They Called Me Mayer July

Painting a Jewish Memory Book

May 29th, 2009
Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. pbs.org

The Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust by Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

by Juliana Ochs Dweck

“Hey! There was a big world out there before the Holocaust,” Mayer Kirshenblatt calls out in his recent book about Jewish life in Poland before World War II.

Passover Seder at My Paternal Grandfather’s, 1992

In 1990, when Kirshenblatt was 73, he began to draw to ensure that people would remember how Eastern European Jews once flourished before so many perished. At the urging of his family, he sketched his memories of life in Apt (Opatów in Polish), the small town he grew up in before World War II and eventually left. He painted his mother and the town’s wigmaker, men praying in the besmedresh (study house), and prostitutes in the marketplace. As a child, Kirshenblatt spent his mornings in kheder (Hebrew school) and his afternoons in the town’s Polish public school, but he devoted almost as much time to playing hooky and exploring everyday activity in Apt. In an exceptional exhibition and ambitious companion book of the same title, They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust (University of California Press), we join Kirshenblatt as a young boy. We go on meandering walks with him, taking in the spectacle of the livestock market, eavesdropping on gossiping women, inspecting the components of a shoe and the workings of a whistle.

Timeout Kids recommends the Mayer July exhibition

Time Out New York Kids / Issue 43 : May 1–31, 2009

The Jewish Museum presents an exhibition of paintings by Mayer Kirshenblatt, based on his childhood memories of prewar Poland.

Boy with Herring (Mayer Kirshenblatt, 1993). Photograph: Courtesy of The Jewish Museum

Your little genius can’t remember where he put his backpack five minutes ago, but Mayer Kirshenblatt, 93, recalls minute details from his childhood in Apt (now Opatów), Poland.

At age 73 Kirshenblatt taught himself to paint and began composing scenes based on his early memories for his daughter, Barbara, who’d requested stories about his youth. Dozens of his works will be on view starting this month at the Jewish Museum.

Wiser than God vs Younger than Jesus, Mayer featured in exhibition of artists over 83

Expect a ferocious battle of the generations raging across New York's Bowery . . . As two group exhibitions pitch the very centuries against each other.

At The New Museum a show entitled "Younger Than Jesus" gathers artists born in or after 1976, making them 33 at oldest . . .

Directly across from the museum at BLT Gallery, 270 Bowery, 2nd Floor, New York, 212 260 4129

"Wiser Than God" presents worldwide working artists born in or before 1926, making them 83 at very youngest . . .

Some are considerably older, many born before the First World War, and several are amongst the most famous artists at work today including Hyman Bloom, Dorothea Tanning and Carlo Nangeroni, currently the most expensive living artist.

Indeed with a set of artists whose cumulative age might add up to a total of almost 5,000 years, the opening vernissage should hop.

"Wiser Than God" runs from May 27th until July 31st overlapping with the current blockbuster Gagosian Picasso show, featuring work made by that artist between the age of 83 and 92.

Paint What You Can Remember (Namaluj co pamietasz), new film just released

Slawomir Grunberg (LogTV) has just completed a 30-minutes documentary about Mayer. Copies can be purchased directly from LogTV or at The Jewish Museum's gift shop. Here is the synopsis.

Mayer Kirshenblatt left Poland for Canada in 1934. Fifty-six years later, at age 73 Mayer began to paint his childhood memories of prewar life in Opatow. Before Second World War Opatow (or Apt in Yiddish) had 10 thousand inhabitants, more than half of them Jewish. Nowadays, little is remembered of the shtetl character of the town and of its Jewish population wiped out entirely by the Holocaust.

When in the summer of 2007 91 year old Mayer came to Opatow and organized a public showing of the images he paints, he was welcomed with incredible enthusiasm. The town officials were astounded by the reaction of the crowd, as no event had ever attracted so many people, who simply could not get enough of Mayer’s stories about a lost Jewish world. Today, there are no Jews living in Opatow and there are hardly any signs of its Jewish heritage.

"...a truly remarkable book"

Katherine R. Jolluck reviews They Called Me Mayer July in Biography 31:4 (2008):756-758.

This is a truly remarkable book—as are the story of its making and the world that inspired it. Through descriptions, anecdotes, sketches, and paintings, Mayer Kirshenblatt recreates the daily life and culture of a small Jewish city in Poland before the Holocaust. It is a world remarkable in part because of its complete destruction by the Nazis, but also because of the richness of its characters and customs. “What I’m trying to say,” Kirshenblatt explains, “is ‘Hey! There was a big world out there before the Holocaust. There was a rich cultural life in Poland as I knew it’” (353). He fulfills his mission with insight, affection, and vibrancy...This is a truly valuable creation—informative, colorful, moving, funny, and at times, sad...With this book, Kirshenblatt restores and celebrates the life and culture that characterized prewar Apt, ensuring that others can share some part of it, long after he and the other surviving inhabitants have passed away. Read whole review.
.

"...extensive, engaging historical and artistic contribution to Jewish culture and Polish history, as well as the ethnography of memory and the art of narrative"

Barbara Rylko-Bauer reviews They Called Me Mayer July in Anthropological Quarterly 8:2 (2008):505-509.

"...Through his recollections and stories, illustrated with over 200 paintings and drawings, full of remarkable details of daily communal life, Mayer Kirshenblatt offers us a unique window onto a world that no longer exists. And it is this latter fact that also makes this book an important contribution to our under standing of the Holocaust and the degree to which it succeeded in erasing a life-way, a culture, a history, a community..." Read whole review.

"...mediating youthful experience through adult recall..."

Carol Zemel reviews They Called Me Mayer July in a special issue of Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal 14:1 (2009):154-160, dedicated to fathers and daughters. Reprinted with permission. Subscribe to Bridges.

Like Herman Melville's "Call Me Ishmael," the salutary title of Mayer Kirshenblatt's They Called Me Mayer July sounds a ringing introduction to the figure who will guide us through a lively personal and cultural history. Though this is the story of a man looking back (Kirshenblatt was 91 when the book was published), the tale is told through the character of an adventurous, hot-headed (hence the nickname, after July's heat), and inquisitive adolescent—just the sort of guide the reader/viewer wants...Mediating youthful experience through adult recall, pictures like this invite careful perusal and discovery, and so demonstrate the importance of images in the formation of memory and memoir. Read whole review .

NYT declares Mayer July at The Jewish Museum an "extraordinary exhibition"

New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/arts/design/08july.html

May 8, 2009
ART REVIEW
From Memory to Canvas, Lost Way of Life in Poland

By ROBERTA SMITH

Sometimes it takes a family, and a persistent one at that. So it was with Mayer Kirshenblatt, a reluctant painter and accidental memoirist whose words and images form an extraordinary exhibition at the Jewish Museum.

“They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust” contains nearly 70 canvases and a dozen works on paper. Nearly all depict scenes of Jewish (and some gentile) life in between-the-wars Poland with a charming combination of poignancy and precision.

Mayer in Yiddish on YouTube

Check out Mayer in Yiddish on youtube. Will be posting regularly. First video is The Hunchback's Wedding.

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.