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Michael Abelman art bright, optimistic

Michael Abelman’s show runs at the Zack until Feb. 16. (photo by Olga Livshin)

A day before Michael Abelman’s art show opened, someone wandered into the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery, looked around, and exclaimed: “How nice. Spring has arrived!” This random comment could serve as a description of the entire show. Bright optimistic flowers bloom on the gallery walls, defying the winter rain outside, encompassing all seasons. It’s hard to believe that the artist only started painting 10 years ago.

“I always loved art,” Abelman told the Independent about his start, “loved visiting museums and galleries. There are wonderful paintings in galleries along Granville Street, but I could never afford them, so I thought I would paint what I like myself.”

His vague wish to create beauty resulted in the birth of an artist, although from his background, one might never guess the exuberance of his floral canvases. By education, Abelman is an accountant; by profession, a salesperson. He grew up in South Africa and immigrated to Canada 20 years ago, together with his partner. He never painted in his native country, but Canada inspired him to start.

“In the beginning, I was really bad for a long time,” he admitted with a smile. “But I never gave up. I learned: studied with Lori Goldberg, took classes at Emily Carr, read textbooks and went to galleries.” And, of course, he painted.

“Studying art was a long, slow progression for me,” he recalled. “Each year, I would get better – maybe one percent. Then, three years ago, I had a big jump in quality. I joined Artists in Our Midst that spring and opened my house to the public.”

He sold several paintings that first year, which seemed like an acknowledgement of his skill, although sales don’t really matter to him. “I enjoy painting. That’s why I do it. If my paintings sell, all the better, but I would do it anyway. I don’t think I’ll ever stop.”

Abelman finds inspiration in the gardens around Vancouver. “I like painting what I see close to home. It’s beautiful here,” he said. “I’ve traveled to Europe, South America and Australia, but I don’t want to paint what I see there. I don’t want to paint Mexico. I want to paint local gardens. My partner, Leon, is a gardener. His garden is wonderful. I painted it one whole year. It motivated me. Leon grows some interesting tropical trees, plants from South Africa. He has a banana tree.”

Several paintings in the exhibition reflect the artist’s vision of his partner’s garden. One of them he even named after the gardener: “Leon’s Garden.”

Verdant greenery and the profusion of flowers of all varieties dominate Abelman’s pictures. Pink roses and red poppies, gorgeous dahlias and coquettish impatiens, slender blush-tinged mallows and exotic orange pokers beckon the viewers to enter the paintings, smell the fragrance, hear the leaves whisper.

All this multicolored magnificence has been painted indoors, in the artist’s basement turned studio, from photographs and picture books. “It’s often cold and rainy outside,” he lamented. “And I try to paint every day, at least one hour a day.”

He uses his own photographs and those of others as a motif, a starting point for his unique compositions, which are imbued with polychromatic light. He never copies a photo. To breathe life into his paintings, he changes the layout, applies his own impressions to the image or introduces a little mystery.

One of the paintings in the show, “Reflections Through My Window,” resonates with enigmatic undertones. Furniture and living stems, glass panes and a bouquet in a glass vase intertwine in the image, creating something new, discordant and harmonious simultaneously. It’s hard to discern what is reflection and what is reality, what is inside the glass and what is outside. “Mystery is good,” Abelman said with satisfaction when he talked about this painting.

“When I look at photos to find a new idea for a painting, color is more important to me than content,” he explained about his creative process. He constantly searches for that elusive quality that only reveals itself to true artists. “I’m always pushing the limits of beauty, but my esthetics change with years, evolve…. It’s all about that final lost layer of paint that makes all the difference.”

Sometimes, that final touch is a shadow or a few stray wavelets in a pond, or a lone petal falling into a stream. Water – be it a tiny rivulet in a garden, a pond in Giverny or the somnolent Burrard Inlet – features prominently in many of his paintings. “I love painting water,” he said.

Always on the lookout for new imagery, Abelman visited the library of Van Dusen Botanical Garden a few months ago for some flower books. When the librarian saw his paintings, she offered him a show at the library, and that show was mounted in the fall of 2013. His impressionistic flowers did very well alongside the real thing. “I was invited to speak to the Richmond Art Guild later this spring, because they saw my paintings at the Van Dusen. They have 60 members.”

He sounded amazed at his own luck, despite his rapidly improving skills and the attending commercial success, as if he can’t take himself too seriously. Even when he disclosed his secret ambition, he laughed, as if sharing a joke: “I want my paintings to be so good that it would hurt you to walk out of the galley without them.”

In Full Bloom is at the Zack Gallery until Feb. 16.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

Kahane and Andres at PuSh

Brooklyn-based Gabriel Kahane will be in Vancouver for the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, with pianist and composer Timo Andres, for Mixtape, a “live playlist” of eclectic and dynamic music appreciation. (photo by Josh Goleman)

Gabriel Kahane describes himself as a “songwriter, singer, pianist, composer, devoted amateur cook, guitarist and occasional banjo player.” With the release of his sophomore album Where are the Arms in 2011, the New York Times called him a “highbrow polymath,” an apt description considering he dips his toes into multiple genres, plays several instruments and seems equally comfortable composing a pop song, a musical theatre work or a piece for chamber ensemble.

The Brooklyn-based Kahane will be in Vancouver for the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, with pianist and composer Timo Andres, for Mixtape, a “live playlist” of eclectic and dynamic music appreciation: “Bach cantatas played alongside folk songs, pieces by their friends and colleagues, music by classical giants Schubert and Schumann, and songs and solo piano works by Kahane and Andres themselves.”

Kahane spoke with the Independent ahead of the Jan. 27 and 28 concerts, part of the festival’s Music on Main program.

Growing up with pianist and conductor Jeffrey Kahane as a father meant early music immersion, but, even then, his interests were diverse.

“I began formal musical training at around the age of 4 on the violin, but switched to piano at age 7, in no small part because I wanted to be like my father, who was and is a concert pianist,” Kahane said. “I also sang from a young age in choruses, and found myself, through curious circumstances, singing in a handful of operas as a boy. My childhood was culturally peripatetic – I went from dusting off my parents’ attic-consigned guitars one week to acting in plays the next, learning jazz standards on the piano for a time, all while doing the national junior chess circuit. I realize this makes me sound like a kid out of some Wes Anderson film, but it wasn’t actually that bizarre…. In college, after transferring from conservatory where I’d been studying jazz piano, I found myself writing a musical with a classmate of mine, which exposed me to the pleasure of permanence, as opposed to the more ephemeral arts I’d been engaged in previously: improvisation, acting. When I finished college and moved to New York, I began both to study piano seriously for the first time (I had been a miserable student as a child) as well as to write songs – pop songs – if you will.

“When I was 25,” he continued, “I had an idea to make a found-text song cycle with ads from Craigslist as lyrics, which caught the attention of some folks in the classical music world, which opened some unexpected doors toward my writing concert works. A few years later, I released my self-titled album of chamber-pop songs, which again had the inadvertent effect of getting me noticed by classical institutions like the L.A. Phil[harmonic], Kronos Quartet, etc. All of this is to say that my path to being a ‘composer’ really began with my efforts as a songwriter, which is where I am most at home.”

Kahane plays guitar and banjo in addition to piano, but is “most at home singing while playing the piano and, in a sense, I think of that compound as my instrument.”

That versatility has led to a prolific output. Aside from two albums, Kahane saw the release of the cast recording from the 2012 musical February House. His music and lyrics for this Public Theatre-commissioned musical “move from mournful to antic,” wrote the New York Times in their review, which also referred to Kahane and his former classmate Seth Bockley, who wrote the book, as an “imposing team.” His biography recounts a partial list of his recent accomplishments without fanfare: “Kahane has been commissioned by, among others, Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, the Caramoor Festival, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra…. Other appearances … include performances of his orchestral song cycle Crane Palimpsest with the Alabama and Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphonies, a recital with Timo Andres at the Library of Congress, and a two-night stand at Ann Arbor’s UMS with the new music ensemble yMusic.”

Effectively managing priorities is key for such a kinetic career. “I’ve been very lucky to have a lot of different opportunities at a relatively young age,” he explained, “and it can be overwhelming. The period of 2011-2013 was tricky for me, and I got pretty overworked in those years, during which time my second album, Where are the Arms, was released; my musical February House premièred at the Public Theatre; and I wrote and premièred three fairly large works for orchestra and voice, along with a smattering of chamber music and various tours. It was just too much. So this last year, when Sony approached me about making some records for them, I made a decision to turn down a lot of work and just focus on that project, which I’m just wrapping up now. I feel much more sane doing one thing at a time, though I’m again starting to feel the itch of wanting more projects at once. I do have two other large projects in the pipeline, but I am, for the moment, committed to doing them one at a time.”

Each project encompasses its own terrain, and is intellectually and psychologically distinct, he noted.

“Writing for oneself as a musician is maybe not dissimilar from how auteurs in the film world operate – they’re writing the thing that they will then (sometimes) shoot and direct. There’s a kind of internal, unspoken conversation going on about how the thing is going to be interpreted, and that often means that one uses a kind of shorthand. (A great example of this in music is Mozart’s Coronation Concerto, where the left-hand part doesn’t exist, because Mozart was just going to make it up. Incidentally, a radical completion of this piece is on Timo’s latest album, and I think it’s stunningly brilliant.)

“When you write for someone else, you invariably have to put more on the page in order to communicate the totality of what you want expressed, and you’re most likely less familiar with their instrument, whether it’s a voice or a violin, and you have to invest in familiarizing yourself to the point where you close that gap.”

Kahane is forging his place in the American songwriting tradition and his libretto Gabriel’s Guide to the 48 States, for example, makes clear the reason. It’s his ability to seamlessly shift between the American tradition and the Western classical tradition that affirms his seat at the vanguard of American new music.

“I certainly think of myself as coming out of the American songwriting tradition, but there are also Germanic roots in what I do, both genetically – my grandmother fled Germany in 1939 – and also musically. I think a lot of my concert music traffics in an attempt to reconcile the populism of the American Songbook with the modernist tradition of 20th-century Europe. And there’s also a connection between the American Songbook and the 19th-century German lied tradition, a connection that Timo and I are, I think, attempting to tease out in our program for PuSh.”

Mixtape is an eclectic and energetic collaboration and is a manifestation of the exploration of the intersections and (receding) boundaries between the American folk and the Western classical tradition. 

In fact, Mixtape is an eclectic and energetic collaboration and is a manifestation of the exploration of the intersections and (receding) boundaries between the American folk and the Western classical tradition. Andres and Kahane have a similar sensibility and sense of creative adventure.

“Timo and I were really friends before we were collaborators. I think it’s a pretty effortless collaboration in that 1) Timo is a brilliant pianist, 2) brings no ego to the table [and] 3) we have similar priorities as musicians, which is basically to play the stuff that we love and to organize it somewhat obsessively. I think the audience will find the evening surprisingly approachable, kind of like that first time you had sea urchin on pasta and were like, ‘OMG, this is delicious,’ even though you thought you hated uni.”

Defying categorization in a world of hyper-classification has its benefits, but it also proves complicated when it comes to marketing.

“Yes, there absolutely are challenges,” he said about his body of work. “First and foremost, it’s much easier to cultivate an audience that already exists, as opposed to one you have to cull from many corners. Creatively, I can’t imagine my life any other way, but there is certainly a struggle in finding the audience that is interested in all these little dribs and drabs from various esthetic spaces.”

“As I mentioned earlier, my grandmother, and all of her immediate family, fled the Nazis in 1939 and settled in Los Angeles. The story of her flight by boat was the impulse for my piece Orinoco Sketches, which I wrote for the L.A. Philharmonic, using my grandmother’s diaries as a basis for my own text. Inasmuch as Judaism is about a rejection of intellectual dogma, I definitely feel that my creative life is informed by being Jewish – constant renewal of ideas and spirit in pursuit of something newer and truer.”

Kahane’s Jewish identity informs this esthetic, as well. “I definitely identify as Jewish, maybe more culturally and philosophically than religiously,” he said. “As I mentioned earlier, my grandmother, and all of her immediate family, fled the Nazis in 1939 and settled in Los Angeles. The story of her flight by boat was the impulse for my piece Orinoco Sketches, which I wrote for the L.A. Philharmonic, using my grandmother’s diaries as a basis for my own text. Inasmuch as Judaism is about a rejection of intellectual dogma, I definitely feel that my creative life is informed by being Jewish – constant renewal of ideas and spirit in pursuit of something newer and truer.”

Kahane spends his downtime in the kitchen. “I absolutely love to cook, as does Timo, though I’ve gotten too serious about it for it to be strictly enjoyable, i.e., I’m nearly as critical of myself as a cook as I am as a musician. I tend toward the Italianate in that realm. I’m also a pretty voracious reader, though more and more, I’m doing these research-based projects that demand a lot of reading, which cuts down on pleasure reading.”

Mixtape, with Gabriel Kahane and Timo Andres, is on Jan. 27 -28, 8 p.m., at Heritage Hall. Visit pushfestival.ca.

Diaspora and Israel 2.0

Next month, we may get an idea of the shape of a dramatic paradigm shift in Israeli-Diaspora relations. The government of Israel is expected to spend as much as $1.5 billion in the next 20 years on a new initiative to strengthen Jewish identity outside Israel.

The Jerusalem Post reports that working groups are considering programs in seven different areas, primarily targeting Diaspora Jews aged 12 to 35. Ideas being floated include a world Jewish peace corps, Hebrew language courses in public schools, and the expansion of Birthright-style programs to younger Jews and more financial support for Jewish summer camps.

The program, which first made news last summer, seems to be a significant shift away from the traditional Israeli position that the reconstitution of Jewish sovereignty in the state of Israel should logically and inevitably lead to the “negation of the Diaspora.” As Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett said last year, “In Israel, we typically view the world as a source of aliyah and a big fat wallet, and that’s got to change.”

The Israeli government is apparently prepared to put up $30 million this year, rising to $300 million annually within five years. The initiative has a 20-year timeline.

The potential is enormous. But there are issues to address as the idea comes to fruition. In initial discussions, the issues of intermarriage and assimilation in the Diaspora appear to be significant motivators for the Israeli proponents. Certainly, the creation of more social and programmatic opportunities for young Diaspora Jews to meet one another will increase the possibility that they will find their bashert. However, there has been, at least in certain parts of the Diaspora, an effort to recognize intermarriage and accommodate it, in order to ensure that our communities are inclusive and accepting of diverse families. It would not be a welcome measure if the Israeli government were to initiate public relations campaigns that appear to condemn or stigmatize intermarried families.

There is also the not-insignificant reality that, it could be argued, the Diaspora has more effectively managed relations between Judaism’s religious streams than has Israel. The quasi-governmental role in religious affairs we see in Israel represents a degree of discrimination against the very streams of Judaism that represent a majority of Jews in the Diaspora. There are a great number of things that Israel would do well to export to the Diaspora; relations between religious streams and secular Jews is not among them.

Especially among secular Israelis, Israeli-ness is often considered effectively a successor to Jewishness. The Diaspora experience has nothing to parallel this reality. Israel is founded on Jewish traditions, values and rituals. It follows a Jewish calendar. It observes Jewish holidays. Its citizens – religious, secular, even non-Jewish – are confronted and absorbed every day with a culture that is intrinsically Jewish. In the Diaspora, Jewish people must make a personal effort to engage with their Jewishness. In many instances, the synagogue is the point of connection between Jewish families and their identity. In Israel, belonging to a synagogue can have a very different connotation.

The proponents of this program – in the government of Israel and in the Jewish Agency for Israel – appear to be making tremendous effort to incorporate the interests and needs of Diaspora communities into the planning of the program. There is great reason for optimism that this could be the beginning of a profoundly improved and dramatically more integrated relationship between and among the world’s Jews. If, as early indicators suggest, this program progresses as a mutually supportive undertaking, and not as Israelis telling Diaspora Jews how to run their affairs, it could be a turning point in Jewish life for the 21st century and beyond. Israel has much to teach the Diaspora. And the Diaspora has much to teach Israelis.

Any increase in dialogue and understanding between Jews inside and outside of Israel is a step in the right direction. But neither group should attempt to define for the other the right way to be.

Long-forgotten chapter: 1942’s Operation Torch

A message from U.S. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to the people of Casablanca, found on the street of that city in 1942. (image from commons.wikimedia.org)

In the wake of invasion and military defeat in the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler and the French government in Vichy, now headed by Marshal Pétain, concluded an armistice by virtue of which France was divided into an occupied zone and a non-occupied zone. The conditions imposed by Germany were at first relatively lenient: the French government retained partial autonomy in the occupied north and full autonomy in the non-occupied south. Vichy also retained varying degrees of control over the French colonial empire: while Algeria remained under direct French rule, Morocco and Tunisia had the status of protectorates under their native rulers supervised by France. In Morocco, King Mohammed V defied France by refusing to apply Vichy’s antisemitic laws. In Tunisia, Gestapo and SS followed Erwin Rommel’s army and, in 1942, rounded up the Jewish population for deportation to the Nazi death camps.

In the spring of 1942, strong disagreements among the Allies came to light in regard of the strategy to adopt against Germany. While President Franklin Roosevelt initially leaned in favor of Josef Stalin’s insistent demand for a landing in Western Europe in 1942, in the end, he reluctantly rallied to Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s view that such a landing at that time could not possibly succeed. He believed that the Allies would not be ready for this risky operation until late in 1943, or even 1944. Churchill proposed that, instead, an Allied landing be staged in North Africa, in order to deny Germany and Italy full control over the Mediterranean and compel Rommel’s army, which was retreating from Libya, to fight on two fronts.

In preparation for this operation, the Americans entered into secret contacts with the anti-Vichy underground in Algiers to enlist its assistance in the landing, albeit with some reluctance since the United States still recognized the legality of the Vichy government with which it maintained diplomatic relations.

Such is the background of Operation Torch placed under the command of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. On the morning of Nov. 8, 1942, a mostly American fleet of more than 100,000 men landed under air cover on the coasts of Morocco and Algeria. Three days later, the Germans violated the armistice of 1940 and invaded the southern zone of France in collaboration with the Italians.

In the port of Algiers, the landing was greatly facilitated by the local resistance, composed in the main of young students, who effectively sabotaged the communications of the local French military, seized public buildings and even arrested two of the top commanders: Admiral François Darlan, Pétain’s former prime minister, and Gen. Alphonse Juin. It is important to note that two-thirds of these 400 young resistance fighters were Jews. The French authorities in Algeria were fanatically devoted to Vichy and so zealous in the implementation of that regime’s antisemitic legislation, that they established internment camps in the Sahara in preparation for the round-up and deportation of the Jewish population to the death camps of Europe. Vichy also deprived the 116,000 Jews of Algeria of the French citizenship that had been awarded them in the 19th century.

What happened after the Allied landing is simply shocking. The young Jews, whose support facilitated the capture of the Algerian capital, were abandoned to whatever fate had in store for them. Instead of handing North Africa to the control of the Free French Forces organized by Gen. Charles de Gaulle from London, the Americans allowed Vichy’s stooges to remain at the helm.

What happened after the Allied landing is simply shocking. The young Jews, whose support facilitated the capture of the Algerian capital, were abandoned to whatever fate had in store for them. Instead of handing North Africa to the control of the Free French Forces organized by Gen. Charles de Gaulle from London, the Americans allowed Vichy’s stooges to remain at the helm.

Roosevelt despised de Gaulle and his Free French Forces, and chose to place in command of the French army of North Africa, whose commanders, including Darlan, resented Germany’s violation of the armistice of 1940, the semi-Vichyste Gen. Henri Giraud. The young anti-Vichy fighters were for the most arrested and interned in the Sahara. Some of them narrowly avoided being executed. The Vichy laws remained in force. De Gaulle eventually rallied a number of generals in charge of colonial troops in French Equatorial Africa and arrived in May 1943 in Algiers, where he established the authority of Free France, invalidated the Vichy laws, and restored to the Jews their French citizenship.

Unfortunately for those of us who grew up revering him, Roosevelt’s connivance with Giraud and Vichy’s military commanders, and politicians in Algeria who had conveniently changed sides, was not the only instance of his betrayal of the hope that our people had pinned on him during the dreadful years of the Shoah. As for de Gaulle, the sympathy that he expressed for the suffering of our people at the time of the liberation of France and his sadness-filled admonition to his Jewish soldiers in the Free French Forces that antisemitism was not dead, were expressions of a friendship, which unfortunately did not survive the temptations of realpolitik and opportunism. On the morrow of Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967, de Gaulle labeled the Jews a “proud and domineering people” and turned France from an ally into an enemy of Israel.

It took nearly half a century for the Jewish resistance in France to win official recognition; for the members of the Jewish communist urban underground, even longer. The Jewish contribution to the liberation of French Algeria is only now beginning to be written about.

René Goldman is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.

Stamp collector Ed Kroft wins awards

Collect postal history and you learn not just how mail has traveled in years past, but also how people lived and functioned. Just ask Ed Kroft, a collector and historian of postal history from Israel who was recently awarded the 2013 Leslie Reggel Memorial Award by the Society of Israel Philatelists (SIP) for his outstanding contributions to Israel philately.

photo - Ed Kroft
Lawyer Ed Kroft, an avid stamp collector, was granted the 2013 Leslie Reggel Memorial Award by the Society of Israel Philatelists.

Kroft is a Vancouver tax lawyer and ardent collector of postal history who started collecting stamps at the tender age of 10. “My teacher at Associated Hebrew Day Schools in Toronto, Ed Deutsch, would bring his stamp collection to school to show us, and he focused on the stamps of Israel,” he recalled. “We formed a stamp club at school and later, I worked at a stamp store to put myself through university.”

Stamp collecting has changed significantly over the years, as many people have moved from soaking stamps off the paper they were used on, to collecting postal history and learning to understand the postmarks and information on the envelopes that contain those stamps.

“Postal history tells a story about how mail has traveled, which requires you to learn about the area, the population, how to read postmarks and envelopes,” he said. “The beauty of collecting postal history as opposed to collecting stamps is that you’re collecting different pieces of mail and trying to describe the history of the postal services.”

In a room filled with bookshelves containing the vast collection he’s amassed, Kroft has binders containing mail that originated in Israel but was destined for many different corners of the world, from New Zealand and Australia to South Africa, Argentina, the Caribbean islands, Brazil and Chile.

“As a Jew, I care about this because it’s interesting to see where Jews were at that time,” he said. “This collection gives me connections to Jewish culture and identity, Jewish history, geography, events, places, buildings and customs. This is part of our heritage, and we can’t let this history disappear.”

Kroft’s collection of mail from the Holy Land dates from the 1870s to the present day. From one binder, he pulled out an envelope inscribed by Ze’ev Jabotinsky to one of his relatives in 1918, and another written to Jabotinsky by his mother. There’s an envelope written by Captain Joseph Trumpeldor and another by Sir Moses Montefiore. While the letters are often no longer in those envelopes, the envelopes offer evidence about the passage of mail, Kroft explained.

The Society of Israel Philatelists is a nonprofit dedicated to studying and promoting Israel philately, with members all over the world. Kroft joined SIP in the mid-1970s and has been an active member ever since, currently serving as its president.

“My collection of Holy Land philately has helped me make many friends around the world who have common interests,” he said. “It’s taught me a lot about Judaism and brought to life things I learned when I was much younger.”

His collections include the history of Rishon LeZion from settlement through statehood, 1882-1948, a history of prisoners of war in 1948-1949, and the history of the Carmel Wine Co., among others. Each one tells a story through postal history, a story about which Kroft is passionate, eager to learn more about and committed to teaching others. “I’m honored to win the award,” he said. “The people who preceded me were extremely knowledgeable and great collectors.”

For now, he is intent on keeping the future of SIP bright by spreading information about its members and their work, and he is hoping to attract new collectors to its ranks.

Kroft will be speaking on The Relevance and Enjoyment of Philately, the Hobby of Stamp Collecting, to Jews in the 21st Century, on Jan. 30, 7:30 p.m., at Temple Sholom Synagogue.

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond, B.C. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net.

New York shows Marc Chagall

Seeing the Chagall show at the Jewish Museum in New York made me recall the year when Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was 90 and I decided it was high time that he, my favorite Jewish artist, and I meet. But first let me tell you about the current Chagall exhibit.

Until Feb. 2, lovers of Chagall’s works can see a fine selection of his paintings that were done between the early 1930s and 1948. Titled Love, War and Exile, the exhibit of 31 paintings, 22 works on paper and assorted photos and letters have been drawn from various public and private collections.

For me, Chagall was the ultimate Jewish artist of the 20th century. He combined artistic intelligence, vivid imagination, sensitivity to and awareness of Jewish history, and deep-rooted Jewish knowledge, based on his early education and the ambience of his Chassidic family in Vitebsk, Russia. Moreover, his knowledge of Yiddish and Yiddish lore expressed itself in many of his works.

Chagall’s colorful and fantastic paintings, with lovers in the air, suspended candelabras, a disembodied painter’s palette, roosters, flower-bedecked cows and snow-covered villages are seen in plenitude. In this show, there are also many crucifixion scenes, for Chagall saw the Jesus figure as representative of the martyrdom of the Jewish people during the 1940s. He himself, his beloved wife, Bella, who figures in so many of his paintings, and his daughter, Ida, were fortunate enough to escape from France and come to the United States in June 1941. The war in Europe was raging and it was just several months before the United States entered the battle in December 1941.

Chagall’s depictions of Jesus invariably have him wearing either a tallis or a tallis-like loincloth, thereby accenting his Jewishness. Although some viewers conclude that it is only during the l940s that Chagall began to paint Jesus on the cross, Chagall painted Jesus as early as 1908, when he was in his late twenties.

To understand Chagall’s works, especially those that are related to thoroughly Jewish themes, a deep understanding of the Yiddish language and Jewish culture are needed. Alas, even museums, which supposedly have knowledgeable staff, err in their interpretation because of ignorance.

To understand Chagall’s works, especially those that are related to thoroughly Jewish themes, a deep understanding of the Yiddish language and Jewish culture are needed. Alas, even museums, which supposedly have knowledgeable staff, err in their interpretation because of ignorance.

A classic example is his painting “Over Vitebsk” (not in this show), which depicts a village and its rooftops, and over the houses floats a bearded figure, with cap and cane, holding a stuffed sack. I remember visiting a museum once with my father, Yakov, and seeing this famous Chagall painting. The curator went to great lengths describing the scene. Reading this banal description, my father laughed and said, “They don’t understand this painting because they don’t know Yiddish and they don’t know Yiddish folk expressions. What Chagall is doing here is visualizing a Yiddish phrase: ‘geyen iber dee hizer’ – ‘going over the houses’ – an expression that actually means ‘going from house to house begging.’”

So, then, without a knowledge of Yiddish lore, Chagall’s brilliant rendering of this scene is misunderstood. What was mistaken as a typical Chagall “floating” scene is actually a rendering of a Jewish beggar going from house to house, as Jewish beggars did all over Eastern Europe, trying to collect food to put in their sacks.

In this show, too, we have one of Chagall’s crucifixion scenes in a shtetl, where there is a huge fire on the left side of the painting. The description on the little card says that it is a kind of crossing of the Red Sea. However, in reality, it is Chagall’s depiction of the Holocaust, a visual rendering of the Yiddish expression “mayn shteytl brent” – “my town is burning.”

I don’t know if the Jewish Museum’s administration is aware of the coincidence, but in the room that shows many of the artist’s crucifixion canvases there is a rather large cross-shaped blue sofa where visitors can sit and view the paintings.

One of the most fascinating parts of the show for me was the Yiddish letter that Chagall wrote to the mayor of Tel Aviv, accepting an invitation to visit. His calligraphy is clear and beautiful, showing the early schooling he had in writing the Hebrew letters, and his Yiddish is fluent and evocative. After all, he is a native Yiddish speaker. On view too is a letter to Hermann Struck, to whom Chagall writes that he hopes his visit will be beneficial to his art. Struck is identified merely as a “printer.” Missing from the description is the fact that Struck himself was a noted artist, who wrote a definitive book on etching. Moreover, Struck was a former teacher of Chagall.

Accompanying this show is a comprehensive catalogue, co-published by Yale University Press, entitled Chagall: Love, War and Exile. In addition to the paintings on view, the book also has many other related paintings, an English translation of some of Chagall’s Yiddish poems, and photographs. One particularly engaging photo is one of Chagall sitting in front of his painting of Bella, right next to Bella herself, who poses wearing a black dress with lace collar and holding a white lace fan.

Now I’ll return to getting to see Chagall in St-Paul-de-Vence, a small town not too far from Nice, in the Provence region of southern France. To see a very private artist, whose visitors were controlled by his managerial second wife, Vava, was not easy. For such an attempt one needs, as the Israeli expression has it: proteksia – or “pull.” I knew the then president of Hadassah, Miriam Freund, who had worked closely with Chagall when that organization commissioned Chagall to make the stained glass windows for the famous Hadassah Hospital synagogue in Jerusalem.

I explained my wish to Miriam, who gladly said she would try to be helpful. She gave me Chagall’s phone number and preceded it with a call to Chagall, telling him that an American writer would like to visit him. She told him that I knew Yiddish, and stemmed from a family whose origins were in Russia. And then she told him one more crucial fact that I had told her might clinch the acquiescence. I knew that Chagall’s first wife, Bella Rosenfeld, stemmed from a family named Levant, which was Bella’s mother’s maiden name. I asked Miriam to accent the fact that our family name, Leviant, might very well be connected to Bella’s family. Miriam also mentioned that I would be in Switzerland during the summer.

In short, Miriam was told that when I was in Europe I should call Chagall’s house. I couldn’t wait. Soon as I arrived in a little town in Switzerland, I dialed the number that Miriam had given me. A woman answered the phone, probably Chagall’s wife, Vava. I introduced myself, told her I had gotten the phone number from Miriam Freund of Hadassah, and hoped I could make the visit to see Chagall, since in a couple of weeks we would be in Nice, and would actually be in the town of St-Paul-de-Vence.

The reply was a very brief message in French: “The master [le maître] is not accepting visitors.”

And, so, that was the end of my Chagall adventure. In person, but not on museum walls.

The final irony of Chagall’s long and productive life is that the Jewish painter – who throughout his long life encapsulated Jewish themes, Jewish imagery, Jewish expressions and Jewish religiosity – was buried by his second wife, Vava (herself a Jew, from a noted Russian Jewish family), in the local Catholic cemetery in St-Paul-de-Vence.

Curt Leviant’s most recent book is the short-story collection Zix Zexy Ztories.

Mystery photo … Jan. 10/14

State of Israel Bonds parlor meeting, men’s group, Vancouver, B.C., 1964. (JWB fonds, JMABC L.14507 )

If you know someone in this photo, please help the JI fill the gaps of its predecessor’s (the Jewish Western Bulletin’s) collection at the Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. by contacting [email protected].