Financial times calls the exhibition "vivid, engagingly autobiographical"

A late trip down memory lane

By Ariella Budick

Published: May 12 2009 22:59 | Last updated: May 12 2009 22:59

For nearly 40 years, Mayer Kirshenblatt ran a paint and wallpaper store in Toronto. If you had assured him then that New York’s Jewish Museum would one day devote a show to his paintings of life in the Polish village where he grew up, he would probably have answered rudely. In fact, there were no such paintings. Kirshenblatt waited until he was 73, retired and depressed, to launch his artistic career. He developed quickly enough to furnish the museum with the vivid, engagingly autobiographical They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust.

Boy with Herring (1992)

Kirshenblatt, now 92, has worried his whole life that his relatives and fellow Jews would be commemorated only for the way they died rather than celebrated for how they lived. Having emigrated to Canada in 1934, he and his family were spared the agony of Europe’s Jews. But many of his friends were not so lucky, and he found that even fleeting exchanges inevitably returned to the Holocaust. “It was as if there was no life before the war,” he has written, “so overshadowed had their memories become by the pain they suffered.”

Kirshenblatt nurtured his own recollections, which predated the Nazi horrors. He remembered the layout of the streets in his native Opatów, the stalls of the weekly fish market, the rich kleptomaniac who secreted fish in her bra, the washing and rinsing of laundry, the way prostitutes hoisted up their dresses to display their wares. In 1967, he began describing these vignettes to his daughter Barbara, who was studying folklore at Berkeley and went on to a distinguished academic career. For decades, she recorded her father’s reminiscences and colluded with the family to buy him brushes, pigments and canvases. But he refused all pleas to commit his memories to paint – until 1990, when he finally unearthed his gifts, both material and internal, and produced a portrait of himself as a child in the family kitchen.

The picture retains an iconic power. A boy in school uniform practices the violin, almost lost in the spacious room. Despite its flat light and naive technique, the accretion of domestic detail rivals a Dutch genre scene. Kirshenblatt’s younger brother reads at a table; their mother turns towards the stove. Across from a jug and washstand is a wall of shelves filled with the family’s fancy dishes. A narrow bed is tucked into a corner. Kirshenblatt combines intricacy with a profound emotional charge. In this magical kitchen, freedom is tempered by cosiness and security coexists with possibility. It’s a safe place from which to launch oneself into the world. The door at the back of the room is left invitingly ajar.

Young Mayer walked through it with determination and hurled himself into the bustle of life in Apt, the town’s Yiddish name, recording its activities with an anthropologist’s eye. In 1921, Apt had 5,462 Jews and 2,365 Christians. “We considered Apt a Jewish town,” Kirshenblatt writes in the show’s catalogue-cum-memoir. “A Jew could live out his whole life in the Jewish community, and many never went beyond the town’s boundaries.”

Though he covers some of the same ground as Chagall and Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kirshenblatt doesn’t have their fondness for fantasy, whimsy or nostalgia. He’s not interested in romanticising the past. Instead, he notes everything down, building by building, room by room, intent on grasping a world of wisps.

Boy in the White Pajamas (1992)

“The places I remember exist no more,” he writes. “They are only in my head, and if I die they will disappear with me. I paint these scenes as I remember them as a little boy looking through the window.”

The colourful, folk-art-inflected paintings act as windows themselves, opening on to the mundane yet lyrical life of a small town between the wars. Kirshenblatt introduces us to all its characters, each of whom had a nifty nickname such as Yosele kliske (Yosl the Little Square Noodle), or Yankele kekl (Yankele the Little Penis). Mayer himself was Mayer tamez, which meant Mayer July, or Crazy Mayer: “People get excited when it’s hot,” he explains, “and I was an excitable kid.”

He often evokes rituals, both scriptural and superstitious. In one scene, young Mayer appears at the house of a pious but sleepy neighbour. The barefoot figures surround a candle – all that protects them from the engulfing darkness. A sense of emergency pervades the painting, but its story makes it mildly comical: on his mother’s instructions, the boy has come to ask the bearded sage to cast the evil eye from his colicky baby brother. The old man mumbles a few words, and by the time Mayer gets home, the baby has fallen asleep.

In small strokes, Mayer assembles a composite portrait of a contained but complicated society. The 500-year-old synagogue plays a central role, enfolding rows of men shrouded in prayer shawls, and casting its stained-glass glow on the dusky square outside. But Kirshenblatt observes the baser side of life with equal care. In one painting, the boy stands in a nightshirt tinged in purple light, urinating into a pail. Kirshenblatt has titled this self-portrait “The Pisher” – the Yiddish equivalent of calling a kid a “squirt” – but he’s not being crude. You can feel the mystery, at once frightening and reassuring, of the pristine bedroom in the middle of the night. It’s a rare artist who can imbue a picture of a boy peeing with such a tender, sanctified air.

Until October 1, tel +1 212 423 3200

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009