It takes a great deal of planning, behind-the-scenes work, and assistance of many to bring together all the details of a documentary film project. More people than I could possibly thank in this post were involved in helping me with my trip to Poland. So I want to start by thanking my donors, family (who held down the fort while I was away), friends (who read my blogs, Facebook posts, and Tweets daily, and wrote emails to check in on me), and everyone else (my apologies to anyone I’ve accidentally left out but whose support I greatly appreciate!) who made this trip possible.  In this blog post, I want to specifically highlight a few special individuals who helped make the trip a success.[Read more…]

The Chasing Portraits documentary film team of Sławomir Grünberg, Cathy Greenblatt, and I, left Krakow Monday afternoon by train for Warsaw. A three hour ride, we did a little bit of everything including filming the views out the window (it was foggy!), working on blog posts, calling family, and resting up for the last big day of filming. We arrived back in Warsaw in the early evening and grabbed a taxi for Polin: The Museum of the History of the Polish Jews. We needed to pick up our press passes (mine said “Documentary Filmmaker” – !) for Wednesday’s grand opening events.[Read more…]

I visited Krakow on Saturday (25 October) and Sunday (26 October). The purpose for my visit was three-fold: to see Krakow Market where Grandpa George was arrested in September 1944 in a sweeping Gestapo round up, to give my talk, “Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for her Lost Art Legacy” at JCCKrakow, and to visit the historical Jewish district of Krakow, Kazimierz. Today’s post is mostly a photo montage.[Read more…]

I first discovered photographs of Moshe Rynecki paintings for sale on Allegro.pl, a Polish auction site, a few years ago. I don’t speak or read Polish, but the wording in one of the listings was “Rarytas,” a cognate for “rarity” or “collector’s item,”information I could piece together from context.   These pieces, the various sellers proclaimed, were real paintings by Moshe Rynecki, a Jewish artist from the interwar years who had perished in the Holocaust. I strained to learn something…anything…from the thumbnail photos included with each of the postings, but they were too small and grainy, yielding little insight about the work.[Read more…]

[Today’s blog is written by Catherine Greenblatt. Cathy is part of the Chasing Portraits documentary film production team and has been with me in Poland for the past two weeks.]

At the turn of the 20th century, artists and writers from Warsaw and other Polish cities discovered the charm of Kazimierz Dolny, a village that lies on the Vistula River between Warsaw and Krakow. Kazimierz Dolny became a regular summer destination for artists, a colony or retreat where they could practice their craft without distraction. Artists visiting the town would stay with local families and participate in domestic life and rituals. Painters would paint in plein air; easels were set outside to catch the warm summer light, often capturing scenes of the marketplace, which still functions today, and the countryside, which remains beautiful, and the castle of King Kasimir, which still sits atop a hill at the end of the road leading from the market square. Moshe Rynecki was one of the many artists who regularly visited Kazimierz Dolny, and four of his watercolors of the town are carefully kept at ZIH (Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw).

None of this would be terribly extraordinary, except for the fact that Kazimierz Dolny was not simply a picturesque town in the Polish countryside. Kazimierz Dolny was a shtetl, a small Jewish community that observed the traditional customs and practices of hasidic Jews, who composed 80% of the town’s population. It would have been, more than likely, into the houses of these Orthodox Jews that visiting artists and writers stayed; more than likely kosher food that they ate and shuttered shops that they encountered in the market square on Saturdays. The artists who visited Kazimierz Dolny, Jew and Pole alike, went there not simply to paint but to explore this other culture, which also became the subject matter of many paintings. When we visited the National Museum in Kazimierz Dolny, we had the pleasure of speaking with Director Agnieszka Zadura and former Director Waldemar Odorowski, who shed light on this complex topic. When Odorowski assembled a 2007 exhibition of Jewish painters for the museum there, he did quite a lot of research about the Jewish communities where artists like Moshe Rynecki lived and worked. He found that it was impossible to speak of a singular Jewish world of Warsaw. There were assimilated Jews who spoke Polish and lived in gentile neighborhoods; there were semi-assimilated Jews who spoke Yiddish and Hebrew at home but who did business with Poles; and there were Jews who lived and worked in Jewish neighborhoods exclusively; and there were Hasidic Jews who lived very traditional lives and did not engage at all in modernity. The artistic groups that emerged from these differing strata of interwar Jewish life had sharp differences, and each one would often work in exclusion to the others. Except in Kazimierz Dolny, where all of the usual differences would, at least for a time, give way to looser, more generous explorations.

The case of Moshe Rynecki is interesting:  we know that he lived outside the Jewish quarters of Warsaw and spoke Polish. We also know that he was from a very religious  Jewish family. He spoke or wrote Yiddish but also Russian, and his children learned German and Russian as well. Though he painted scenes of traditional Jewish life, in his self-portraits his image is that of an urban, worldly man, a modern European. The brush strokes of those self-portraits are stark and bold, expressive and contemporary. How do we make sense of this difference between his self-portraits and his depictions of traditional Jewish life, which are more lush and colorful and detailed?

The self-portrait with wedding scene shows some of these dynamic qualities at work in Moshe’s imagination. There he is, in the lower right hand corner, confronting us with his gaze. The painter as self-conscious ethnographer. The majority of the canvas is given over to the wedding scene, an archetypal celebration in the life of Jewish family and community. The painting has two idioms, so to speak, one belonging to the painter and the other to the painted. Two cultures. Two separate spaces. Two identifications. And yet there they are, in the same frame finally, together making sense of what it is to be a Polish Jew.

 

Elizabeth’s Corner… I thought you might enjoy some photos of our time at Kazimierz Dolny

[NOTE: Today’s post is written by Catherine Greenblatt. Cathy is part of the Chasing Portraits documentary film production team.]

One bone-chilling, digit-numbing afternoon in Lublin, after visiting the concentration camp Majdanek, an experience I’ve yet to metabolize, we visited The “Grodzka Gate – NN Theater” Center. Grodzka Gate – NN Theater occupies a building that is a literal bridge between what once was the Jewish and what is still the Gentile quarters of the town, where different cultures and religions could meet and pass into one another’s neighborhoods. Architecture becomes metaphor in Grodzka Gate, as the organization fully embraces the actual and figurative space of the bridge. The Jewish part of the city is now completely gone, the streets that once were busy with commerce and life are now silent, paved over, their vitality slipping away from the collective memory of Lublin.  It is difficult to categorize simply the work that “Grodzka Gate – NN Theater” does. It researches, explores, documents, and makes present again the lives of people who before the war made up one third of the town’s inhabitants. Their alchemy is part urban archaeology, part performance art, part gallery installation, part photographic archive, all filtered through the medium of public education and civic engagement. All of these gestures and research are then communicated through the ethical imperative of communal mourning and memory. Through photographs, maps, civic records, and other historical documents, “Grodzka Gate – NN Theater” finds remnants of lost lives and then animates them with conversation, live performance, and storytelling. Learning about this intelligent, heartfelt work warmed us as much as the hot milled wine and mushroom soup we had eaten earlier for lunch at a nearby traditional Polish restaurant.

Grodzka Gate began as a theater company, and though its mission took a turn when it fully realized the meaning of its location, there is no doubt that its work continues in a performative vein. In one civic performance, the stories of survivors commingle with those “righteous” Poles who rescued or hid Jews, each of the storytellers forming a line on each side of the Grodzka Gate, each one becoming witness for the other. As each person spoke, a lit candle would pass between each individual all along the line, and a handful of earth would be collected. Into each pile of earth a plant would be planted, a sign of life in a city that lost too many. I have long been fascinated by the speech of ghosts and have trained my ears to hear what it is they have to say. Poland is overwhelmed by ghosts, the airwaves are choked by their broadcasts, and not all of them are speaking in Yiddish. In the West, we don’t really learn about the suffering of Poles during the war, especially under Soviet occupation. The example of Grodzka Gate gives us an ethos of compassion and empathy and, above all, a desire to know what all of us are missing.