"... like a home movie of a vanished world"

Vibrant works offer visual keys to culture

By Robert Taylor
Contra Costa Times

September 13/2007T

"Scene by scene, street by street, family by family, the paintings nearly come to life on the museum's walls, creating something like a home movie of a vanished world."

THE MAGNES MUSEUM in Berkeley is offering a distinctive exhibit that is as much history and sociology as art: "They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust." The museum's main galleries are filled with 65 paintings, just a portion of the output of Canadian resident Mayer Kirshenblatt, who is now 91 years old.

Kirshenblatt arrived in Canada with his family in 1934 at the age of 17. He taught himself to paint when he was in his 70s. Beginning in the 1990, he painted detailed scenes of everything he could remember about Apt, the town where he spent his childhood.

Scene by scene, street by street, family by family, the paintings nearly come to life on the museum's walls, creating something like a home movie of a vanished world.

Whatever Kirshenblatt's skills as a painter -- the figures are often rudimentary, perspectives flattened -- his recalled details are precise, colorful and emotional. There are many scenes of Jewish religious life, family gatherings, birth, death and civic events, and even civic scandals.

Kirshenblatt's written recollections, posted with many of the paintings, add to the richness and poignancy of the exhibit. A fish market scene brings this comment: "Would you believe? The wife of one of the richest men in town was a kleptomaniac. She would steal a fish and hide it in her bosom."

His painted stories extend beyond his own years in Poland. Kirshenblatt describes one scene: "Khiel the Brunet (he was actually a redhead) dressed his son in white pajamas to fool the Angel of Death. But, when the Nazis arrived, the white pajamas did not save him."

Of the 5,200 Jews living in Apt on the eve of World War II, he says, only 300 survived. Kirshenblatt based two paintings on works by Goya and called them "Slaughter of the Innocents." Another tells a fragment of his family's story: "Execution of Grandmother on the Road to Sandomierz, 1942."

Reach Robert Taylor at 925-977-8428 or [email protected].

JUDAH L. MAGNES MUSEUM: "They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust," through Jan. 13, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sundays-Wednesdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays, 2911 Russell St., Berkeley, $4-$6, 510-549-6950, http://www.magnes.org.