Arts & Culture – Page 129

Films offer glance at Bedouin life

A still from the movie Voices from El Sayed.

When one is a Bedouin living in southern Israel, ironies seem to multiply with regularity. Two relatively recent Israeli-made films bring this incongruous life into sharp focus.

In the first, Voices from El Sayed: A Snail in the Desert (2009, documentary), director Oded Leshem examines a minority within a minority – a special needs Bedouin group. In the second, Sharqiya (2012, drama), director Ami Livne focuses on an Israeli Bedouin who, although he has spent his young adult life protecting other Israelis – first as a soldier and then as a security guard – faces eviction from his land because the Israeli authorities do not acknowledge it as his.

Leshem focuses on both the social and technological challenges facing the deaf members of the El Sayed Bedouin. In an understated but convincing manner, Leshem makes this point: for people who are deaf, this Bedouin tribe is both heaven and hell.

Leshem presents a lot of information in his 75-minute film. For starters, he unearths this nugget: the El Sayed have the highest concentration of deaf people of any community in the world. Estimates are that this desert community located northeast of the Negev city of Be’ersheva has 3,000 tribal members and, of this number, 125-150 are deaf. Intra-marriage is high – 65 percent of El Sayed’s couples are somehow related – so deafness is, therefore, more often transmitted from generation to generation. Almost every family has a deaf family member.

In this village, deafness is acknowledged as a fact of life. Not only is it considered normal, but everyone in the film – hearing and deaf – knows and uses sign language. At first glance, deaf community members appear totally accepted and functioning comfortably within the group. There is always someone with whom to converse – but in which language does one communicate?

According to Leshem’s film, language is one of the major social challenges facing Israel’s minorities. The film notes that the older deaf members of El Sayed converse in their own form of signing: El Sayed Bedouin Sign Language (EBSL). A number of the younger members, however, have studied in schools outside the community. These schools fall under the jurisdiction of the Israeli Ministry of Education, so these Bedouin study Israeli Sign Language (ISL). In addition, these same young students learn to read and write in Hebrew, rather than in Arabic, their mother tongue.

There is no school for the deaf on tribal land: children are bused to a school in Be’ersheva. But not every deaf child attends or has attended this facility. As the audience learns, some young adults studied in the centre of the country. However, on the positive side, the film explains that Be’ersheva has a special early childhood class for the hearing challenged, which is taught by traditional Bedouin teachers.

The deaf young adult tribal members who speak in the film want to marry deaf partners. But in this strongly paternalistic society, their parents still have a lot of say in marital matches. Some of the hearing parents want their marriage-age children to break what they see as a chain of deafness, so they are interested in having their deaf offspring pair off with hearing mates.

Not only are there parents who want to alter the course of future generations, but there are those trying to improve the life of their offspring in the present. The movie depicts one set of hearing parents who decide that one of their children will be the first El Sayed member to undergo a cochlear implant.

The good news is that the Israeli health-care system will cover the cost of the surgery and the implant itself. But, as viewers soon grasp, this family faces many other obstacles. The first several months following surgery entail regular and frequent trips back to Be’ersheva’s Soroka Hospital. During these hospital visits, the parents learn how to encourage their toddler to listen in everyday situations. Both the mother and father accompany the child to the hospital. There, they work with a Hebrew-speaking professional staff. The father speaks and reads Hebrew fluently, but the mother does not. No Arabic translator is provided. This point is critical as, at home, the mother has the huge task of ensuring that all the other children participate in the training.

No less significant is the hospital staff’s lack of awareness of the overall situation in El Sayed. While Leshem’s camera reveals that high-tension wires stand in close proximity to the village, the film’s narrative discloses that El Sayed is not hooked up to the national grid. There is no electricity, except for the generators that power the village. Just as the hospital staff comes to terms with the family’s difficulty in keeping all the implant parts properly charged, so the audience grasps just how challenging this procedure is for this family.

El Sayed lacks what most Westerners would consider basic utilities or services. For the dispersed Bedouins living in areas of southern Israel, which successive governments have classified as “unrecognized,” not having electricity or running water is a common situation. Nowhere is that brought home more clearly than in Livne’s drama Sharqiya.

photo - a still from Sharqiya — A still from *Sharqiya*.

The story of Sharqiya centres around two brothers and the wife of one trying to live on family land. The land appears fairly inhospitable. Family members live quite minimally in one-room tin huts, serviced by a temperamental generator. In the barren surroundings, one brother herds a small number of goats, while Kamel Najer, the other brother and main character, works as a security guard in Be’ersheva’s central bus station.

Westerner viewers might wonder why it is so important to keep this undeveloped plot of land, especially when Israeli authorities offer compensation for leaving it. Coming from a Western society, it is also hard to get one’s head around the notion of inheriting land without documentation. But this is exactly what the Najer brothers claim: their family has lived on the land for generations.

In the film, viewers watch the authorities stand by, waiting to destroy the Najers’ homestead, as Kamel packs up cherished memorabilia from his army service. We witness this young Israeli Bedouin – who has felt enough sense of belonging to hold on to his army pictures and banners – have his living space made not just unfit, but non-existent. Livne makes it clear that if Israeli society does not appreciate the irony of this situation, it will not understand that such treatment puts the fragile foundation of Israel’s democratic structure at risk of collapse.

When the human and humane element is missing – as depicted by the Israel Land Authority’s tractor leveling the family’s meagre housing and corral – the cracks in society’s foundation deepen. The frustration and the disappointment do not fade out: in the closing shot, they are inscribed on Kamel’s face.

Deborah Rubin Fields is an Israel-based features writer. She is also the author of Take a Peek Inside: A Child’s Guide to Radiology.

More on the Bedouin

The following links are to position papers or websites of some of those involved in Israeli Bedouin affairs.

From the Israeli government: mmi.gov.il/static/HanhalaPirsumim/Beduin_information.pdf

From Jewish National Fund: www.kkl.org.il/eng/about-kkl-jnf/kkl-jnf-in-public-discourse/kkl-jnf-conferences/kkl-jnf-european-leadership-conference/kkl-jnf-position-bedouin

From a few nongovernmental organizations:

• adva.org/uploaded/NegevEnglishSummary.pdf

• dukium.org/eng/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/NCF-CounterClaims-Dec10.pdf

• acri.org.il/en/category/arab-citizens-of-israel/negev-bedouins-and-unrecognized-villages

Holocaust survivor Peter Gary’s oratorio

Peter Gary (photo from Peter Gary)

April is a month of miracles for Peter Gary. An April baby, he was born in Poland in 1924, where he first developed his love – and talent – for playing music and composition. Starting piano by age 5, he was accepted into the Franz Liszt Royal Academy at age 11, being chosen to attend classes with Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly and Leo Weiner. In 1941, however, Gary and his mother were arrested by the Nazis. His mother was murdered soon after, trying to protect him. After surviving the Warsaw Ghetto, Gary, who was in his late teens, was sent to Majdanek, then Dachau and, finally, Bergen-Belsen. He was liberated from there in April 1945, just as he turned 21 years old.

Following more music studies in Paris and a career in medicine in California, where he eventually settled, Gary retired in Victoria, B.C. For many years, he chose not to speak about his Holocaust experiences. Instead, in the mid-1970s, he returned to his love of music to compose something that would help express the immensity of the losses he experienced and the loss of six million fellow Jews. A Twentieth Century Passion will at long last be performed – on April 2 at the University of Victoria. It took 40 years to bring this 500-plus-page piece of music to the stage. And it almost didn’t happen at all.

“Gary’s musical composition takes the form of an oratorio. A Twentieth Century Passion not only draws on the works of famous German composers such as Bach, Handel and Mendelssohn, but also represents a musical intervention to that tradition. Instead of portraying the gospel narrative of the Passion, this oratorio focuses on the emotions and suffering of European Jews during the Shoah.”

UVic has put together a booklet on Gary’s composition and describes its immense scope. “Gary’s musical composition takes the form of an oratorio. A Twentieth Century Passion not only draws on the works of famous German composers such as Bach, Handel and Mendelssohn, but also represents a musical intervention to that tradition. Instead of portraying the gospel narrative of the Passion, this oratorio focuses on the emotions and suffering of European Jews during the Shoah. The libretto includes a composite of stories and perspectives – of men and women, young and old – beginning from the end of the First World War up until the end of the Nuremberg trials. In particular, A Twentieth Century Passion remembers and honors the lives of the murdered children.”

April is a significant month for Gary in other ways, as well. He and his wife, Judy Estrin, will celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary the day before A Twentieth Century Passion is performed for the first time – just two weeks before the composer’s 90th birthday.

The couple met on JDate and decided to marry after a brief online courtship, Estrin told the Independent. “We finally met in December 2006. As Peter’s mother was murdered on Christmas Eve, that has always been a difficult time for him. We opted to ‘say our vows’ to each other at approximately the time that corresponded to her murder on Christmas Eve, including exchanging rings. For us, that is the day we were married.” However, “on April 1, 2007, in the rain, hail, sleet and snow, we had an outdoor wedding, under a chuppah in our yard, followed by a civil ceremony on June 1, 2007.”

Gary credits Estrin for having the tenacity to get his oratorio to the stage, and it wasn’t an easy task.

“I tried to get orchestras interested in the piece when we first were married, to no avail,” she said. “We agreed that we had to let go of the vision of having a performance of A Twentieth Century Passion in his lifetime – which was my promise to him when we married. So, we let go, with the provision that if the universe wanted him to experience his piece in his lifetime, the universe would make it happen.”

How the concert possibility came about

It was during a visit with two UVic students that Gary unearthed his score, long since put away. The students, Jason Michaud and Andrea van Noord, were part of UVic’s month-long I-Witness Holocaust Field School Project, a program co-founded in 2011 by Helga Thorson, associate professor in the department of Germanic and Slavic studies. The project, which “focuses on the ways in which the Holocaust is memorialized in Central Europe,” sees students spending the first week together in Victoria and then “three weeks on the road in Central Europe, where we visit the sites of former concentration camps, museums, monuments, cemeteries and other memorialization projects,” Thorson explained to the Independent. “Along the way, the students meet young Europeans who are also studying the Holocaust and engage in cross-cultural dialogues about the relationship between the present and the past.”

She added, “During the 2011 field school, [Michaud and van Noord] came up to me separately and said pretty much the same thing – without realizing that the other one had approached me, as well. They both mentioned that they wanted to work on some form of Holocaust remembrance and education when they returned to Victoria. After the field school program, the three of us sat down together and decided to found an archival project in which we would collect local stories of the Shoah in Victoria and on Vancouver Island. It was in this context that we visited Peter Gary.

“During this visit … we explained our ideas for the archival project. We told him that our project was different from other projects that had taken place…. It was not our intention to repeat the work that others had already done. Our project, called Building an Archive: Local Stories and Experiences of the Holocaust, was interested in collecting the stories of individuals whose lives were affected by the Shoah, either as told by themselves directly or as told by their children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren….

“It was during this visit when Peter got up, ran to the other room, and came back with a copy of his oratorio…. Van Noord took the oratorio and brought it around to various musicians and conductors. She was the one who brought it to the attention of Timothy Vernon, the founding artistic director of Pacific Opera Victoria, who has agreed to conduct the piece during the April 2, 2014, première.”

Thorson said the university is “amazed at the diverse material we have collected for our archival project to date: from Peter Gary’s musical composition, to copies of art that was created in Bergen-Belsen, to an interview with three generations of one family, to many other stories in myriad creative formats. The entire collection is remarkable in a community as small as Victoria. Peter Gary’s musical score and libretto comprise a special part of the university archives because, as an oratorio, this musical composition represents an ambitious project dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and memorialization.”

About the university’s interest in her husband’s work, Estrin said, “It wasn’t me who made this dream come true. There are so many miracles that have manifested along the way. Helga Thorson, her students Jason and Andrea from the first I-Witness Field School, Timothy Vernon agreeing to conduct without having ever seen the piece, so many people, so many miracles.”

The plans don’t stop with the April 2 concert, she added. “Now, we have to have all the funds in place to pay for the concert itself and to fund a scholarship that the University of Victoria has established for the field school, in Peter’s name. Once we get to some surplus funds, then we can think about establishing a process to bring the music to the world, free of charge, to anyone who wants to produce it. Then, we’d like to develop a curriculum for middle and high school students. Hopefully, we will also have enough excess funds to complete the documentary that is in process to document how this all came about. If an angel appears, the last wish in my vision is to be able to have Timothy Vernon conduct the piece and produce a CD. A big dream at the moment!”

She admitted, “There have been moments when it was totally overwhelming for Peter, which is why, after three fundraising events and a number of interviews, he is ‘off the hook.’ He is excited about it finally happening, although I suspect he has his moments of total disbelief, as it came close in the past but did not happen. We both hope that the piece makes people think and talk – about hate, about racism, and about antisemitism…. My hope is that after this world première performance, A Twentieth Century Passion will become the piece played around the world to memorialize and remember the Six Million, at least once a year, ideally played on Yom Hashoah.”

A fundraising event

One of the fundraisers was held in November at the home of Vancouver community members Dr. Michael and Linda Frimer, friends of Gary and Estrin, who came over from Victoria to participate. The Independent also attended the event, which featured music performed by cellist Eric Wilson and pianist Corey Hamm. Estrin spoke about her admiration for her husband and the life he’s poured into the music, and her delight at finally seeing the composition come alive this April.

Michael Frimer introduced Gary, noting, “He’s been our close, close friend for many years and an inspiration for our whole family. I’d say, the biggest inspiration for me, except for the 50 push-ups a day, is the fact that, from where he came, which is such a dark, dark place, he has such an amazing ability to look on the positive and the good, and to find the good where you would not expect it….

“This oratorio is really, I think, of potential historic significance…. This has been sitting for over 40 years now, and Peter’s been talking about it for so long. To have it finally come to fruition is amazing…. You think of Handel’s Messiah, which is a great piece of work written about this one Jewish rabbi, and it’s played every single year throughout the world, which is a wonderful thing, but I am hoping and I can see and envision this becoming something that is played on a regular basis in perpetuity in the capitals of the world to remember the lessons of this event that happened and the lessons that we have to take forward in the future.”

Peter Gary speaks about his work

Gary addressed those present, as well, and read selections from the oratorio’s libretto. “This is not about me,” he said. “The moment I put the last note down and put the double line, which means it’s finished, it has nothing to do with me anymore, it’s ‘it.’ And the next time, when Timothy Vernon, a very well-known Canadian conductor, raises his two arms, it’s his. It’s whatever his creativity, his insights [dictate]. Yes, we will have meetings and I will answer the questions, how do you envision this, but after that, it’s done. It has to exist and run on its own.”

Gary then read from notes he had written on his hopes for future generations. “How do you explain the inexplicable, the horrors that humanity brought and brings downs on its members? We are bombarded by the media in full graphic detail, in real time, the most horrific cruelty and suffering from time immemorial into our 21st century. The Shoah … was introduced to our history as a uniquely barbaric act. Unlike in wars before, it targeted strictly innocent children, women, men, the old, sick, for systematic torture and murder by the millions, not for what they did but who they were.

“Ever since the discovery at the end of World War Two of this permanent stain on human culture, without blinking an eye, we are still involved, as I’m speaking, and stoking the fires of death and destruction on each other. Is there a wonder why the public becomes bored as these acts are blaring at them from the pictures of newspapers, their television sets, computers and all other gadgetry of communication. Just to mention a few from the 20th century to the present: mass murder of the Armenians, Balkans, Congo, Sudan, Syria, Libya, many, many others.

“Back to the Shoah. We have been presented with vivid details from history books to films, novels, poetry, survivor personal testimonies, and some musical compositions, but only dealing with specific areas, like the piece on Terezin, which was the Nazi show camp. I have aimed, with A Twentieth Century Passion, to unify all those components. From history to the prisoners’ daily lives, their feelings, anxieties, fears, angers, of those abuse[d] … and, of course, always the unanswerable whys.”

“Back to the Shoah. We have been presented with vivid details from history books to films, novels, poetry, survivor personal testimonies, and some musical compositions, but only dealing with specific areas, like the piece on Terezin, which was the Nazi show camp. I have aimed, with A Twentieth Century Passion, to unify all those components. From history to the prisoners’ daily lives, their feelings, anxieties, fears, angers, of those abuse[d] … and, of course, always the unanswerable whys.

“This, I felt was only possible to achieve in the musical form of the oratorio,” he continued. “The oratorio, mass, requiem, Passion, comes to us in the Christian musical literature, in great compositions from Bach to Bernstein, Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorak, and many others. A Twentieth Century Passion was created incorporating all general and personal details in this musical form. In Latin, verba volant, scripta manent, words fly away, writing stays forever. I hope this music will bring for all times a memorial as well as a warning to humanity. I have begged over 66,000 young and old [as a survivor speaker] to stamp out hate, the most obscene word in the English language, if we want our children and grandchildren to survive on our planet.”

In an e-mail to the Independent, Linda Frimer shared her reflections on supporting their friend in bringing A Twentieth Century Passion to life. “We feel honored and privileged to have Peter in our lives,” she said. “Through the years, he has been an outstanding mentor and friend. He teaches, through his strength of character and noble heart, that one must never give in to the perpetrators of cultural genocide. By actively choosing to make his life a joy-filled creative service to humankind, he inspires others to give of themselves. The upcoming oratorio this April is the full flowering of the tree of his life, for through his composition he is ensuring that not only will those of all ages who perished in the Holocaust always be remembered, but the witnesses of the world, once hearing this, will be assured never to forget.”

The world première of Peter Gary’s A Twentieth Century Passion, conducted by Timothy Vernon, was scheduled for April 2. Unfortunately, it was cancelled.

Darcy Mann is VAG featured artist

“Poplars” by Darcy Mann.

The Vancouver Art Gallery’s Art Rental and Sales space is not yet a well-known feature, but the nonprofit program has been quietly promoting emerging and mid-career Canadian artists on the gallery’s main floor. According to the website, “Whether you are you staging a home for sale, have an empty wall in your board room or love contemporary art but can’t decide what to purchase, you’ll find what you’re looking for in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Art Rental and Sales Showroom. With more than 1,000 works by 200 Canadian artists, Art Rental and Sales has the largest selection of copyright-cleared, original art for rent in British Columbia…. All the artwork in the rental program is consigned by the artists, who receive the majority of the fees collected. The remaining proceeds are donated to the Vancouver Art Gallery.”

photo - Darcy Mann — Darcy Mann
*(photo by Olga Livshin)*

Darcy Mann is the next artist to have a feature exhibit in the space. Her charcoal drawings of British Columbia forests have been so successful with both the rental and sales part of the program that VAG offered to feature her work for three months.

Mann hasn’t always focused on forest drawings. She started her artistic life with figurative compositions. In an interview with the Independent, she talked about her life and the evolution of her themes.

“I always liked art. When I turned 10, I got a birthday gift from my mother – a pencil and some drawing paper. It was the best birthday gift of my childhood, the only one I remember,” she said.

After high school, she continued her art education in British Columbia and Nova Scotia, and later received an MFA in Texas. In 1987, in the course of her graduate studies, she had to spend a term abroad and she chose Israel, an experience that made a huge impression on the young artist. She and her husband, who is also a professional artist, then went to New York, where they lived for 14 years. “That’s where we really understood what art was,” she said. “But, of course, we couldn’t make a living as artists. We both had daytime jobs. I worked for an advertising agency. We kept practising our art and participated in several group shows. There is a wonderful place there for Jewish artists – Synagogue for the Arts.”

When their firstborn son was three, they returned to Vancouver, but Mann didn’t return to work. With the support of her husband and his family, she became a stay-at-home mom and a full-time artist. “Many artists experience financial challenges. We are willing to sacrifice material things, to live simply, for the sake of our art and our kids,” she said.

“I stopped painting and began drawing when my son was born – [I] didn’t want the chemicals in the paints to interfere with nursing the baby,” she said. “I also switched to forest scenes from figurative. You need to do much less talking when you paint forest. I don’t like talking and I don’t like discussing my art or explaining anything.”

Even when her son was older and she resumed painting with oils, she concentrated on the large forest landscapes. But she never gave up on drawing.

“Paintings and drawings are both satisfying in different ways,” she explained. “They complement each other. Painting is fluid. You can move paint around, remove some, add some, use different brushes, layers. A painting can change. It is chaos. While drawings stick to order, drawings are solid. When you use pressed charcoal, it’s there, on paper. You can’t erase it. But I need both. When I paint, I miss drawing. When I work on a drawing, I need to paint.”

Mann paints in her Marpole studio. “I paint and draw from photographs. I love going out with my camera during summer and fall, when it’s warm outside. Especially fall – it’s when I take the most interesting pictures. Not in winter though – too cold.”

After printing her photos, she starts the next phase of the process – assembling collages. Once she has the photographs, “… to get an image I want, I have to separate the background from the foreground” of each image. “I go through dozens of pictures. It’s like solving a puzzle, selecting which pieces fit where. I cut the pieces and glue or tape them together. I do it all by hand – I don’t trust computers. The whole thing is like taking a ball of mixed-up necklaces and untangling them, before creating a new image.”

Mann’s paintings and drawings are straightforward on the surface, but the underlying mystery shimmers in most of her compositions, a hint of a story, a token of a concept, as if the artist didn’t really abandon the figurative but just concealed it behind a bush or in the midst of this thicket.

“For me, esthetics is the most important,” she said. “The best of my works happen when I allow myself to lose conscious control, when my hand and my intuition take over. The idea is still there, but not controlled by me.” That’s why she often listens to audio books when she is at her easel. “With an audio book engaging my thoughts, it’s easier to let the intuition fly.”

Several years ago, she answered the VAG Art Rental and Sales call for artists and sent them some of her forest drawings, thus beginning a long association. Mann is the featured artist at the VAG Art Rental and Sales Showroom from Feb. 3 to May 2. Her artist talk, on March 4, 7 p.m., is free and open to the public.

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

Profeti della Quinta brings Salomone Rossi to life

Profeti della Quinta is at Vancouver Playhouse on Feb. 2. (photo by Susanna Drescher)

The documentary Hebreo: The Search for Salomone Rossi (Joseph Rochlitz, 2012) introduced last year’s Vancouver International Film Festival audiences to Profeti della Quinta, a Switzerland-based Renaissance and early Baroque vocal ensemble, primarily composed of Israelis. It followed the quintet to the Italian town of Mantua, the birthplace of Salomone Rossi, the first-known – and elusive – early-17th-century composer of Jewish music, who also was “one of the most renowned composers and performers at the court of the Gonzaga dukes.” The film’s audiences were treated to the ensemble’s musical preparations ahead of their concert of Rossi’s works at the Palazzo Te, where his music might have originally been performed, as well as by illuminating commentary from historians and musicologists on Rossi’s music and its impact.

On a North American tour to support their latest recording, Il Mantovano Hebreo, featuring Italian madrigals and Hebrew prayers by Rossi, Profeti della Quinta is in Vancouver Feb. 2, presented by Early Music Vancouver at Vancouver Playhouse. The first half of the program includes a screening of the 45-minute 2012 documentary; the program continues with the live performance of Rossi’s music. Members of the ensemble appearing in the Vancouver recital include Doron Schleifer and David Feldman, cantus; Lior Leibovici and Dan Dunkelblum, tenor; Elam Roten, bass and musical direction; and Orí Harmelin, chitarrone (a large bass lute).

Rotem, the ensemble’s music director, who also composes and plays the harpsichord in addition to the bass, spoke with the Independent about the quintet’s newest release, the experience of making the film, and their upcoming recording Rappresentatione Di Giuseppe E I Suoi Fratelli (Joseph and His Brethren), a “musical drama in three acts sung in biblical Hebrew,” Rotem’s composition for the ensemble set to be released in March.

Jewish Independent: When and how was Profeti della Quinta established?

Elam Rotem: Profeti della Quinta started while I was still in high school. Around the age of 17, I fell in love with vocal music, and especially the music of the 16th and 17th centuries. It was shortly after that I collected some of my friends and started singing Latin motets in the corridors of the school. The early sacred music that we were singing was a very odd element in an Israeli kibbutz school, but I think that our fellow students liked it.

Later, we were lucky to add Doron Schleifer, who can sing perfectly the soprano lines of 16th-century music and has a most beautiful and unique voice color, different from any other countertenor I know. After a pause, when I was in the army, I studied music in Jerusalem and then joined Doron in Basel in the schola cantorum – one of the best schools specializing in early music. There, we found new colleagues. Not so surprisingly, most of them are from Israel, too. (In this particular tour, we are all Israelis, but in others, it’s not always the case.)

JI: Can you talk about the experience of making that film about Salomone Rossi and what it was like, ultimately, to play his music at the palazzo?

image - Salomone Rossi image — Profeti della Quinta performs the music of Salomone Rossi.

ER: It should be noted that we are definitely not the first to sing and play Rossi’s music – not at all. His Hebrew sacred music is quite common in Israeli choirs’ repertoire, and was also performed and recorded in America. Rossi’s instrumental music is played in many concerts of 17th-century music. However, with our historically informed performance approach, we try to get closer as much as possible (and this is not simple) to the way Rossi’s music may have been performed in his time. Our special combination of knowledge in early music and in Hebrew allows us to read Rossi’s Hebrew music in its original notation (this is something worth seeing and we welcome people after the concert to have a look in the scores).

Moreover, in our new album, Il Mantovano Hebreo, we shed light on Rossi’s most neglected repertoire – his beautiful Italian madrigals. Singing in the palaces of Mantova [Mantua] where Rossi worked 400 years ago was an amazing experience for us. We look forward to further experiences like that in Italy!

JI: Can you speak to what role, if any, music plays in “illustrating” Jewish history?

ER: As far as I understand, the Hebrew music of Rossi is a very local phenomenon that probably stopped not much after its creation, probably around Rossi’s death (circa 1630). Other compositions in Hebrew came up only much later in music history, and not in Italy. However, this was a very interesting point in history – a Jewish musician succeeds in breaking the barriers of society, becomes successful and accepted, and then goes back to his own community and tries to revolutionize the music of the synagogue. In Rossi’s own words, to share with God the talents that were given to him.

JI: There seems to be a movement to work to “uncover history” through performing the work of composers who were (or nearly were) “erased” by history. Can you comment on the experience and responsibility of performing “neglected” music? How does Profeti della Quinta approach this enterprise? How do you make this music accessible to contemporary audiences?

ER: Profeti della Quinta are privileged to be (at least) the third generation of the “early music movement.” However, we believe that if music is “only” forgotten, that alone is not a good enough reason to bring it to life. We believe in good music, and when we find such good music, we want to share it with others. This was exactly the case with Rossi’s Italian madrigals. The purpose of music in the early 17th century was to move the listeners, and this is exactly our aim, as well.

JI: Profeti della Quinta achieves “vivid and expressive” performances by “addressing the performance practices of the time.” Can you explain a little bit more about that approach? Do you try to recreate an experience or to create something entirely new?

ER: This is an important point – it is not possible to recreate early music exactly the way it was done. This is simply because we cannot know fully how it was done. However, there are many things we can do. We strive to understand the compositions better (historical counterpoint and composition techniques), to understand the way music was performed (historical notation, ornamentation practices) and, as much as we can, also the social context and the meaning the music had in the time of its use. Nevertheless, we are aware that what we are doing is a new creation, mainly inspired by the past.

JI: What are some of the challenges of your dual role as music director of the quintet, as well as being one of the musicians?

ER: This is, in fact, quite simple: Before the concert I’m the musical director, but during the concerts I’m one of the performers. The concerts are the easy and fun part!

JI: I’m curious about your composition about Joseph and his brothers. Can you describe what it’s like to compose in Hebrew, while “using the musical language and context” of Italian Renaissance composers? Mazal tov on the recording’s upcoming release!

ER: Thanks, we are all very excited about the coming release of Rappresentatione Di Giuseppe E I Suoi Fratelli (Joseph and His Brethren). Concerning the language, I merely followed Rossi’s footsteps. He was the first to use the Hebrew language within the Christian musical language of his day. For Joseph and His Brethren, I also used the musical language of the early 17th century but with a focus on the newly invented dramatic genre – the opera. It’s a Hebrew Orfeo, if you like! (I intentionally don’t say “Jewish”; the Old Testament’s stories belong to whole of the Western culture. Luckily for me, it’s my mother tongue in which it was originally written, and I’m excited to share it.)

JI: Many leading Israeli classical musicians leave Israel for Europe. How difficult is it to achieve an international reputation while based in Israel? Do any of you participate in the Israeli expat community in Europe?

ER: This is a difficult question. Being in the middle of Europe makes … traveling around relatively easy, and this economical aspect is crucial today. For example, we performed in the U.K. only once, after … winning in the York competitions. We got several calls, but none of the organizers were able to pay the travel [costs]. The situation would have been much more difficult if we were coming every time from Israel.

JI: Your February concert with Early Music Vancouver will be paired with a screening of the documentary film. What’s it like to perform alongside yourselves, as it were?

ER: We love performing next to the screening of the film. The audience actually knows what [they are listening to] and, therefore, enjoys and is moved much more from our performance. It is related to what “early music” is – the more you understand the context, the stronger your experience is. We are looking forward very much to this tour!

Profeti della Quinta is in Vancouver, Feb. 2, 3 p.m., at the Playhouse; there is a pre-show chat at 2:15 p.m. Early Music Vancouver has recently introduced half-price tickets for concert-goers 35 years of age or younger, and rush seats for students with valid ID are $10 at the door. For information and tickets, visit earlymusic.bc.ca.

Metro Theatre’s Deathtrap macabre, fun

Left to right: Melanie Preston, Drew Taylor, James Behenna, Don Briard and Deborah Tom, in Deathtrap at Metro Theatre. (photo by Tracy Lynn-Chernaske)

If you like rollercoaster rides, then Metro Theatre’s staging of Ira Levin’s Deathtrap as part of its 51st season is for you. This satirical thriller winds its way through more twists and turns than any ride at the PNE. Levin, who has penned such classics as Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil, steps it up a notch with this macabre mix of Monty Python meets Sleuth, with a twist of Macbeth thrown in for good measure. Stephen King called Levin, “the Swiss watchmaker of suspense novels.”

Deathtrap ran on Broadway for 1,800 performances over four years and garnered a Tony nomination for best play. In 1982, it was made into a film starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve.

The play-within-a-play format is based on the premise of an aging Broadway playwright, Sidney Bruhl, whose repertoire consists of one set, five-character thrillers, such as The Murder Game and Blind Justice. However, writer’s block has landed him in a dry spell and he has not had a hit for 18 years. He is reduced to teaching college seminars to aspiring writers – or “twerps,” as he calls them, while living off his wife’s fortune. A young student, Clifford Anderson, shows him a script that looks like it could be a smash hit. It’s called Deathtrap, and guess what? It is a one-set, five-character thriller. Only Bruhl has seen the manuscript. When Anderson wants to discuss his work with his teacher, Bruhl sees a light at the end of his tunnel and tells his wife, Myra, of a killer idea to get his hands on the manuscript. He invites the young man to his remote New England retreat and tells him to bring all the copies of his play with him. Anderson has no family and has not told anyone where he is going. Need I say more? As in an Agatha Christie play, A Murder is Announced – but is it really?

Houdini handcuffs, a garroting, a body dragged out to be buried, a resurrection, a heart attack, a double murder and a clairvoyant who has a premonition about it all, are all part of the thickening plot. The audience cannot be sure that this is going to end well for anyone as it grapples with hidden meanings, plot reversals and deceit until the final coup de theatre.

The set is very simple – a quaint old colonial farmhouse with the attached stable converted into a beamed study for Bruhl’s writing, replete with a crackling fireplace. A desk with a manual typewriter sits front and centre. The walls are covered with posters from Bruhl’s Broadway hits and an assortment of antique weaponry from those plays, including maces, swords, daggers and a cross-bow, visual spoilers, perhaps?

Community members Melanie Preston (who was profiled in the Jewish Independent, Sept. 10, 2010), playing Myra, Bruhl’s nervous wife, and Deborah Tom, as the Bruhls’ nosey Dutch psychic neighbor, carry the female roles. In an e-mail interview, Preston noted that, “The character of Myra is a wonderful challenge. When I first read the script, she surprised me, so I am trying to do the same for the audience, but it is always challenging to make someone real while honoring the script. I have worked hard to study my internal motivations with the other characters and to bring what Myra struggles with to life.” Added to that motivation is the fact that Preston’s true-life significant other, James Behenna, plays naïve Anderson. “I have always wanted to work on stage with James again,” she said. “He is a very good actor, and it’s nice to have both a hubby and a boyfriend in the play.”

Tom said she has fond memories of her early acting days at Vancouver’s Peretz School under the tutelage of Lerner Bossman and Claire Klein Osipov, where she developed her passion for theatre. By e-mail she said she “fondly remembers the elaborate productions with beautiful sets and costumes performed in the auditorium of the old, one-storey building, with the aromas of all the goodies the babas were making in the adjacent kitchen. Everyone contributed and it is this sense of community that [I have] found here in our local nonprofit theatre organizations such as Metro.”

In this production, Tom plays Helga Van Torp, a renowned psychic. With her ersatz accent, she provides much of the comic relief. Drew Taylor is convincing as the suave but cunning Bruhl. His one-line witticisms are barbed with delicious bitterness as he complains that “nothing recedes like success.” Behenna’s Anderson is the perfect counterpoint to Bruhl’s sophistication. Director Don Briard does quadruple duty, not only showing his thespian talents in a smaller role as Bruhl’s lawyer, Milgrim, but also as set, lighting and sound designer for the play.

On preview night, some of the actors had trouble with their timing and Tom’s accent needs some work, but all of this should improve over the course of the run. Some critics have labeled the play dated and a genre past its sell-by date. This reviewer does not agree – there is nothing like a good bout of murder and mayhem for one’s entertainment pleasure. Deathtrap runs until Feb. 8. Tickets are available at 604-266-7191 or metrotheatre.org.

Tova Kornfeld is a Vancouver freelance writer and lawyer.

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.

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.