Family legends. Every family has them, right? There’s the one about my great-grandmother who pretended to be the bride of someone she had never met in order to gain passage to the United States.
She had to escape the czarist authorities because she was a socialist agitator.
But we can talk about that another time. Let me tell you about my great-grandfather Max.
From what I gather, Max was a feisty man, with many kids from two marriages. He was a house painter by day and an artist by night. He would stay up late painting murals on the dining room walls.
For years I thought about Max’s art, although the details of it are lost to hazy family recollection and all but one of his children have died. To me, he was the Abraham of frustrated artists, the source of a legacy of artistic careers set aside by my family members for the sake of the almighty dollar.
When my mom called me recently and said that she had received two frail paintings by Max from her aunt Miriam, it was like finding the sixth book of Moses, or a golden ticket in a Wonka bar.
I was stunned when she added that they were landscapes recollected from his native Lithuania. Here was a century-old glimpse into my family’s artistic past. Here also was a tangible connection to the Old Country, to my Ashkenazi roots.
This had great symbolic weight for me. Only recently have I realized how secular Jewish culture from Europe is just as vital and important to the past, present and future of the Jewish people as midrash and halachah. I’m not sure if it was the Yiddish sing-along in San Francisco, but at some point it hit me that I don’t have to feel guilty about feeling closer to klezmer than kashrut.
Secular Jewish arts and culture are just as refined and deeply rooted as religious tradition. But we’re not taught that at Hebrew school.
If we’re lucky, someone will expose the richness of these traditions to us. If we’re even luckier we’ll find some direct link to these traditions in our own lives.
I was blessed to have the work of Max’s son, my grandpa Ralph, around me from the day I was born. Ralph was also a housepainter, but tried to break into the Sunday funnies with various takes on classic cartoon types — talking animals, wacky army mishaps. He also painted lyrical portraits and landscapes, and tried his hand at pulp adventure tales.
Besides Max, Ralph and a couple of pianists, my brother and I stick out like sore thumbs. There are talented sheet metal workers, network security analysts, bakers and engineers. Then there’s us. A couple of intellectuals — a librarian and an editor — sitting on our duffs all day. We’re artists, too. My brother plays free jazz on the bass. I write minor key melodies on the marimba.
So I like to imagine what Max’s father did back in Lithuania. Did he paint shtetl walls from dawn till dusk, go home and write Yiddish poetry? Play bawdy klezmer on the accordion? Paint murals on his walls?
I don’t know, but I do have digital copies of Max’s paintings right in front of me, and they’re a melancholy portrait of my heritage. One shows how he remembered a rich person’s house in his village. There are odd little ducks grazing in the foreground with a massive forest behind them. The house looks like something from “The Sound of Music.”
The other depicts the house where he grew up. This painting is simpler, but conjures intense emotions. It’s winter; the sky is yellow and gray. The house is small and barely looks warm enough to withstand the surrounding frozen landscape. But there’s a subtle light coming from a single window, a reddish-blue glow.
Are these Shabbat candles? A fire by which Max’s mother is reading to him? But if there’s at least a bit of Max in me, I’d like to think huddled beneath the glow is a young boy learning to handle a paintbrush.
Jay Schwartz can be reached at [email protected]. E-mail him to see digital copies of the paintings.