They Called Me Mayer July

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.

"...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.
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"...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.

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.

AP praises Mayer's paintings for their "vivid detail" and "innocent charm"

May 19, 6:35 AM EDT
Jewish childhood in Poland before the Holocaust

By ANN LEVIN
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- Call him the Polish-Jewish Grandma Moses.

Like the renowned American folk artist who launched her career in her 70s, Mayer Kirshenblatt didn't start painting until he was 73. Since then, the 92-year-old Toronto resident has painted hundreds of canvases that evoke the vanished world of Jewish life in small-town Poland before the Holocaust.

More than 80 paintings and drawings by the self-taught artist can be seen at The Jewish Museum in an exhibition that is striking for its vivid detail, innocent charm and folkloric quality.

Praise from The Forward!

The Power of White Pajamas: The Angel of Death is cheated by a wily rabbi. Toy theater by Jennifer Romaine and Great Small Works, with Mayer Kirshenblatt

Mayer Before the Nightmare

By Dan Friedman
Published May 20, 2009, issue of May 29, 2009.

Born in 1916 in Opatów (Apt in Yiddish), Poland, Mayer Kirshenblatt was 73 when he began to paint, but his pictures have the sunny guilelessness of a peaceful childhood in Poland.

They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust, currently at the Jewish Museum in New York, is an expanded version of the one accompanying Kirshenblatt’s 2007 book of the same name at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, Calif.

"an absolute treasure...an amazing accomplishment..."

One for the Books: Recent Jewish Nonfiction

Mary Louise Ruehr

October 10, 2008 recordpub.com
http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4442 453

"They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust" by Mayer Kirshenblatt and his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, is an absolute treasure. Kirshenblatt's paintings are simplistic but colorful. "I consider myself a storehouse of memories," he says. His pictures bring to life the people in a small Jewish town in Poland before World War II. (His family left Poland in 1934.) This is a remarkable view of a lost world. "The places I remember exist no more," he says. "They are only in my head, and if I die they will disappear with me." He shows everyday life at home, in the town square, inside the synagogue, in school, at worship, at play, in celebration. And he brings us the people -- the fire brigade, the water-carrier, the chimney sweep, gypsies. Plus, he tells wonderful stories: "After an animal had been butchered, it had to be sold quickly because there was no refrigeration. Even if a housewife were short of money, the butcher would give her credit so that he could get rid of the meat. (But he) could not read or write. To keep track of his transactions, he would mark the name and the sum on his boots with chalk, in his own signs, and he would know who owed him what. But on Friday, since he had to clean his boots before going to the synagogue, he would go around collecting his debts. Once they were settled, he could clean his boots and erase the whole bookkeeping." This is an amazing accomplishment and makes an absorbing read. His pictures and stories just took me right into another world.

"...Kirshenblatt's memory is priceless"

Florence Waszkelewicz Clowes, Polish American Journal 96,12 (2007):20.

At the encouragement of his daughter, Mayer Kirshenblatt began drawing memories of his hometown in Poland, in 1990, when he was seventy-four years old. His memories of the early years as a child in the town are reflected in his Grandma Moses-style drawings, as are his writings of a time and place long gone.