They Called Me Mayer July

Award for Mayer July Acoustiguide from American Association of Museums

We are thrilled that the audioguide for the exhibition They Called Me Mayer July: A Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust at The Jewish Museum (NYC) has just received an award from the American Association of Museums (AAM) for outstanding achievement in museum media and technology. 

You can hear parts of it here:
 http://www.thejewishmuseum.org/site/pages/mayer-july-onlinefeature.html

Bravo to The Jewish Museum!

Canadian premiere of Paint What You Can Remember, Tuesday April 20

Paint What You Remember Tuesday April 20 at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival! At noon, with Shawna Silver, Mayer's granddaughter presenting.
http://www.tjff.com/film-info.php?id=66&sortby=date&filterby=

Lives Lived: Mayer in the Globe and Mail

 Mayer Kirshenblatt was known as Mayer July, the hotheaded boy from Apt. His children called him Mayer Wildfire. While he spent most of his childhood in Polish public school and kheyder (Jewish school), he would rather watch the blacksmith at his anvil or the town kleptomaniac slip a live fish down her bosom. His real school was the town, which he would immortalize in words and images later in life.

Mayer’s father, Avner, left for Canada in 1928 for economic reasons. Mayer stayed in Poland with his mother, Rivka, and his three brothers. Hoping for work in a Toronto shoe factory, Mayer apprenticed with a shoemaker, but quit because all he did was carry the shoemaker’s baby around and empty the slop bucket. In 1934, Mayer finally arrived in Canada with his family and went to work in a sweatshop. After falling asleep at the sewing machine – he had stayed out late the night before – and running his finger under the needle, he turned to house painting. In the late 1940s, he opened his own wallpaper and paint store.

Anna Sheftel reviews Mayer July

Anna Sheftel, “'Review of Kirshenblatt and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July’.” Oral History Forum d’histoire orale 29 (2009), Special Issue “Remembering Family, Analyzing Home: Oral History and the Family"
 http://www.oralhistoryforum.ca/index.php/ohf/article/viewPDFInterstitial/42/65

Bonny V. Fetterman reviews Mayer July in Reform Judaism Online, Spring 2010

Having recently returned from a trip to the Polish town of my mother’s childhood, I was eager to see Mayer Kirshenblatt’s paintings of Jewish life in prewar Poland on exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. I immediately recognized buildings and landscapes I had seen on the trip—the small, square houses surrounding the town square, ruins of once impressive, multi-tiered synagogues—but the exhibition instantly filled me with joy because Mayer Kirshenblatt’s paintings put the people back in a panoramic view of life before the Holocaust.

At once naive and sophisticated, Kirshenblatt’s art captures the energy and diversity of life as it was lived in prewar Apt (Opatów in Polish), a shtetl in southern Poland. Shunning nostalgia for accuracy, the paintings are rich in ethnographic detail and show every area of activity, some with the artist as a blue-clad schoolboy looking on. The 93-year-old Toronto artist, who started painting in his seventies, is becoming internationally known; his work was recently exhibited at the Galician Jewish Museum in Kraków.

The text of this book, which includes 200 full color reproductions, represents another kind of achievement. Each painting tells a story, evoking memories of people, trades, and events. Mayer Kirshenblatt collaborated with his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a scholar of Eastern European Jewish culture and folklore, on a captivating text recording his almost encyclopedic range of memories of the town up to 1934, the year he departed for Canada.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who co-authored Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland with Lucjan Dobroszychi, a book based on the photographic collection of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, comments on her father’s art: “Until Mayer’s paintings, all my images of Jewish life in Poland were black and white because all of them were from photographs,” she writes. “That world, thanks to Mayer’s paintings, was now emerging in vibrant color.” Kirshenblatt’s extraordinary visual memory, humor, and love can revivify this world for us all.

http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1557

Amy Shuman reviews Mayer July

Amy Shuman, Western Folklore 2/3 (2009): 384-387.

They Called Me Mayer July is one of those rare multi-genre productions that works at multiple levels, as narrative and counter-narrative, tableau, portrait, and memoir, interposing the everyday and the ordinary into life story. Through paintings and personal narratives, Mayer Kirshenblatt describes his childhood experience of Jewish life in Apt, Poland before World War II. It is a portrait of a community destroyed by the Nazis, but Kirshenblatt's portraits do not focus on destruction. As he says, he painted his portraits, "lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived." The narratives are multiply dialogic, produced in dialogue with Mayer's daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (who also wrote an afterword to the book) and in dialogue with the paintings and with both the lived and the destroyed past. Although deeply personal, the personal and the community stories are not separable, and neither works as a simple chronology. The personal story is created out of retrospective reflection that requires the reader to shift positions through the reading. Only in the second half of the book do we learn the reason for Mayer Kirshenblatt's father's absence, his departure to Canada after losing his business inventory in a train wreck, an event that brought Mayer to Canada before the Nazis came. This story, linking Apt and Toronto seemingly inexorably, is suddenly fragile. Mayer Kirshenblatt could as easily have stayed in Apt. These are not just an immigrant's memories. They are the accumulated stories of the displaced or murdered Jewish residents of Apt: in telling them, Mayer Kirshenblatt is both witness and memoirist.

Mayer z"l: The unfinished painting

 It is now two months since Mayer died. He was 93 years old. Mayer lived life long and well. He left us much to celebrate, even as we mourn the loss. During the shiva I took this photo of his studio.

You can sign the Memorial Book for him here.

Mayer featured in the Globe and Mail, February 1, 2010, in Lives Lived

Watch for the story! Will post it here. Mayer would have been thrilled.

Mayer July exhibition opens at the National Yiddish Book Center in April 2010

An exhibition of digital prints of Mayer's paintings, accompanied by an audio guide in English, Polish, and Yiddish, will travel in North America starting with the National Yiddish Book Center in New Hampshire (April 2010) and Brandeis University in Boston (fall 2010). The exhibition started in Mayer's home town, Opatów, with the help of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and was reinstalled at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Kazimierz. The GJM is traveling the exhibition. Stay tuned! 

Mayer July opens in Amsterdam June 3, 2010

We are thrilled that They Called Me Mayer July will open at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam June 3, 2010. Stay tuned for details!