One Tale, Many Ways To Tell It
“A Historical Chronicle: The Life of the European Jew in the 20th Century,” an exhibit that runs until September 18 at the Krasdale Gallery in White Plains, N.Y., depicts the rocky journey of Eastern European Jews from the shtetl to the concentration camps to modern-day Israel. The show consists of drawings, collages, photography and sketches, all by prominent Jewish artists: Roman Vishniac, Aaron Morgan, Tamar Hirschl, Elias Mandel Grossman, Abel Pann, Saul Raskin and Reba Rottenberg. Each brings to the canvas a deep responsibility to the past.
The journey begins with Vishniac in the cities and shtetls of prewar Eastern Europe, where Jews are involved in everyday activities — learning Torah, trading gifts, farming — strikingly unaware of the lurking tragedy. In Morgan’s work, Vishniac’s subjects meet their fate: Mounds of gaunt, naked bodies obscure their faces. Hirschl’s Israeli “Cities” collages, though more hopeful, present an abstract view of the Holy Land, a crossroad of Eastern Europe and the modernized West. It is Rottenberg’s “Angst” however, a Jewish face fading onto a gray backdrop, that may best represent the sense of an uncertain Jewish future that pervades the exhibit.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
