They Called Me Mayer July

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.