A Critical Appreciation

"Thirty Years After the World Vanished" is a sensitive selection of the art that defies the Holocaust. Here for rejoicing and renewal are the reflexes of a life, a Chayim, which sustains possessions but is not sustained by them.

[Click either the graphic "thumbnail" or the title. Links from the artist's name lead to more resources about him on the WWW.]

Boris Deutsch's Village Fiddler
is no plastic music box,
but a David of the shtetl
playing the available harp.
The melody is a midrash of
harmony for ears not attuned to discord.

 

Ilya Schor's Fiddler
is to the outside world what
Deutsch's is to the inner.
It is a public statement.
It is a woodcut that creates trees
where a bird can sing a dove-song, Peace.

 

Solomon Yudovin's Maggid
is a bit of a popinjay.
He is the preacher-poseur-coxcomb
who postures and orates
while others study and pray.
The prayer is an action
and his posing is a farce.

 

Joseph Budko's Kishinev
is in the style of Munch.
It is violence,
the smell of flesh seared -
- the lip-tasted ashes.
It is warning. It screams.

 

David Bekkor's Ritual Bath
is the cleansing
that affirms innocence;
it is old wives' tales
for the new wife triumphant.
It is hoary age growing young
at the breast of rebirth.
It is time recreating itself.

 

E. M. Lilien's Double Portrait
reminds us that even
the wise man needs his sage.
The older, more humbled body
has a unique stature;
its half-closed eyes
view eons beyond objects.
What the younger man studies
the older man has become.

 

Hermann Struck's Merchant
sells dreams with discards.
He salvages his livelihood
with salvaged goods.
Regarded as a discard by the others,
he knows his own values
as he knows his wares.
He is selling dreams to buy herring,
which is something to dream about.

 

David Labcovski's Drayman
is an assistant to a horse
and an appendage to a wagon.
He is Tevyeh waiting
for a messianic Sabbath
of fish and meat and fowl, as he hungers.
He is a life force concealed,
his weakness covering his strength.
He is survivor all the way, uphill.

 

Jakob Steinhard's Streetscene
is the elongation of a psalmic shadow.
It is the pathway which leads
only to Jerusalem.|
His black-staring window-eyes
admit only visions.
Realities are Cossacks and SS men.

 

Todros Geller's Yidl Mitn Fidl
is an organizing of disparate spaces
into composition.
It is impact. It forces a tune out
of cacophony.
Hear -- the civilizing of violence.

 

Julius Turner's Day After Day
is a parade of prayer
being taken home.
It is landscape under Divine spell,
men being propelled
by the Wind of God.

 

William Gropper's Dance
is a ballet of books
and ritual fringes.
It is a Sinai song
composed on a tablet of stone.
It has the fiddle,
the shofar of the shtetl,
accompanied by ecstatic man.
The men and books and fringes
are flying not because they levitate,
but because the world,
"the world that has vanished,"
has sunk beneath them.

Rabbi William Mordecai Kramer
Professor, California State University at Northridge