San Francisco Chronicle: 3-page spread!

Mayer July: Self-taught painter, 91, maps a Jewish life now lost

Jessica Werner Zack, Special to The San Francisco Chronicle

Friday, September 14, 2007

When Mayer Kirshenblatt, at age 73, put a paintbrush to canvas for the first time, he was motivated less by a creative impulse than a desire to finally appease his daughter Barbara, who had been pleading with him for years to paint what he could remember of his Jewish childhood in pre-war Poland.

"She just kept cracking the whip, begging me, and her husband, an artist, was buying me paper, brushes, supplies," Kirshenblatt recalls. "They wanted so badly for me to paint my life as it was and show them everything that is now gone."

"It's true; it was a 10-year-long campaign. The whole family got involved," says Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, an anthropologist and professor of Judaic studies at New York University. "Somehow in my bones I just knew my father had it in him. I knew he had an unusually visual intelligence."

Kirshenblatt's only prior art experience, aside from his career as a Toronto housepainter and furniture restorer, had been a still-life drawing class his wife signed him up for one winter at Century Village, a senior community in Boca Raton, Fla. ("I call it my green pepper period," he says with a laugh.) Yet he relented to the family pressure on the occasion of his 50th wedding anniversary, in 1990, by painting a small, delicately rendered watercolor of himself as a young boy in his mother's kitchen in Opatów (pronounced Apt in Yiddish).

The small town in southern Poland, where he was born in 1916 and lived until emigrating to Canada in 1934, was an industrious yet poor city of 10,000 during Kirshenblatt's childhood that, like similar towns across Eastern Europe, was decimated during World War II. Approximately 300 of Apt's 6,000 Jews survived the Holocaust.

"I started with the kitchen because Barbara had always asked what it was like in the old country. Little did I know that once I started painting, I wouldn't be able to stop."

Seventeen years and more than 250 paintings later, Kirshenblatt, who turned 91 last week, was in the Bay Area for the opening of "They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood before the Holocaust" at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. The first major exhibition dedicated to his work in the United States will tour next year to museums in Atlanta, New York and Amsterdam.

The 65 paintings on display, and 100 additional works reproduced in the companion publication from University of California Press, are vivid proof that using a memory is the best way to keep it. Kirshenblatt's body of work is a detailed visual geography of his life before the age of 17, which he has created from the inside out starting with his family's two-room home and then branching out to their courtyard, the "Jewish Street," marketplace, river and Apt's surrounding countryside.

Kirshenblatt says: "It's stimulating to try to remember so much; it helps me remember even more. I have no imagination. I close my eyes and walk myself through Apt in my mind."

His style suggests a self-taught artist's emphasis on subject matter over technique, a simplicity incorporating the iconography of Jewish legend and the characters of shtetl life borrowed from his favorite painter, Marc Chagall. Apt's colorful rabbis, craftsmen, water-carriers, prostitutes, thieves and scribes could have stepped right out of stories by Yiddish writers Isaac Bashevis Singer or Sholom Aleichem.

"Let me tell you a story," Kirshenblatt says repeatedly while walking slowly through the Magnes exhibition, taking his interviewer's hand in his stout fingers, which are painfully swollen from arthritis that makes fine brushwork an increasing challenge. He stops before a painting depicting a pregnant hunchback bride and explains that an emigre from Apt had returned from America a prosperous man but found his handicapped daughter's "stomach getting bigger. Well, he convinced a guy to marry her and she gave birth 20 minutes after saying her vows."

Kirshenblatt tips his hat at an image of his teenage girlfriend's balcony, where the teenage Mayer hid from her father, who disliked him for not wearing the Jewish boy's compulsory hat. A self-described "odd, rebellious kid," Kirshenblatt was called Mayer Tamez "because tamez in Yiddish is July, and in the hottest month of the year everyone goes crazy."

In another image, a corpse's beard is shaved on rabbinic orders that God see the impious man as he was in life. Religious themes permeate his work, yet Kirshenblatt says, "My parents were secular. We kept kosher, of course. It was tradition."

"He's helped us see in color a world that was previously only known in black and white from old photographs," says Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, citing the documentary work of Russian photographer Roman Vishniac that serves as inspiration for her father when occasionally even his remarkable memory falters. Even before her father started painting, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett says she "knew he remembered everything visually from all of our interviews."

She began recording their conversations 40 years ago when she first become fascinated with Yiddish folklore as a college student. (She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Jewish storytelling traditions in her father's Toronto neighborhood.) As detail-oriented as her father, she says, "I had so many questions for him about his life in Poland and he seemed to remember everything. I would ask, 'How did the baker use his oven? What did the water-carrier look like? How do you make a shoe? Bind a book? Bridle a horse?' And when words failed he would put pencil to paper and clarify with a drawing."

Kirshenblatt is fond of saying there is nothing about life in Apt that does not fascinate him. He sees his work as a "memory artist" as a positive, life-affirming corrective to the insistent focus on loss that Holocaust survivors and scholars alike perpetuate.

"I go to the Jewish Community Center to work out four or five times a week, and 98 percent of the men there are (Holocaust) survivors. Well, like men anywhere when we get together we talk about cars and women, but with them before we know it we are back in the concentration camps, back on the death march, back in the trains. And I think to myself, 'There was a life before all of that.'

"It is my mission to teach people what life was like before the war. We were poor, but we had culture, people with various professions, industry, and it is no more and never will be again. What was most important about it? Life itself!"

As a young man in Toronto in the '40s, Kirshenblatt remembers reading of the Nazi atrocities with disbelief, "sure that it must be war-time propaganda." The worst was confirmed in 1946 when his father (who had also emigrated to Toronto) received a letter informing him of the murder of 47 members of his family who had remained in Poland. "The (Nazis) tied my grandmother to a tree and shot them all in front of her, then shot her too. My father read the letter and immediately had a stroke and never recuperated."

After avoiding the painful subject for years, in 1997 Kirshenblatt painted two gruesome scenes from that letter after seeing Goya's "Disasters of War" at the Prado Museum in Madrid. (Kirshenblatt's "Slaughter of the Innocents" is on view at the Magnes.) In conversation, Kirshenblatt discusses the contradiction that his small town in Europe is a storehouse of painful memories yet has served as lifelong inspiration. "The first time I went to Poland with Barbara I started crying and told her, 'Let's leave.' She said, 'All your life you wanted to see this and you can't wait to leave?' But everything was gone. Everything."

He has since made three more trips to Poland and returns there in his mind several mornings each week when he enters his studio to "remember and remember. I have news for you, it beats television."

In the exhibition's main gallery, he says, "I just thought of what I'm going to do next when I get home. The most important street in Apt is the street with the shops. I want to do a grand view of the town showing all the shops around the marketplace, shop by shop."

They Called Me Mayer July: Through Jan. 13. Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2911 Russell St., Berkeley. (510) 549-6950. www.magnes.org.         

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle