literary minds: soviet jewish writers portrayed by matvey vaisberg | exhibition texts 2014

5/20/2018 Literary Minds: Soviet Jewish Writers portrayed by Matvey Vaisberg | Exhibition Texts 2014

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In 2014, The Magnes acquired twelve works by theNew York Times-

featured Ukrainian artist, Matvey Vaisberg, including the portraits of

eight Jewish writers. Vaisberg, the grandson of the Yiddish author,

Motl D. Gartsman (19091943), was born in 1958, and lives and

works in Kiev.

Several of the authors portrayed by Vaisberg were Yiddish writers

arrested by the Soviet regime and executed on August 12, 1952:

Itzik Feffer, Leib Kvitko, Peretz Markish, and David Hofstein. Other

portraits include prominent writers such as Sholem Aleichem,

Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Joseph Brodsky.

These unusual works, painted on cardboard in the late 1980s, and

based on archival photographic sources, reclaimed a suppressed

cultural heritage on the eve of the fall of the Soviet Union. The faces

of Yiddish and Russian Jewish writers emerge as spectral and partial

reflections on the politics of identity in contemporary Ukraine.

FRANCESCO SPAGNOLOCURATOR

ELI ROSENBLATTMAGNES GRADUATE FELLOW (20132014)

Literary MindsSOVIET JEWISH WRITERS PORTRAYED BY MATVEY VAISBERG


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Iosif Brodski, 1989GIFT OF INA ZHOLUDOVA, 2014.2.2

JOSEPH BRODSKY(19401996) was born into a Jewishfamily in Leningrad. His father, Aleksandr Brodsky, and

his mother, Maria Volpert Brodsky, lived in communal

apartments, in poverty, marginalized by their Jewish status.

He drew on wide-ranging themes, from Mexican and

Caribbean literature to Latin poetry, and created powerfulnarratives. In 1962, Brodsky began experiencing a series

of arrests and imprisonments, all while continuing to

develop his oeuvre. In 1972, he left the Soviet Union and

arrived in Vienna, ostensibly en route to Israel. He spent the

remainder of his life in exile in the United States, balancing

prominence as a man of letters with the alienated longings

of the Russian emigre, The holiest thing we have, Brodsky

said in a 1983 interview, is, perhaps, not our icons, not

even our historyit is our language.


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Osip Mandelstam,1989GIFT OF INA ZHOLUDOVA, 2014.2.3

OSIP MANDELSTAM(18911938) was born in Warsaw,Poland, and grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his

fathers standing merchant made life relatively free of

the anti-Semitism which was then pervasive. Mandelstam

renounced the symbolist style of his contemporaries.

Emphasizing thoughts, feelings, and observations,he ranked as an Acmeist that rejected vagueness and

affectations in poetic language. In the 1920s, as the

Bolsheviks established their power, it became increasingly

difficult for Mandelstam to maintain himself as a poet. He

refused to conform to political aims, and instead cultivated

his autonomy as an artist. Mandelstams verbal harmony,

iconoclastic posture and eruptive attitude continually irked

Soviet authorities. Alienated from state-sponsored poets by

the 1920s, Mandelshtam went into exile in Armenia. After a

brief return to Moscow, he was exiled to Siberia in 1937 and

died of heart failure in 1938.


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Boris Pasternak, 1989GIFT OF INA ZHOLUDOVA, 2014.2.4

BORIS PASTERNAK(18901960) was the author ofnumerous translations of stage plays by Johann Wolfgang

von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Pedro Caldern de la Barca,

and William Shakespeare into Russian. His cosmopolitan

upbringing, his association with Tolstoy and Scriabin,

and the rise of the Russian Revolution profoundly affectedhis development. After studing with Jewish philosopher

Hermann Cohen, philosophy became a concern secondary

to poetry. His highly metaphorical writing style made his

early works somewhat opaque, while his later works are

variously interpreted as attacks on the Soviet regime and

celebrations of individuality and the human spirit. He

entered the spotlight by the relentless Soviet campaign

against his novel, Doctor Zhivago, which became an instant

sensation in Europe and the United States upon its release

in 1957. Pasternak was thereafter expelled by the Soviet

Writers Union and died in 1960.

This table is not broad enough to bear my chest

Upon its board or beyond the brink of anguishTo crook my elbow or just past that isthmus

Of so many miles of freshly ploughed Forgive.

(The Poetry of Boris Pasternak, 19171959, edited and translated by George Reavey)


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Sholem Aleichem, 1989GIFT OF INA ZHOLUDOVA, 2014.2.6

SHOLEM ALEICHEM (18591916, born SholomRabinovitz), one of the most influential Yiddish writers

of all times, created stories that continue to enjoy

worldwide popularity. In his fiction, he drew upon

childhood experiences from his birthplace, Pereyaslav,

in provincial Ukraine, where he grew up in a middle-classfamily. These memories were eventually utilized in the

creation of a fictional town, Kasrilevke, which has since

become the archetype of the shtetl, the Jewish village

upon which much East-European Jewish life was centered.

Some Soviet Yiddish critics read Sholem Aleichems

deeply humorous stories as an expression of the Jewish

petite bourgeoisie at the fin de sicle, while others paid

closer attention to Sholem Aleichems mastery of spoken

Yiddish and unpretentious style. His legacy in the Soviet

Union endured even as the memory of the shtetleclipsed

its historical reality. Sholem Aleichem died May 13th,

1916 in New York City. Attracting hundreds of thousands

of mourners, the funeral evolved into an unprecedented

display of unity among New Yorks Yiddish-speakingpopulation.

From Hodl

Well one such character turned up in our neck of the woods. In fact, I once

knew his father, a man who peddled cigarettes and was a beggar seven timesoverBut thats a whole other story, and besides, if the Talmud tells us that

Rabbi Yochanan the peddler made a living patching shoes, a person can be

permitted a father who didnt make one peddle cigarettes! . . .

(Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories, 2011, trans. Hillel Halkin)


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David Hofstein, 1988GIFT OF INA ZHOLUDOVA, 2014.2.1

DOVID HOFSHTEYN(18891952) was born inKorostyshev, Ukraine, attended a traditional kheyderschool,

and acquired private tutors in Russian and Hebrew. He

began writing poems in Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian

as a child, and his boyhood experience in these languages

influenced his Yiddish poetry. A communist, on the eve ofthe Second World War he redefined his identity according

to his vision for Soviet-Jewish culture in Yiddish. An activist

involved with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee from 1942,

Hofshteyn was the first of its leaders to be imprisoned

for anti-Soviet activities in September 1948 and was

executed on August 12th, 1952.

Procession(1919)

Today I, too, am a piece of clanging brass.

I leap across

hushed and velvet places,

I wake the weary,

and drown with my resounding laughter

the sighs of those who languish.

Not one step back!

(Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Chone Shmeruk,The Penguin Book of

Modern Yiddish Verse, 1987, trans. Robert Friend)

,

,

'

!


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Perets Markish,1989GIFT OF INA ZHOLUDOVA, 2014.2.5

PERETS MARKISH (18951952) was born in Polonnoye,Volhynia (Western Ukraine). After receiving a traditional

education and leaving home at a young age, he worked

at various jobs and was drafted into the Russian army

during the First World War. After his discharge from the

military, Markish allied himself with Warsaw poets UriTsevi Grinberg and Melech Ravitch, who in the early 1920s

shaping the city into the center of Yiddish modernism.

Markishs most important achievement is his long poem,

Di kupe. Its disturbing imagery centers on a pile of corpses

laid out in the middle of the marketplace of a Ukrainian

shtetl after a pogrom. Markish was at the helm of the

Yiddish section of the Soviet Writers Union in 19391943,

and was the only Yiddish writer to receive the Order of

Lenin. He joined the Communist Party in 1942 and was a

member of the executive board of the Jewish Anti-Fascist

Committee. Markish was arrested in January of 1949 and,

after a lengthy imprisonment and a trial, he was sentenced

death and executed on August 12th, 1952.

The MoundAh, Mount Sinai! In the upturned bowl of sky, lick blue mud,

Humbly, humbly as a cat licks up its midnight prayers.

Into your face, the Sovereign Mound spits back the Ten

Commandments.

(trans. Leonard Wolf)

!

,

,

,

,

,

!


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Itsik Fefer, 1989GIFT OF INA ZHOLUDOVA, 2014.2.7

ITSIK FEFER(19001952) was born in Shpola, Ukraine,and started working as a printing shop apprentice at age

twelve. In 1917 he joined the Socialist-Jewish Bund and

became an activist in the trade unions. A Communist from

1919, he served in the Red Army. He began producing

Yiddish poetry in 1918, and in 1922 joined Vidervuks(New Growth), a Kiev-based group of young Yiddish

writers whose mentor was Dovid Hofshteyn. After

serving in the Red Army, Fefer began producing a body of

poetry known for a linguistic style drawn from colloquial

speech, and very different from the more intellectualized

production of his peers. Fefer was arrested in 1948, along

with other members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

He was executed on August, 12, 1952.

The sun has blessedly bronzed my body,My life is all battles and songs of fame;

It really breaks me up to remember

That I carry some famous rabbis name.

(Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, 1987,

trans. John Hollander)


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Leib Kvitko, 1988GIFT OF INA ZHOLUDOVA, 2014.2.8

LEYB K VITKO (1890 or 18931952) a Yiddish andRussian poet and storyteller, was born in Holoskovo,

near Odessa. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised

by his grandmother. At age 10 he began working as a

quilters apprentice and lived briefly in Nikolaev, Odessa,

and Kherson. Encouraged by the Yiddish modernistDovid Bergelson, Kvitko was welcomed by the Kiev literary

community. His story, Tsvey khaveyrim (Two Friends,

1933), which highlighted Slavic-Jewish camaraderie, had the

largest number of editions in Yiddish and other languages

than any Soviet prose work in Yiddish, and his writings for

children were widely popular. He was arrested with other

members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and was

executed on August 12th, 1952.

Esau

Esau,

Hairy Esau, blessed with fragrant fields;

To you I owe an ancient debt,

Debt deep within my marrow,

Buried in my innards shadows . . .

(Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, 1987,

trans. Allen Mandelbaum and Harold Rabinowitz)

literary minds: soviet jewish writers portrayed by matvey vaisberg | exhibition texts 2014

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