, among other things, descriptions and depictions of several relatives, family customs, traditions and rites (observed at various stages from birth to death), and various ordinary and extraordinary aspects of family life (e.g., exorcism). Kirshenblatt also makes a small excursion into the fate of his relatives during the Second World War and depicts the atrocities of the Nazi regime (e.g., the execution of both his grand-mothers). Section III ("My youth") has a more personal dimension and exposes, both in image and in text, several aspects of Kirshenblatt's youth in Opatów: the types of schools he attended, some of the school excursions he went on, the various ways he and his friends used to spend free time, his involvement in Zionist organizations,... In this chapter, Kirshenblatt also touches upon topics such as local weather conditions, politics, and the military. Finally, in section IV, which is interestingly entitled "My future", Kirshenblatt concentrates on his departure from Poland and the family's journey to Canada , through Warsaw , Hamburg and the oceanic waters. Once again, the year 1934 reveals itself as a decisive and turning moment in Kirshenblatt's biography, dividing his Opatów years ("youth") from everything that came after (the "future"). At the same time, the artist draws attention to the fact that there was no future for him in Poland due to a lack of equal opportunities: he considered himself a Pole (albeit of Jewish descent), whereas the Polish government tended to treat people like him as mere Jews (albeit with Polish citizenship).
Kirshenblatt's painted and written memories of his Polish childhood deserve attention for several reasons. First of all, the book provides a wide range of first-hand information and practical knowledge on daily life in a small Jewish-Polish community during the interwar period. The artist's eager attempt to cover all possible aspects of life in Opatów is exemplified by the fact that he also included a series of instructables which describe and depict how daily-life products were made in those days (e.g., "How to make a tin whistle"). This accumulation of details about Apt is presented in an anecdotal and episodic manner and is permeated with a subtle sense of humor. Certainly, Kirshenblatt never conceals that daily life was hard and demanding in those days. Yet, the artist's main concern is to show that pre-Holocaust Apt was a world in its own right, inhabited by ordinary (and extraordinary) people doing ordinary (and extraordinary) things. Secondly, the book also provides an interesting example of how text and image can complement each other in a fruitful way. Kirshenblatt's paintings do not function as mere illustrations of the artist's written memories nor does the text function as a redundant verbal paraphrase of the paintings (although Kirshenblatt starts some of his commentaries in a seemingly ekphrastic way, with phrasings such as "This painting shows."). Basically, the textual part of the volume aims at contextualizing the paintings by providing relevant background information and introducing and expanding certain realia and topics. The artwork in turn attempts to concretize the textual information by envisioning how certain aspects of daily life in interwar Apt more or less looked like. As the artist himself seems to indicate in the introduction ("The subjects I decide to paint are those that have a story to tell"), this artistic project would have not been realizable with images alone (nor with text alone). In Kirshenblatt's case, the question whether to paint a particular subject or not, largely depends on its narrative potential: does it have a story to tell or not? The paintings themselves, however, are not expected to "tell" the stories in their entirety. On the contrary, they ask to be "narrated" and need to be complemented by (oral and written) comments. As such, Kirshenblatt's painted and written memories of his Jewish childhood may urge us to look at the interplay between text and image in artistic practice from a more pragmatic (and less theoretical) point of view. At the heart of the artist's decision to combine text and images in one volume did not lie a profound awareness of their distinct semiotic qualities, but rather the artist's personal predisposition to narrate in a double way: in Kirshenblatt's case, the persons, locations, and events depicted in his "childish" paintings act like visual triggers which set the narrative in motion. |
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Kris van Heuckelom teaches Slavic languages at the University of Leuven. |
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