This year has seen the publication of some extraordinary books highlighting Jewish art and photography. With Hanukkah upon us, they may serve you well if you are seeking gift ideas.
Photographer Roman Vishniac is remembered for recording Eastern European Jewry on the eve of annihilation. Through books like “A Vanished World” and “To Give Them Light,” his photographs have come to play a large role in how we envision prewar Jewish life in the shtetls and cities of Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary and elsewhere.
But there was more to his career, as is revealed in “Roman Vishniac Rediscovered.” The word “rediscovered” is not a matter of hyperbole. Several years ago, art historian Maya Benton came upon thousands of previously unknown negatives that Vishniac, who died in 1990, left behind.
As a result, we now have access to the larger arc of his work across five decades, including splendid avant-garde photographs taken as an expatriate in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s; portraits of Chagall and Einstein and shots of burlesque dancers after his 1940 escape to New York; and, most unusually, groundbreaking images of microscopic organisms, reflecting his training as a scientist in Russia decades earlier.
But there are also surprises to be found in his iconic portrayals of Eastern European Jews in the 1930s. Vishniac was apparently quiet about the fact that he took these photographs at the behest of the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish relief organization. The images were selected and cropped in order to serve the aims of his employer: soliciting support for European Jewry in terrible times.
What didn’t make the cut were a large number of images depicting a broader spectrum of Jewish existence — including the secular and middle class Jews generally absent in the familiar photographs.
The good news is that you’ll be able to see a sampling of these photos and others in an exhibition of the same title opening at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco in February.
For those interested in Vishniac, I would argue that the book, with its ample essays explaining every dimension of the photographer’s career and work, is a “must read.”
Anybody who has spent time in San Francisco’s Rincon Annex Post Office, Beach House Chalet or Coit Tower has experienced the power of murals funded by the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In “Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene,” art historian Diana Linden looks at the murals created by celebrated social realist Shahn during this era on the East Coast and in the Midwest.
Shahn’s induction into mural artistry was a case of starting at the top: Diego Rivera recruited him in 1933 to be an assistant on the famed Rockefeller Center mural in New York City that the Rockefellers, upset by its Communist imagery, would order to be destroyed.
Like Rivera, Lithuanian-born Shahn embraced the social and political possibilities of art. But Linden draws out the Jewish dimension in his mural work as well. The most explicitly Jewish murals were created for Jersey Homesteads, a utopian development (later renamed Roosevelt) in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Not only did they include Jewish subject matter, but Linden proposes that their narrative echoes the structure of the Passover haggadah.
Although it is richly illustrated, this is a book for reading. An enormous amount of research informs Linden’s account. My one disappointment is that the reproductions aren’t as large as one would hope, given the scale of the works addressed.
Jewish illuminated manuscripts are a genre that receives insufficient attention. Often people captivated by Jewish texts do not seem particularly interested in their artistic presentation, while those focused on art tend to look to other forms.
I am hoping that “Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts” helps ameliorate this situation. Assembled by Marc Michael Epstein of Vassar College, it includes splendid reproductions, ranging from the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, created in Catalonia in the 14th century, to works by contemporary artists like David Moss and JT Waldman.
But what really distinguishes this book are the very approachable essays by Epstein and other scholars on a wide range of topics that illuminate the illuminations. Subjects include regional differences, the process of creation and how the representational artwork was reconciled with the Second Commandment forbidding graven images. This is one of my favorite books of the year, and I recommend it very highly.
“The Last Folio” is a beautiful and heartbreaking book with stunning photographs by Yuri Dojc. Dojc, who left Czechoslovakia as a child, later returned to his ancestral home and recorded what he could find remaining of the world that disappeared in the Shoah. He recorded synagogues, graveyards and other mostly abandoned Jewish spaces, and photographed and interviewed survivors. But a large part of the book is devoted to extraordinary images of the books left behind. Fading, decaying and often disfigured, they serve as mute witnesses to the past.
We learn in the haunting text by Katya Krausova of an amazing story: Krausova and Dojc were exploring an abandoned Jewish school in eastern Slovakia that was left intact after its teachers and students were deported. Leafing through random books left untouched for decades, they came across one stamped with the name of Dojc’s grandfather — whom Dojc never met because he died in Auschwitz.
Howard Freedman is the director of the Jewish Community Library, a program of Jewish LearningWorks, in San Francisco. All books mentioned in this column may be borrowed from the library.
“Roman Vishniac Rediscovered” by Maya Benton (384 pages, Prestel Publishing)
“Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene” by Diana L. Linden (184 pages, Wayne State University Press)
“Skies of Parchment, Seas of Ink: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts” edited by Marc Michael Epstein (288 pages, Princeton University Press)
“Last Folio: A Photographic Memory” by Yuri Dojc and Katya Krausova (128 pages, Prestel Publishing)