On Reading Between the Lines
9
As to Two Jewish Spaces
12
Prologue: On Jewish Habitations
15
An Atlas of Jewish Space
25
Coda—and a New Beginning
295
Bibliography & References
319
Acknowledgments
329
Index
333
On Reading Between the Lines
9
As to Two Jewish Spaces
12
Prologue: On Jewish Habitations
15
An Atlas of Jewish Space
25
Coda—and a New Beginning
295
Bibliography & References
319
Acknowledgments
329
Index
333
Arbeit Macht Frei (2013)
10
11
Arbeit Macht Frei (2013)
10
11
AS TO TWO JEWISH SPACES Mark Podwal
constructed synagogue. Little could I envision that five decades later I’d design the textiles for Prague’s 700-year-old synagogue, the Altneuschul. Nor conceive that in a forty-year span I would illustrate the works of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel or be commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create its Passover seder plate. Preoccupied with Jewish history and fascinated by its traditions, legends, and mysticism, I’ve tried to imaginatively interpret and faithfully transmit my heritage through pictorial narratives. Much of my art involves inventing visual metaphors adapted from Jewish symbols and iconography. When chronicling an event, although my art at times may include anachronisms, I like to be accurate concerning historical details. Drawing for over forty years for the New York Times very much influenced my art. The role of op-ed art is not to “illustrate” but to expand the impact of the word, as opposed to a literal interpretation. Literary critic Harold Bloom said about our book Fallen Angels, “Mark Podwal is in every sense an illuminator.” The term illumination denotes: to reveal information or details; to clarify; to help understand something. Although museum directors and curators have urged me to broaden my subject matter—to become an artist more universal rather than being limited by Jewish content—my heart is with the Jewish experience. Franz Kafka once described writing as a form of prayer, and that definition has resonated with me. For me, drawing is a form of prayer. To have been asked by Robert Jan van Pelt to collaborate on this volume is a tremendous honor. The artworks chosen for the book represent nearly fifty years of my art on Jewish subjects. Many of the original drawings, paintings, and prints are in the collections of institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Jewish museums in Prague, Berlin, and Vienna, the Terezín Ghetto Museum, the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, and the Warsaw Ghetto Museum (under construction), among numerous other venues and private collections. In gathering my art to partner with Robert Jan’s illuminating texts, I’m delighted to say that, without question, I’ve chosen the right path.
According to the artist Ben Shahn, in his 1956–57 Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard, for an artist, each work is often instilled with doubt. “There are no guideposts, no maps, no geography” to tell the artist that he or she “is on the right path.” Nevertheless, I’d like to acknowledge two Jewish spaces that set me on my path: One, Dąbrowa Białostocka, my mother’s birthplace, a shtetl in northeastern Poland burned to the ground by the Germans in 1941. The other, a Jewish camp 150 kilometers north of New York City. In 1929, when my mother, at age eight, immigrated with her family to the United States, her brother David was denied entry based on an erroneous diagnosis of an eye infection and had to remain in Dąbrowa. Letters from eye specialists in Warsaw attesting that David had been misdiagnosed failed to help. Moreover, attempts to arrange a visa for David to immigrate to Latin America were unsuccessful. When the German army reached Dąbrowa in July 1941, in revenge for finding the body of a slain German officer, the command burned down the entire town. Only two small stone houses on the edge of town and a partially destroyed church were left standing. About 300 Jews lived under desperate conditions, finding refuge wherever they could in huts or in storage basements. In November 1942, the Jewish population was forced to run most of the twenty-eight kilometers to Grodno, where they were placed in the Kelbashin camp, previously used for Russian prisoners of war. The Dąbrowa Jews remained there for nearly six weeks before the final trip to the Treblinka extermination camp. My mother’s mother, on learning that her son David had perished in Treblinka, became severely depressed and was committed to a psychiatric hospital for the last eighteen years of her life. The closest I ever got to my grandmother was when I helped carry her coffin. Since early childhood, Dąbrowa Białostocka lived in my imagination. Although for many years I had wanted to visit Dąbrowa, the incentive came when its mayor sent me an invitation to participate in a conference on the history of the town’s Jews. Although Dąbrowa was once 75 percent Jewish, no Jews currently live there. My visit on May 24, 2016, resulted in a series of drawings, some of which are published in this volume. The other Jewish space was Cejwin Camps, where I spent several summers. When at age twelve I first arrived at Cejwin, having grown up in a nonobservant home, I was overwhelmed with a Judaism I barely knew anything about—and enthusiastically embraced. More interested in arts and crafts than sports, I spent many afternoons sawing wood to shape into Jewish motifs for the camp’s newly 12
Yiddish Dąbrowa (2016)
13
AS TO TWO JEWISH SPACES Mark Podwal
constructed synagogue. Little could I envision that five decades later I’d design the textiles for Prague’s 700-year-old synagogue, the Altneuschul. Nor conceive that in a forty-year span I would illustrate the works of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel or be commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create its Passover seder plate. Preoccupied with Jewish history and fascinated by its traditions, legends, and mysticism, I’ve tried to imaginatively interpret and faithfully transmit my heritage through pictorial narratives. Much of my art involves inventing visual metaphors adapted from Jewish symbols and iconography. When chronicling an event, although my art at times may include anachronisms, I like to be accurate concerning historical details. Drawing for over forty years for the New York Times very much influenced my art. The role of op-ed art is not to “illustrate” but to expand the impact of the word, as opposed to a literal interpretation. Literary critic Harold Bloom said about our book Fallen Angels, “Mark Podwal is in every sense an illuminator.” The term illumination denotes: to reveal information or details; to clarify; to help understand something. Although museum directors and curators have urged me to broaden my subject matter—to become an artist more universal rather than being limited by Jewish content—my heart is with the Jewish experience. Franz Kafka once described writing as a form of prayer, and that definition has resonated with me. For me, drawing is a form of prayer. To have been asked by Robert Jan van Pelt to collaborate on this volume is a tremendous honor. The artworks chosen for the book represent nearly fifty years of my art on Jewish subjects. Many of the original drawings, paintings, and prints are in the collections of institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Jewish museums in Prague, Berlin, and Vienna, the Terezín Ghetto Museum, the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, and the Warsaw Ghetto Museum (under construction), among numerous other venues and private collections. In gathering my art to partner with Robert Jan’s illuminating texts, I’m delighted to say that, without question, I’ve chosen the right path.
According to the artist Ben Shahn, in his 1956–57 Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard, for an artist, each work is often instilled with doubt. “There are no guideposts, no maps, no geography” to tell the artist that he or she “is on the right path.” Nevertheless, I’d like to acknowledge two Jewish spaces that set me on my path: One, Dąbrowa Białostocka, my mother’s birthplace, a shtetl in northeastern Poland burned to the ground by the Germans in 1941. The other, a Jewish camp 150 kilometers north of New York City. In 1929, when my mother, at age eight, immigrated with her family to the United States, her brother David was denied entry based on an erroneous diagnosis of an eye infection and had to remain in Dąbrowa. Letters from eye specialists in Warsaw attesting that David had been misdiagnosed failed to help. Moreover, attempts to arrange a visa for David to immigrate to Latin America were unsuccessful. When the German army reached Dąbrowa in July 1941, in revenge for finding the body of a slain German officer, the command burned down the entire town. Only two small stone houses on the edge of town and a partially destroyed church were left standing. About 300 Jews lived under desperate conditions, finding refuge wherever they could in huts or in storage basements. In November 1942, the Jewish population was forced to run most of the twenty-eight kilometers to Grodno, where they were placed in the Kelbashin camp, previously used for Russian prisoners of war. The Dąbrowa Jews remained there for nearly six weeks before the final trip to the Treblinka extermination camp. My mother’s mother, on learning that her son David had perished in Treblinka, became severely depressed and was committed to a psychiatric hospital for the last eighteen years of her life. The closest I ever got to my grandmother was when I helped carry her coffin. Since early childhood, Dąbrowa Białostocka lived in my imagination. Although for many years I had wanted to visit Dąbrowa, the incentive came when its mayor sent me an invitation to participate in a conference on the history of the town’s Jews. Although Dąbrowa was once 75 percent Jewish, no Jews currently live there. My visit on May 24, 2016, resulted in a series of drawings, some of which are published in this volume. The other Jewish space was Cejwin Camps, where I spent several summers. When at age twelve I first arrived at Cejwin, having grown up in a nonobservant home, I was overwhelmed with a Judaism I barely knew anything about—and enthusiastically embraced. More interested in arts and crafts than sports, I spent many afternoons sawing wood to shape into Jewish motifs for the camp’s newly 12
Yiddish Dąbrowa (2016)
13
Fiddlers on Roofs (1995)
28
Fragment of Wooden Synagogue Interior (2021)
29
Fiddlers on Roofs (1995)
28
Fragment of Wooden Synagogue Interior (2021)
29
Ninth of Av (2012)
48
Come and Read (1997)
49
Ninth of Av (2012)
48
Come and Read (1997)
49
Tower of David as a Spice Box (2021)
60
Fortified City (1997)
61
Tower of David as a Spice Box (2021)
60
Fortified City (1997)
61
Matzoh Moon (2004)
88
The Ant (2020)
89
Matzoh Moon (2004)
88
The Ant (2020)
89
RHYTHMS AND TRUTHS
YOUR BELOVED IS KNOCKING
The ideology that shaped the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy presented a powerful nexus that connected an understanding of grand history with liturgical precision. It was the product of those connected to the Temple in Jerusalem. But at the same time, there was a different reality in the countryside of Judah, where life unfolded in a timeless manner, with the regular rhythms of sowing, waiting, tending, and harvesting crops and birthing, tending, and slaughtering animals—rhythms sometimes interrupted by calamities such as droughts, floods, and diseases, which provide a horizon of uncertainty around the stable core of peasant life. In the villages, Judahite elders steered the life of the community and instructed the young with the usual admonitions to look beyond the needs of the day: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest—and poverty will come on you like a thief and scarcity like an armed man.” Pithy proverbs also arose, simple messages meant to provide guidance in social life: “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.” “Better to be a nobody and yet have a servant than pretend to be somebody and have no food.” “The Lord tears down the house of the proud, but he sets the widow’s boundary stones in place.” These messages show that, in the final analysis, all the tales about that originally egalitarian society of refugees in the desert were, for the majority of the Judahite population, just tales. They also show that if in some ways the Judahites and their descendants, the Jews, stand apart from other people, they are also the same—especially when facing the question of how to live a life of practical righteousness amid their neighbors. Hence the enduring popularity of the book that collected all of them: Mishle (Proverbs).
If life in the Judahite countryside resembled that of peasants everywhere, the concerns of young aristocrats in Jerusalem were like those of the young and restless of all ages. While the priests attended to their God of the covenant in the Holy of Holies of the Temple, young men and women celebrated their covenants, both imagined and experienced, in the Song of Songs. “He: ‘I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride; I have gathered my myrrh with my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb and my honey; I have drunk my wine and my milk.’ Friends: ‘Eat, friends, and drink; drink your fill of love.’ She: ‘I slept but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking [...] I arose to open for my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with flowing myrrh, on the handles of the bolt. I opened for my beloved, but my beloved had left; he was gone. My heart sank at his departure. I looked for him but did not find him. I called him but he did not answer. The watchmen found me as they made their rounds in the city. They beat me, they bruised me; they took away my cloak, those watchmen of the walls! Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you—if you find my beloved, what will you tell him? Tell him I am faint with love.’” It remains a credit to the sages who decided on the final compilation of the Tanakh that they included the Song of Songs in the literary canon of the Jewish people. Of course, the justification was not to be found in the sexual longings the text was able to engender. He was read as an allegory of God, and She as a symbol of the Jewish people. As to the watchmen: there are too many candidates. And having become the story of the love affair between God and the Jews, it acquired a central place in the Jewish imagination. “For all of eternity in its entirety is not as worthy as the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel,” Rabbi Akiva ben Yosef declared not long after the destruction of King Herod’s Temple. “All the Writings are holy, but Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”
90
91
RHYTHMS AND TRUTHS
YOUR BELOVED IS KNOCKING
The ideology that shaped the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy presented a powerful nexus that connected an understanding of grand history with liturgical precision. It was the product of those connected to the Temple in Jerusalem. But at the same time, there was a different reality in the countryside of Judah, where life unfolded in a timeless manner, with the regular rhythms of sowing, waiting, tending, and harvesting crops and birthing, tending, and slaughtering animals—rhythms sometimes interrupted by calamities such as droughts, floods, and diseases, which provide a horizon of uncertainty around the stable core of peasant life. In the villages, Judahite elders steered the life of the community and instructed the young with the usual admonitions to look beyond the needs of the day: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest—and poverty will come on you like a thief and scarcity like an armed man.” Pithy proverbs also arose, simple messages meant to provide guidance in social life: “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.” “Better to be a nobody and yet have a servant than pretend to be somebody and have no food.” “The Lord tears down the house of the proud, but he sets the widow’s boundary stones in place.” These messages show that, in the final analysis, all the tales about that originally egalitarian society of refugees in the desert were, for the majority of the Judahite population, just tales. They also show that if in some ways the Judahites and their descendants, the Jews, stand apart from other people, they are also the same—especially when facing the question of how to live a life of practical righteousness amid their neighbors. Hence the enduring popularity of the book that collected all of them: Mishle (Proverbs).
If life in the Judahite countryside resembled that of peasants everywhere, the concerns of young aristocrats in Jerusalem were like those of the young and restless of all ages. While the priests attended to their God of the covenant in the Holy of Holies of the Temple, young men and women celebrated their covenants, both imagined and experienced, in the Song of Songs. “He: ‘I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride; I have gathered my myrrh with my spice. I have eaten my honeycomb and my honey; I have drunk my wine and my milk.’ Friends: ‘Eat, friends, and drink; drink your fill of love.’ She: ‘I slept but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking [...] I arose to open for my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with flowing myrrh, on the handles of the bolt. I opened for my beloved, but my beloved had left; he was gone. My heart sank at his departure. I looked for him but did not find him. I called him but he did not answer. The watchmen found me as they made their rounds in the city. They beat me, they bruised me; they took away my cloak, those watchmen of the walls! Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you—if you find my beloved, what will you tell him? Tell him I am faint with love.’” It remains a credit to the sages who decided on the final compilation of the Tanakh that they included the Song of Songs in the literary canon of the Jewish people. Of course, the justification was not to be found in the sexual longings the text was able to engender. He was read as an allegory of God, and She as a symbol of the Jewish people. As to the watchmen: there are too many candidates. And having become the story of the love affair between God and the Jews, it acquired a central place in the Jewish imagination. “For all of eternity in its entirety is not as worthy as the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel,” Rabbi Akiva ben Yosef declared not long after the destruction of King Herod’s Temple. “All the Writings are holy, but Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”
90
91
According to Heine (2020)
252
Great Synagogue of Munich Wrapped in a Prayer Shawl (2017)
253
According to Heine (2020)
252
Great Synagogue of Munich Wrapped in a Prayer Shawl (2017)
253
TO HAVE NO NEIGHBOR
CONTESTED REFUGE
Antisemitic legislation, expropriation, and systematic violence pushed German Jews out of civil society. Jews tried to understand what was happening to them, and often tried to compare their situation to that of their ancestors before emancipation. “The fact that we are living in a ghetto is beginning to penetrate our awareness,” Rabbi Joachim Prinz wrote in 1935. “On the basis of our experiences and the exigencies of our life we designate as a ‘ghetto’ the fact that we are living in a country, we Jews of Germany, where they tell us without any prettification or adornment, on many occasions, that our lives are a burden on the German people.” The new ghetto was radically different from the premodern one. “The medieval ghetto was sealed at night. The gate was shut strictly and aggressively. The bolt was thrown deliberately: one left the ‘world’ and entered the ghetto. Today the situation is just the opposite. When the door of our house closes behind us, we leave the ghetto and enter our homes. This is the basic difference. The ghetto is no longer a defined geographical area, at least not in the sense of the Middle Ages. The ghetto is the ‘world.’ It is outside that the ghetto exists for us. In the market, in the streets, in the hotels—the ghetto exists in every place. It has a sign. That sign is: no neighbors. The Jewish destiny is to have no neighbor.” As Jewish children were kicked out of schools and sport clubs, Jewish communities improvised to create Jewish schools and Jewish sports clubs, financed by rapidly impoverishing parents. Forbidden to participate in the public sphere, synagogues provided Jews some kind of refuge, acquiring in addition to their traditional purpose the function of community center, counseling office for those willing and able to emigrate, and concert hall, where Jews were allowed to enjoy the music composed by Jewish composers. The Great Synagogue in Munich fulfilled all these functions until June 1938, when Hitler visited the city to help it prepare for the annual Tag der deutschen Kunst (Day of German Art), which was to take place on July 8. Aspiring to make the whole of Germany into a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), the German artist-in-chief, Hitler, ordered the immediate destruction of one of the finest and largest Jewish religious buildings in the Reich.
With Germany transforming into a ghetto, many German Jews tried to find a new life abroad. Emigration was difficult: immigration was not popular in countries with high unemployment as a result of the lingering Depression. Zionism, which had been an ideology supported by a small minority of German Jews before 1933, suddenly seemed to provide an answer. The odd, daggerlike shape of Mandatory Palestine that had entered atlases in the 1920s now became a sign of rescue. Yet, due to a strict immigration policy agreed upon by the British government, which was the Mandatory power in Palestine, and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the number of immigration certificates issued each year was to be based on the economic and demographic absorption capacity of the country. And this was very limited. Nevertheless, thanks to German immigration in 1933, 1934, and 1935, which brought both know-how and some needed capital, the prospects of a viable, independent Jewish state in Palestine became real—and triggered an uprising of the Arab population. Subsequently, the Palestine Royal Commission recommended a partition of the territory, with a Jewish state in most of the coastal strip and Galilee, and an Arab state in the ancient heartland of Judah and Israel. Jerusalem was to remain under British rule. The British government, however, decided to stop Jewish immigration. Ten years, and in terms of Jewish history an epoch later, the United Nations assumed the mandate and proposed a second partition plan, which transferred the blade of the dagger to the Jewish state. More than seventy years after the establishment of the State of Israel, its eastern boundary with a still nascent Arab Palestine remains a moving target.
254
255
TO HAVE NO NEIGHBOR
CONTESTED REFUGE
Antisemitic legislation, expropriation, and systematic violence pushed German Jews out of civil society. Jews tried to understand what was happening to them, and often tried to compare their situation to that of their ancestors before emancipation. “The fact that we are living in a ghetto is beginning to penetrate our awareness,” Rabbi Joachim Prinz wrote in 1935. “On the basis of our experiences and the exigencies of our life we designate as a ‘ghetto’ the fact that we are living in a country, we Jews of Germany, where they tell us without any prettification or adornment, on many occasions, that our lives are a burden on the German people.” The new ghetto was radically different from the premodern one. “The medieval ghetto was sealed at night. The gate was shut strictly and aggressively. The bolt was thrown deliberately: one left the ‘world’ and entered the ghetto. Today the situation is just the opposite. When the door of our house closes behind us, we leave the ghetto and enter our homes. This is the basic difference. The ghetto is no longer a defined geographical area, at least not in the sense of the Middle Ages. The ghetto is the ‘world.’ It is outside that the ghetto exists for us. In the market, in the streets, in the hotels—the ghetto exists in every place. It has a sign. That sign is: no neighbors. The Jewish destiny is to have no neighbor.” As Jewish children were kicked out of schools and sport clubs, Jewish communities improvised to create Jewish schools and Jewish sports clubs, financed by rapidly impoverishing parents. Forbidden to participate in the public sphere, synagogues provided Jews some kind of refuge, acquiring in addition to their traditional purpose the function of community center, counseling office for those willing and able to emigrate, and concert hall, where Jews were allowed to enjoy the music composed by Jewish composers. The Great Synagogue in Munich fulfilled all these functions until June 1938, when Hitler visited the city to help it prepare for the annual Tag der deutschen Kunst (Day of German Art), which was to take place on July 8. Aspiring to make the whole of Germany into a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), the German artist-in-chief, Hitler, ordered the immediate destruction of one of the finest and largest Jewish religious buildings in the Reich.
With Germany transforming into a ghetto, many German Jews tried to find a new life abroad. Emigration was difficult: immigration was not popular in countries with high unemployment as a result of the lingering Depression. Zionism, which had been an ideology supported by a small minority of German Jews before 1933, suddenly seemed to provide an answer. The odd, daggerlike shape of Mandatory Palestine that had entered atlases in the 1920s now became a sign of rescue. Yet, due to a strict immigration policy agreed upon by the British government, which was the Mandatory power in Palestine, and the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the number of immigration certificates issued each year was to be based on the economic and demographic absorption capacity of the country. And this was very limited. Nevertheless, thanks to German immigration in 1933, 1934, and 1935, which brought both know-how and some needed capital, the prospects of a viable, independent Jewish state in Palestine became real—and triggered an uprising of the Arab population. Subsequently, the Palestine Royal Commission recommended a partition of the territory, with a Jewish state in most of the coastal strip and Galilee, and an Arab state in the ancient heartland of Judah and Israel. Jerusalem was to remain under British rule. The British government, however, decided to stop Jewish immigration. Ten years, and in terms of Jewish history an epoch later, the United Nations assumed the mandate and proposed a second partition plan, which transferred the blade of the dagger to the Jewish state. More than seventy years after the establishment of the State of Israel, its eastern boundary with a still nascent Arab Palestine remains a moving target.
254
255
Torah Shield Engraved with Chodorów Synagogue (2020), 289 Tower of Babel (1994), 52 Tower of David as a Spice Box (2021), 60 Tu B’Shevat (2003), 240 Twelve Tribes (2011), 76 Two Panels of a Triptych (2020), 161 Tyrants Sought to Destroy Us (1971), 125 Tyrants Sought to Destroy Us (2011), 221 Úštek School Book (2017), 173 Waiting for a Minyan (2020), 184 Western Portal (2020), 176 Western Wall (1978), 232 Where Time Stands Still (1997), 224 Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (2013), 153 Wooden Synagogue of Zabludow (1999), 105 Yiddish Typewriter (2018), 32 Yom Kippur in the Altneuschul (2008), 180 Zbarazh (2021), 281 Zeus Defiling the Temple (1997), 108
336