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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253015426 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 214 |
| Sales rank: | 852,092 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Carol Zemel is Professor Emerita of Art History and Visual Culture in the Department of Visual Arts at York University, Toronto.
Read an Excerpt
Looking Jewish
Visual Culture and Modern Diaspora
By Carol Zemel
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Carol ZemelAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01542-6
CHAPTER 1
Beyond the Ghetto Walls: Shtetl to Nation in Photography by Alter Kacyzne and Moshe Vorobeichic
I begin with the Jewish culture of Ashkenaz, the vast region that stretched from modern Lithuania through Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, where Jews lived in great number from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. In 1797, with much of the region under Russian control, the Russian Empire declared the area a "Pale of Settlement" (map 1.1), intended to confine the Jewish population, as well as to serve as a buffer zone between the Russians and Poles. For Jewish inhabitants, however, the Pale became a supranational territory, which was a space of diasporic culture and consciousness that transcended shifting frontiers, and whose landmarks were synagogues, study centers, and rabbinical courts. Within the Pale, Ashkenazi Jews developed an extensive shtetl (small town) culture, by which is generally meant a Yiddish-speaking, provincial society, orthodox in its religious practice and traditional Jewish way of life. By the 1920s, however, this shtetl culture had been transformed by half a century of modernization, secularization, and emigration to cities in Europe and America. For many Jews, this was an ambivalent undertaking: an escape from ethnic and economic oppression, but also an escape from "self" or home, and a flight from the shtetl's fixed traditions and orthodoxy.
Images of Eastern European Jews produced in the 1920s and '30s by Jewish photographers Alter Kacyzne and Moshe Vorobeichic represent this change and its ambivalence. Their work is similar in subject, but different in photographic style: pictorialist documentary in the case of Kacyzne's images, modernist photomontage in Vorobeichic's work. Both photographers, however, represent a traditional society at a moment of modernization, when the diasporic horizon of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe was rapidly changing. We can see signs of this modernizing encounter in Kacyzne's much-reproduced photograph of a kheder (schoolroom) taken in 1924 (figure 1.1). The locale is Lublin, but the obscuring shadows in the image mask the specificities of setting and render it generic: this is any prewar kheder in the Pale. In it, little boys in caps and side-curls sit side by side, their chins barely reaching the reading table, while a bearded melamed (teacher) hovers over them and—the exception to countless tales of teacherly impatience—kindly guides them through the aleph-beyz (ABCs). The image marks an important moment in a Jewish boy's life, as he begins the journey from childhood play to religious study and affirmation of his place among the "people of the book." Like most kids, their attention wanders—this is part of the picture's charm. They exchange glances, whisper, or daydream. But two wide-eyed fellows at the image center, their heads visually punctuated by the melamed's white sleeve, stare down the table toward us, and doing so, they activate the picture's real dynamic: the sudden intrusion of camera and photographer, of technology and modernity, into this traditional space.
Although it is structured differently, the picture by Moshe Vorobeichic made in 1931 (figure 1.2) is no less a confrontation of tradition and modernity. The encounter here is hardly intimate, as the viewer looks from some distance, almost separate from the depicted space. A white-bearded old man makes his way along the pavement of an arcaded street. In fur hat and flapping overcoat, clutching two canes and his tallis (prayer-shawl) bag under one arm, the man is determined, purposive, but also a somewhat awkward silhouette. And though dark figures in the background suggest pedestrians and commerce, the setting is mainly characterized by the man and the arched passage: both are aged and both are picturesque. Here too the picture's air of timelessness is interrupted, not however by the subject's attention to the intruding photographer, but by the picture's modernist style, where montage shatters the cohesion and the picturesqueness of the image and flash-forwards the Jewish elder into history as a small, pale, apparitional echo at the lower left.
Despite their differences, both images subject a traditional society to the modern viewers' scrutiny. And each photographer addressed his work to an expanding Jewish diaspora: Kacyzne, to a Jewish immigrant population in North America; Vorobeichic, to an international Jewish cultural elite. Today, however, the pictures' meanings are not always easy to define. Some see them as sentimental and nostalgic, emblems of collective memory in their photographic timelessness. Recent publication of Alter Kacyzne's pictures as Poyln, Jewish Life in the Old Country reinforces this effect, with an art book format and finely printed images—so different from their initial newspaper appearance—calling attention to the photographer's artistry. At the same time, and almost inevitably, the photographs are shrouded, or "backshadowed" to use Michael Andre Bernstein's term, by the tragic aura of the Holocaust. Not only do we look at these pictures with the poignant knowledge that most of their subjects were murdered in the war that was to come, the images themselves become predictive after the fact: the people and activities—indeed, the culture—shown are doomed, and the pictures seem to forecast that destiny. This backshadowing effect began, one might say, with the New York daily Forverts' 1947 publication of The Vanished World, a photo book that included many of Kacyzne's images, and functioned as a collective yizkher-bukh (memorial book). Of course, photographs in general seem to stop time; the future and death are held in abeyance, lurking at the edge ofthe frame, and given the scale of the Jewish catastrophe, some backshadowing is inevitable here. But without dismissing this postwar response, I believe these images deserve less tendentious readings that set aside the aura of impending doom and are grounded instead in the diasporic and nationalist context of those interwar years.
With their ineradicable indexicality, or what John Berger refers to as their ability to quote rather than translate events, photographs play a distinctive role in the preservation of historical moment and the writing of history. Indeed, as Walter Benjamin wrote in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," for the modern historian "the true picture of the past flits by." "The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.... To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger." Arguing that understanding the past is mediated through modernity's own concerns, Benjamin uses language that not only is visual and pictorial, but also mimes—with its references to flash and seizure—photography's impact and cognitive effects. Considering Kacyzne's and Vorobeichic's images today, the task for historians and viewers is to separate out the backshadowing nostalgia, to grasp the pictures' meaning for their time, and to seize the pictures' import for our own "moment of [diasporic] danger." Such preservation projects are themselves testimonies, not only to the desire to preserve a history, but also to the tensions of ongoing change.
Photographs especially—easily reproduced and recirculated—not only testify to a particular moment, they also have an extensive future life that expands the terrain of photographic historiography and memory. This phenomenon, what photo theorist Ariella Azoulay calls "the event of photography," encompasses the conditions of photographic capture—photographer, camera, image subjects—as well as viewers, which inflects the pictures' later viewing and the histories they disclose. Unlike backshadowing—where pictures are read through the imposition of a later history—the event of photography kindles a different sort of modern memory: the event worth photographing and how it might be deployed.
The 1920s and early 1930s augured well for the Jews of the Poland and the western Soviet Union or former Pale. As a protected minority in Poland and a recognized ethnic nationality in the USSR, the Jewish population in these regions enjoyed greater social and geographic mobility. Many people left their rural villages and moved to cities, where they joined the expanding Bundist proletariat and growing Jewish middle class. Jewish art and culture flourished. Their achievements extended across literature, poetry, film, theater, music and the visual arts. In the Soviet Union, Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, and Natan Altman infused their modernist styles with Jewish content, thereby declaring both continuity and a new expressiveness for Judaism in a revolutionary sphere. In Poland, Bruno Schulz addressed the challenges of Jewish modernization in his pictures, while Yankel Adler and others who formed the Lodz-based Yung-yidish group promoted the production of a modern Jewish art.
As promising as these activities were, Jewish optimism—in all sectors—was also fraught with ambivalence. Educational and professional opportunities widened, but limitations remained. The urge to emigrate that had characterized the previous three decades continued, even as the most desired North American destinations closed their doors. Zionist commitments grew at the same time, and after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, thousands of Jews emigrated to Palestine to develop a Jewish state. By that time, Jewish aid organizations such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the Joint Jewish Distribution Committee (JDC) had been established to alleviate the deprivations of the poor and to enable the numbers trying to leave Europe. For Jews, then, the interwar period paradoxically saw both increased national consciousness and an intensified sense of diaspora, as the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were consciously bound to their émigré relatives in Palestine and North America. Even if they were not planning their own departures—and many, especially on the Jewish political left, were not—family and community contact was maintained through letters and visits, and on a broader level, bolstered by cultural exchange and the international Jewish press. Kacyzne's and Vorobeichic's photographs bear witness to the opportunities and uncertainties of these decades.
There was some precedent for Kacyzne's documentary images and the meanings they evoked. The best-known is the work of writer and radical S. An-sky (1863–1920) (figure 1.3), who in 1912 and 1913 toured the shtetlekh of the former Jewish Pale with an ethnographic team that included his young nephew Solomon Iudovin as photographer (figures 1.4, 1.5). The expedition's three journeys were meant to collect and preserve the artifacts, customs, music, and images of a traditional provincial Jewish life/4 But An-sky also envisioned the project as the basis for Jewish renewal, an inspirational and educational collection that would encourage a modern Jewish future. Sponsored by Baron Naftali Horace Guenzburg and the Historical-Ethnographic Society of St. Petersburg, the project ended with the outbreak of the WWI, and the collected materials were presented as a small exhibit in St Petersburg.
One might see An-sky's personal trajectory from Talmudic scholar to radical socialist to Jewish nationalist and Yiddish writer as emblematic of the disruptive and transformative energies within Jewish communities in the later decades of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth. As was true of Ahad Ha'am and Simon Dubnow, neither rejection of Judaism nor assimilation was an option for modernizing Jews. Acknowledging his own ambivalent path at a celebration in his honor in St. Petersburg in 1910, An-sky described himself as having led a "broken, severed, ruptured" life "on the borders between two worlds." The tensions of Jewish modernity resonate through An-sky's texts. The Yiddish title of his best known work, The Dybbuk (1920), includes the phrase Between Two Worlds (Tsvishn tsvey veltn [Der dibek])—a reference to the realm of restless spirits in the story wandering between the living and the dead, but also a metaphor for a new Jewish condition, poised between tradition and modernity. Key figures in other An-sky tales like Behind a Mask (1909) or The Sins of Youth (1910) fill the dissenting world of the maskilim with a mixture of anger, excitement, and anticipation of broader horizons ahead. In this tumultuous cultural frame, the ethnographic project and its photographic component was a repository ofJewish folklore—which An-sky deemed, in part, an "Oral Torah"—meant to enable study and revitalization of a Jewish past.
Like An-sky's goals, Kacyzne's and Vorobeichic's projects were intended for widespread Jewish audiences. As self-images of a people—Jewish photographers photographing Jewish subjects for Jewish viewers—they are formulations of a Jewish social, cultural, ethnic—and implicitly national—identity, and as collections to be viewed through mass media rather than only visits to institutional sites, they describe in images what Benedict Andersen calls "imagined community"—that is, community based in national consciousness rather than fixed territory. Stressing the effectiveness of print culture to the formation of that consciousness, Anderson notes George William Friedrich Hegel's characterization of reading the daily paper as a modern ritual "substitute for morning prayers." "Each communicant," he writes—and the description is certainly apt for these Jewish projects—"is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.... What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?"
Photography was quickly annexed to print technology; the weekly rotogravure sections of papers like the New York Forverts were eagerly anticipated and seemed to concretize the "now-ness" of press accounts (figure 1.6). As visual presentations of a Jewish society circulated through print media well beyond their points of origin, we might say that Kacyzne's and Vorobeichic's photographic projects perform a cultural task, what Homi Bhabha, in a literary context, labels "narrating-a-nation." And like national epics, novels, or tales of panoramic social sweep, these collections selectively celebrate, critique, and render iconic aspects of Jewish identity and community life.
The concept of nation-narration for these images is especially useful for modern Jewish diaspora because it can speak to the ambivalence that, Bhabha writes, "haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it." National consciousness, he argues, both cherishes its history and repudiates elements of its past. To accommodate this ambivalence, nation-narration is riven with polemic, it overdetermines its anxiety in stereotypes, and its emphases can be signposts of tension and disjuncture as well as strength. From a position of diaspora, with its varying degrees of assimilation and difference, the process of forming national consciousness may be even more ambivalent and complex. However uneasy their position among the Gentiles, overthrow of an imperial or occupying oppressor was not the diasporic position Jews sought.
Following WWI, Jewish self-consciousness as a diaspora people was underscored—encouraged as well as daunted—by the burgeoning nationalisms of newly constituted states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania. The tensions of diaspora loomed large. It is worth repeating Simon Dubnow's earlier invocation ofJewish national survival.
In order to strengthen the Diaspora, we will use the weapons of national struggle which served us for thousands of years and which are adapted to the world view of our time. You ask what wall shall we erect in place of the fallen ghetto walls. Every period has its own architecture, and the powerful vital instinct will unmistakably tell the people what style to use for building the wall of national autonomy which will replace the former religious 'fence to the fence,' and will not at the same time shut out the flow of world culture.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Looking Jewish by Carol Zemel. Copyright © 2015 Carol Zemel. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
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