krakow, poland | When Mayer Kirshenblatt was born, the town of Opatow in south-central Poland was known to most of its inhabitants as “Apt.” That’s because most of the population was Jewish, and Apt was Opatow’s name in Yiddish.
The Holocaust left Yiddish Apt a distant memory, glimpsed dimly in sepia-tinted photographs or locked up in the hearts of the few people still alive who had known it before the destruction.
Kirshenblatt was one of them until 1990 when, at the age of 73, he taught himself to paint and began to record in colorful detail the vibrant lost world of his childhood hometown.
“I only paint one thing — that’s Apt,” he said. “I paint not from my imagination but what actually happened.”
Sprightly and bespectacled, with twinkling eyes and a bristly moustache, Kirshenblatt, 91, turned to painting at the urging of his family.
Since 1967, his daughter, the scholar Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, has conducted interviews with him on prewar Jewish life in Apt.
The recollections were published last year along with nearly 200 of Kirshenblatt’s paintings as a book, “They Called Me Mayer July.” The title stems from Kirshenblatt’s childhood nickname, “Mayer Tamez,” or “Mayer July” — slang at the time for “Crazy Mayer.”
Published by University of California Press, the book has won several awards and brought international attention to the work of Kirshenblatt, who left Poland for Canada in 1934.
Some of the first attention he received was right here in the Bay Area, from September 2007 through January 2008, when the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley exhibited “They Called Me Mayer July.” It was the first major exhibition of his work in the United States.
“It was an incredibly popular exhibit at Magnes, garnering us great press and record crowds,” said Virginia Reinhart, the museum’s development and marketing assistant. “It also led to several extremely well-attended public programs, including a lecture in our conversation series, ‘Jewish Folk Art: Recalling the Lost World of Polish Jews.'”
Kirshenblatt’s work is currently showing at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Other shows are planned, including a May 2009 opening at The Jewish Museum in New York.
In June, Kirshenblatt and his daughter brought his memories of Apt back to present-day Opatow with an exhibition of 50 full-scale digital prints of his paintings.
“It was absolutely fabulous,” Kirshenblatt later said. “The event was well advertised all over the city with posters — even the priest mentioned it.”
He added, “I’ve had exhibitions elsewhere, but here the people, the atmosphere, was absolutely the best I ever had.”
It was, Kirshenblatt said, a far cry from the first time that he returned to his hometown. That was in 1988, when Poland was still in the grip of communist rule. “I was crying,” he recalled. “I came to the town and there was not a sign of Jewishness.”
Detailed, wry and often witty, Kirshenblatt’s paintings are peopled by sometimes crudely drawn characters, each of which seems to come to life as an individual. They crowd around dinner tables or cluster in the synagogue. They peer into windows, carry water in wooden buckets, play music, walk to school, mourn the dead, even commit a crime.
The titles of his paintings alone reflect complex, even convoluted tales that defy common stereotypes. Examples: “The Klepto-maniac Slipping a Fish Down Her Bosom,” “The Hunchback’s Wedding” and “Jadzka the Prostitute Shows off her Wares at the end of Market Day at Harshl Kishke’s Well.”
“There was a rich cultural life in Poland as I knew it at the time,” Kirshenblatt told his daughter in one recent conversation. “That’s why I feel I’m doing something very important by showing what that life was like.”
Opatow’s official Web site offers scant mention of the town’s Jewish past. Most of those who live there now settled in the town from elsewhere after World War II. Knowledge about the town’s prewar past is sketchy.
Things are changing, though, says Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. At the exhibition in Opatow, she said, she met a young local man who wants to specialize in Jewish studies in college. And as part of a nationwide project of “adopting” historic places, a group of local people is attempting to document the destroyed Jewish cemetery and recover uprooted tombstones.
Her father and his work, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said, are part of this process.
“They have really embraced him,” she said. “They consider him really one of the people who holds the memory of the town.”
Significant, too, she said, was the title given by town authorities to her father’s exhibition.
“They called it ‘Old Opatow,’ not ‘Old Jewish Opatow,'” she said. “And when we dedicated the book, we dedicated it to the people of Apt. So it’s everybody, Jews and non-Jews alike, but we dedicated it to the town with its Jewish name.”
“They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust” by Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (424 pages, University of California Press, $39.95)