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157 pages

English

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Jewish art and visual culture—art made by Jews about Jews—in modern diasporic settings is the subject of Looking Jewish. Carol Zemel focuses on particular artists and cultural figures in interwar Eastern Europe and postwar America who blended Jewishness and mainstream modernism to create a diasporic art, one that transcends dominant national traditions. She begins with a painting by Ken Aptekar entitled Albert: Used to Be Abraham, a double portrait of a man, which serves to illustrate Zemel's conception of the doubleness of Jewish diasporic art. She considers two interwar photographers, Alter Kacyzne and Moshe Vorobeichic; images by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz; the pre- and postwar photographs of Roman Vishniac; the figure of the Jewish mother in postwar popular culture (Molly Goldberg); and works by R. B. Kitaj, Ben Katchor, and Vera Frenkel that explore Jewish identity in a postmodern environment.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Beyond the Ghetto Walls: Shtetl to Nation in Photography by Alter Kacyzne and Moshe Vorobeichic
2. Modern Artist, Modern Jew: Bruno Schulz's Diasporas
3. Z'chor! Roman Vishniac's Photo-Eulogy of Eastern European Jews
4. Difference in Diaspora: The Yiddishe Mama, the Jewish Mother, the Jewish Princess and their Men
5. Diasporic Values in Contemporary Art: Kitaj, Katchor, Frenkel
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

History of art

Criticism

Theory

Art

History

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Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	29 juin 2015
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9780253015426
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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Extrait

LOOKING JEWISH
LOOKING JEWISH
VISUAL CULTURE
and
MODERN DIASPORA

CAROL ZEMEL
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone 800-842-6796 Fax 812-855-7931
2015 by Carol Zemel
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zemel, Carol M.
Looking Jewish : visual culture and modern diaspora / Carol Zemel.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00598-4 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01542-6 (ebook) 1. Jewish art. 2. Jews in art. 3. Art, Modern-20th century. 4. Art, Modern-21st century. I. Title.
N7415.Z46 2015
704.03 924-dc23
2014044170
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
Cover: Photograph of Pearl Rabinowicz, 1900-1941. Daughter of Rabbi Yerachmiel Tzvi Rabinowicz, Byaler Rebbe. Died with her husband, Shalom Alter Perlow, 1941.
To the memory of my parents:
Joseph William Moscovitch, z l (Vaslui, Rumania, 1900-Montreal, 1949)
Beatrice (Rebekah) Greenblatt, z l (Izyaslavl, Ukraine, 1913-Montreal, 1981)
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
1 Beyond the Ghetto Walls: Shtetl to Nation in Photography by Alter Kacyzne and Moshe Vorobeichic
2 Modern Artist, Modern Jew: Bruno Schulz s Diasporas
3 Z chor! Roman Vishniac s Photo-Eulogy of Eastern European Jews
4 Difference in Diaspora: The Yiddishe Mama , the Jewish Mother, the Jewish Princess, and Their Men
5 Diasporic Values in Contemporary Art: R. B. Kitaj, Ben Katchor, Vera Frenkel
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
I began this book many years ago, in what became a major reorientation of my scholarly work. I had just finished a book on Vincent van Gogh, and I returned to Amsterdam, the city that had nourished my interests for so many years, to seek a new direction. One rainy afternoon, I wandered into a bookstore across from the Amsterdams Historisch Museum, and saw among the tables, a remaindered stack of Roman Vishniac s A Vanished World . Oh, yes, I remembered about the expensive publication, those are the pictures of Jewish life I ve wanted to see. Now the price was right. Still, I hesitated, moved away and back again several times, and finally decided that any images that left me, an art historian, so uncertain were surely worth investigating. I write about my ambivalent response to Vishniac s publication in chapter 3 of this volume. Visits in the next few days to the library of the Joods Historisch Museum led me to Moshe Vorobeichic s Ghetto Lane in Vilna . Na ve as I was about the pictorial repertoire of Eastern Europe s Jewish culture, the photographic combination of Vishniac and Vorobeichic emboldened me to explore the field of Jewish visual culture and self-imaging.
The new direction resonated with my long-held interest in my family s history. I was the child who badgered my parents, grandparents, great-aunts and -uncles about daily life in Vaslui in Rumania and Izyaslavl in the former Russian Pale. They indulged my curiosity, but with a certain reticence: they reported fragments-who was related to whom, who lived in a better part of town, who read forbidden books, who married by family arrangement and who for love. The most stirring part of their narrative was the family flight from the marauding forces of the 1919-20 Petlura uprising in Ukraine: their journey through Poland, winter on the ship in Antwerp s harbor, and finally, arrival in Canada in 1921. By the time I was a young adult, ready to supplement their story fragments with fuller interviews, the grandparents generation was gone. At the same time, my parents desire for acculturated bourgeois Jewish life in Montreal distanced me from what I later learned was the city s rich Yiddish-ist culture. Though they too were fluent Yiddish speakers and moderately observant, for my family, that world was past. Even after the arrival of cousins who had survived the Shoah, little was said beyond nothing and no one remained. History may have documented their past, but memory shut down.
Amsterdam then, for me, became a site of a restored Jewish imaginary. Holland had, after all, a long history of Jewish tolerance. Expelled from Catholic Spain, large numbers of Jews sought refuge in the Protestant Dutch Republic at the end of the sixteenth century, and notwithstanding the wartime loss of 75 percent of Dutch Jews, I assumed a thriving and largely Jewish population had existed there-much as they had in Canada. It did not strike me as unusual that the Dutch Jews who became close friends were so thoroughly assimilated that they knew very little of Jewish custom and practice.
That summer too, I read Isaac Bashevis Singer s novella The Certificate , and at last learned of a world that seemed entirely new to me: a society of modern Jews-men and women-in prewar Warsaw, who were secular, intellectual, politically radical, and culturally productive. Drawn to a modern Jewish history that I had scarcely imagined, I determined to explore its culture and its visual field. For those who lived it, and for me looking back, I wondered: how did that world look, and how and what did it see?
There seemed no clear place for such a project in the art history I knew. Jew in the home, but not as your scholarship was the tacit variant of a familiar maxim. No place for Jewish art as such, even though modern art history was organized along national and anthropological lines-French art, American art, Oriental art, primitive art. Jewish art might mean Israeli art, but most often it referred to ancient archaeology and Judaica-ritual objects, medieval manuscripts-or in the modern period, synagogue architecture. I realized, with some chagrin, that the Jewish visual culture that interested me had an uncertain place in the histories of modern art.
I came to see this as a challenge of diaspora. I was a Canadian woman, raised in a minority culture (Jewish) that was part of a larger powerful minority (English-speaking) culture that dominated the majority (French-speaking) society of Quebec. That complex layering had seemed normal to me. I now recognized it as the multifaceted norm of diaspora s double-consciousness. The structural challenge became clearer as I sought to explore work by artists whose work referred to their Jewish identity, and who achieved recognition and success among both Jews and the non-Jewish cultural mainstream.
In the course of this project, I have been helped and encouraged by many friends and scholars. Elissa Bemporad, the late Peter Yankel Conzens, Margherita Pascucci, and David Shneer, fellow students at the YIVO/Columbia Yiddish Summer Program, shared their enthusiasm and expertise, and welcomed me into a new scholarly environment. I am grateful for their continuing friendship and stimulating company. In 2000-2001, I was fortunate to receive a fellowship for study at the University of Pennsylvania s Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. As I embarked on this book, my research and writing was invigorated and challenged by my colleagues there; I thank Zachary Braiterman, Amy Horowitz, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Gideon Ofrat, Anna Shternshis, Susan Suleiman, and Nina Warnke for their wise counsel. Philadelphia scholars Laura Levitt and Michael Steinlauf, frequent visitors to the Center s colloquia, offered further advice and encouragement through the thickets of my new field. By great good luck, in Philadelphia I shared the home and friendship of Wendy Steiner; the breakfast table on Pine Street soon rivaled the Penn Center in its play of ideas and intellectual adventure.
In 2001, I returned to Canada and Toronto s York University, where I have learned immeasurably from new friends and colleagues. I thank Judith Hamilton, Yvonne Singer, Shelley Hornstein, and Sara Horowitz, for their insights and continuing support. I have relied intellectually, socially, and emotionally on the adventurous minds and considerable humor of my friends Deborah Britzman, Alice Pitt, Sharon Sliwinski, Jeff Peck, and Tim Forbes. They have made Toronto feel like home.
At the YIVO Archives, I benefited from the wisdom and generosity of archivists Krysia Fisher and Marek Web. At Indiana University Press, I thank Janet Rabinowitch for taking on my manuscript, and thank Robert Sloan, Jenna Whittaker, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, and copy editor Carol Kennedy for their careful attention to my text and for easing the manuscript along the journey to publication.
Portions of these chapters appeared earlier in the following publications: Diaspora Culture, Photography and Eastern European Jews, chapter 1 in Diaspora and Modern Visual Culture , ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Routledge Press, 1999; My, Zydzi polscy . . . : tozsamosci artystyczene Brunona Schulza (Polish), chapter 2 in Polak Zyd, artysta; Tozsamosc a awangarda , ed. Jaroslaw Suchan, Lodz: Muzeum Sztuki, 2010; Zchor! [Remember!]: Roman Vishniac s Photo-Eulogy of Eastern European Jews, chapter 3 in Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust , ed. Julia Epstein, Lori Lefkovitz, University of Illinoi