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

Polish translation of They Called Me Mayer July

We are delighted that They Called Me Mayer July will appear in Polish. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw) bought the translation rights. The Polish translation should appear by the end of 2011.

Barbara will make an illustrated presentation about the Museum of the History of Polish Jews on Wednesday May 6, 6:30 pm at Temple Emanu-El, One East 65th Street, NYC.
http://www.emanuelnyc.org/calendar_detail.php?event_id=244209

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is dedicated to presenting a millenium of the history and civilization of Polish Jews in the very place where they lived and died. Barbara is head of the international core exhibition planning team and will present recent developments in the creation of the Museum's innovative multimedia narrative exhibition.

Listen to Mayer's cellphone tour of the exhibition and book

Use your cell phone to listen to the artist tell dramatic, humorous, and surprising stories about his paintings. If you are in the exhibition, look for the cell phone symbol. Can't get to the exhibition? Open the book and turn to the page with the picture, as indicated below.

Then, call 510.550.7597 and follow the prompts. To hear a story, press the number for the painting, as indicated below, followed by the # sign. To leave a comment, press 0 # [zero followed by the pound sign] at any time during the tour. To hear other people's comments, press any number from 24 on, followed by the # sign. Many thanks to Shawna Silver, our ace sound editor.

1. Curator’s Introduction
2. Purim Play: The Kraków Wedding, p. 34
3. Town Panorama, pp. 16-17
4. Market Day, pp.91, 237, 108
5. Butcher Carrying a Calf, p. 110
6. Jadźka the Prostitute Shows off her Wares at the End of Market Day at Harshl Kishke’s Well, p. 123
7. The Kleptomaniac Slipping a Fish Down Her Bosom, p. 127
8. Boy with Herring, p. 6
9. Boy in the White Pajamas, p. 252
10. Slaughter of the Innocents I: Execution of My Father’s Family at Szydłowiec, 1942, p. 184, 185
11. Mother Giving Birth to My Brother Vadye, p. 190
12. Jadwiga Washing Laundry, p. 226
13. Stealing the Laundry, p. 228
14. Mother Blessing the Sabbath Candles, p. 210
15. Simchas Torah, p. 69
16. Reading Psalms before the Expulsion, p. 61
17. Synagogue Interior, p. 51
18. Shaving the Corpse, p. 26
19. The Black Wedding in the Cemetery, 1892, p. 14
20. The Hunchback’s Wedding, p. 324
21. Funeral of the Father of my Christian Friend, pp. 80-81
22. Iłża series, pp. 172, 175, 176, 177
23. Leaving series, pp. 346, 349, 451

From the blogosphere

Lance Strate's Blog Time Passing posts the article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Luanne comments: "Mayer Kirshenblatt's work is brilliant! I gasped - for me, always a good sign. Blessings to his daughter for encouraging his work. Thank you for sharing."

Order They Called Me Mayer July

Intimate, humorous, and refreshingly candid, this extraordinary work is a remarkable record--in both words and images--of Jewish life in a Polish town before World War II as seen through the eyes of an inquisitive boy. Mayer Kirshenblatt, who was born in 1916 and left Poland for Canada in 1934, taught himself to paint at age 73. Since then, he has made it his mission to remember the world of his childhood in living color, "lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived."

This volume presents his lively paintings woven together with a marvelous narrative created from interviews that took place over forty years between Mayer and his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Together, father and daughter draw readers into a lost world--we roam the streets and courtyards of the town of Apt, witness details of daily life, and meet those who lived and worked there: the pregnant hunchback, who stood under the wedding canopy just hours before giving birth; the khayder teacher caught in bed with the drummer's wife; the cobbler's son, who was dressed in white pajamas all his life to fool the angel of death; the corpse that was shaved; and the couple who held a "black wedding" in the cemetery during a cholera epidemic.

This moving collaboration--a unique blend of memoir, oral history, and artistic interpretation--is at once a labor of love, a tribute to a distinctive imagination, and a brilliant portrait of life in one Jewish home town.

To pre-order:

USA: University of California Press 800-777-4726 (toll free), 800-999-1958 (fax), or world wide, wherever books are sold.

Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust. University of California Press. Copublished with the Judah L. Magnes Museum. ISBN: 978-0-520-24961-5.  Hardcover with jacket: 411 pages, 196 color illustrations, 11 black and white drawings, 2 maps