ELIZABETH'S BLOG
A Great-Granddaughter's Legacy

Young Jewish Artists Abroad

January 24, 2014 by

 

F6957 copyIncluded in the Otto Schneid archive at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library are several newspaper clippings with information about some exhibitions that included Moshe Rynecki’s work.  This article, written in German, was particularly difficult to read because of the use of the font, Fraktur.  I eventually was able to transcribe the text which I then put through Google Translate.  The results (included in this blog post down a bit further) are not brilliant, but they give you a sense of the content of the article.  I am hoping that someone who speaks German might take a look at this and help me refine the translation.

I find a few things about this article compelling and eye opening.  The first is that my great-grandfather was so prominently featured in this newspaper (whose title I do not know).  The second is that all four of his paintings included in this article have titles, which lends quite a bit of history and insight to my great-grandfather’s way of thinking about his paintings. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Search for Rynecki paintings

Untitled? My Guest Blog on Museumlines.

January 20, 2014 by

Museumlines is a London based blog hosted by David Mentiply (@davidmentiply) offering reviews of museums, galleries and exhibitions. I was invited to write about the Moshe Rynecki project for the blog.  My piece, “Untitled?” is about titles (or lack thereof) for my great-grandfather’s paintings.  The piece explores curatorial choices versus known information and a viewer’s “needs.”

Here’s the piece as it appears on Museumlines:

Moshe Rynecki was a Warsaw based artist who painted scenes of the Polish Jewish community in the interwar years. He had a keen eye for exploring and documenting the daily rhythm of life; painting scenes from the synagogue, manual labor, and leisure time. At the outbreak of the Second World War Moshe became concerned about preserving his life’s work. In the early days of the war he made the decision to divide his oeuvre of approximately 800 works into a number of bundles, and to hide them in and around Warsaw. He gave a list of the locations where the works were hidden to his wife, son, and daughter, in hopes that after the war the family would retrieve the bundles and the collection would be whole once again. Moshe perished in the Holocaust. After the war his surviving widow recovered only a small percentage of the original collection; just over 100 paintings.  Today his great-granddaughter is searching for the lost and missing pieces from the original collection.  To date she has located approximately 70 pieces.

I grew up in the shadow of my great-grandfather’s paintings. Many pieces hung on the walls of my parents’ home which, given the sheer number of works, sometimes made my childhood home feel an awful lot like the hallowed halls of a museum.  While the presence of the art sometimes made me feel more like I lived in an exhibition than a child-friendly home with play spaces, I had the distinct advantage of actually living in the space.  There were no crowds, no closing times, and no security guards objecting to my close proximity to the works.  The disadvantage, if there was one, centered around my having to learn about the art on my own.  There was no curator to group the works by theme, style, or other artistic attributes, and never any exhibit labels to contextualize or explain the paintings to me.

In a way, having paintings hanging with no written guidance is liberating. In fact, today it has become hip for some museums to not provide any information at all about the works on display.  The theoretical concept for this lack of labels is to liberate visitors from a curator’s preconceived notions; to allow viewers to assess and appreciate the aesthetic appeal of a given piece (or a larger collection) without the wisdom and insight of titles or explanatory paragraphs.  My parents were not ahead of their time, of course; very few, if any, private collectors have descriptive labels on their collection.  Instead, guests notice the art on display and sometimes inquire about it.  The family learns to curate the work verbally – to share the pieces they love and to tell abbreviated stories about the collection.  This approach works quite well if the art is in your family and isn’t shared beyond the walls of your home, but as interest in my great-grandfather’s work has grown, and my responsibility to the collection has expanded, the haphazard titles assigned to the pieces gnaws at me.[Read more…]

Filed Under: Second Generation Legacy

A Look at Secret City – The Hidden Jews of Warsaw

January 3, 2014 by

My bookshelf and reading lists are filled with Holocaust memoirs. In part I read these books because I have an insatiable curiosity about World War Two survivor chronicles and in part because I seek to fill in the ellipses of my family’s own story of survival. While many are well written, they are very hard for me to read. I begin to worry about where I might hide or how I might provide for my family if presented with similar circumstances, and although rationally I can tell myself how unlikely those circumstances are, there are tragic modern examples of genocide to demonstrate that similar horrors are not beyond the realm of possibility. I can’t read camp survivor stories late in the evening – the chills and nightmares they give me are too real as my overactive imagination reflects on the fates that befell most of my family as well as countless others. But I continue to read them at other times, finding occasional nuggets of stories, information, or context that give me a better glimpse into my family’s story. I did get a small trove of personal history in the memoir my grandfather George hid in the trunk of his car before he died in 1992. Though the manuscript was an incredible, and personal historical account, I was still unable to find a reason- a person, a story, a turning point, about why they survived when so many did not. From what I have pieced together, they survived due to an unlikely, but powerful [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Reviews

2013 – The Year in Review

December 31, 2013 by

2013 was marked by many great milestones and successes for the Moshe Rynecki project. A brief listing of this year’s finds:

(1) In early June a Fulbright scholar in Warsaw tracked down 2 images I’d never seen before. These images were printed in Nasz Prezglad – a Polish Zionist daily published in Warsaw in the interwar years.

(2) In late June I received photographs of 7 Moshe Rynecki paintings held by a woman in Israel. She is the aunt of the man I visited in Canada, whose parents were partisan fighters and who bought a bundle of my great-grandfather’s paintings after the war.

(3) In October I learned about the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the Otto Schneid archive. In that archive were letters written by my great-grandfather that I’d never seen before and 13 black and white photos (and newspaper clippings) of paintings that were all new to me. I now hope to be able to track down those canvases…

(4) In November the Jewish Historical Institute (ZIH) in Warsaw emailed me photographs of 17 of the 52 Moshe Rynecki paintings held in their collection.

In case you’re counting, that’s a discovery of thirty-nine (39!) images of my great-grandfather’s work that were all new to me in 2013! Wow. It’s been quite a year.

Thank you for following (and helping!) me as I continue on my quest to find and learn more about my great-grandfather’s body of work. I can’t promise what 2014 will bring, but I do have tentative plans to travel to Warsaw in the fall, and that should prove to be an interesting journey.

Filed Under: Search for Rynecki paintings

Past and Present Collide

December 28, 2013 by

I know this isn’t going to make a lot of sense to many people, but for me Poland has always been the land of shadows. It has been the black and white photographs from the Second World War. It is the amalgamation of my great-grandfather’s paintings. It is “the old country.” It is the country of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories. I have come to know it not through its current residents, but through the memories of survivors. It is a place where I am afraid to go – not for my physical safety – but because the shadows of the past frighten me. I wonder how not being called the Americanized “rye-neck-e” that I know as my own identity, but rather a “ri-net-ski” (the proper Polish pronunciation) will make me feel. I am confused by the issues of history, identity, memory, and self. It is why I will NOT go alone when I travel there to film for my documentary film.

My great-grandfather lived at 24 Krucza Street. While I’ve always known this fact, it was confirmed and made very real for me with the discovery of this envelope and letter showing it as his return address. I’ve always known it is the place where the family had the art[Read more…]

Filed Under: Second Generation Legacy

Warsaw Yiddish Dailies – Exhibitions

December 17, 2013 by

My work on the Moshe Rynecki project has moved forward because of all the help I receive from so very many different people. Sometimes that help arrives in the form of serendipitous information, other times people have offered useful advice and guidance. A few weeks ago I learned about the Historical Jewish Press website and the fact that they offer a digital collection of Jewish newspapers that is accessible to the public.  The papers in their archive include publications across several different countries, languages, and years. Not only have they digitized the papers making it possible to view many papers in their original layout, but they also digitized the content, making it possible to search the published text on any desired term. This effort, begun by Tel Aviv University and the Jewish National and University Library, is a phenomenal amount of work and an incredible resource.

I only had one problem, I can’t read Hebrew and I definitely don’t know how to read Yiddish. While I don’t read Polish either, I can usually stumble my way through a Polish publication trying to eyeball any mention of my great-grandfather’s name. That, sadly, is not possible for me in a publication whose letters I cannot read. Fortunately, the same gentleman who informed me that the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library had original resource information about my great-grandfather, also gave me the magical sequence of Hebrew letters to form the Yiddish version of my great-grandfather’s name, Rynetski [read right to left]: רינעצקי

Searching with this magical sequence of Hebrew letters turned up many different “hits” in the Historical Jewish Press website. It turns [Read more…]

Filed Under: Search for Rynecki paintings

17 Photos of Moshe Rynecki Paintings Held by ZIH

December 13, 2013 by

On the 18th of November I received an email from the Jewish Historical Institute (ZIH) in Warsaw, Poland. The email contained photographs of 17 of the 52 Moshe Rynecki paintings held in their collection.I have been sharing those photos here on my blog for the last few weeks in individual posts.  Today I present all 17 images below.

So now, you may ask, where are photographs of the other 35 pieces held by ZIH?  As those of you who have been following for awhile know, over the years I have managed to find photographs of  34 of the works held by ZIH. I am, therefore, awaiting a photograph of just one more Moshe Rynecki painting held by the Jewish Historical Institute.

Filed Under: Search for Rynecki paintings

In Moshe Rynecki’s Own Words – A Bio

December 12, 2013 by

During my visit at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, I “found” in the Otto Schneid archives a handwritten Yiddish letter that Moshe Rynecki wrote to Otto Schneid. While the mystery of WHAT the letter says has been solved, there are now new mysteries about the contents of the letter. I’m working on that, but welcome any assistance you may be able to offer.  Here is the original letter and the translation:

pic_2013-10-17_182220Answered on 28 Dec. [19]30

Otto Shneyd!

I am an artist, a painter, born in the year 1885 in the small Polish town of Shedlits. My name is Moyshe Rinetsky [Rynecki]. I now live in Warsaw at 24 Kradzhe [Krucza][Read more…]

Filed Under: Search for Rynecki paintings

A Bit About the Jewish Historical Institute

December 11, 2013 by

A few weeks ago I received an email with 17 photographs of my great-grandfather’s paintings held by the Jewish Historical Institute (ZIH) in Warsaw.  The Institute has 52 of  Moshe Rynecki’s paintings under their control.  I am frequently asked how they came into possession of my great-grandfather’s works.  The answer is that I do not entirely know.  I know their records show they obtained many of his pieces in 1946, but that they also acquired others at different points in time.  I am including here a description of the Institute as explained on Wikipedia as well as a photograph of one of the pieces held by ZIH.

The Jewish Historical Institute was created in 1947 as a continuation of the Central Jewish Historical Commission, founded in 1944. The Jewish Historical Institute Association is the corporate body responsible for the building and the Institute’s [Read more…]

Filed Under: Search for Rynecki paintings

The Life of Art and Heritage

December 10, 2013 by

Today a few quotes that really speak to me:

Heritage is not just about sticks and stones. It’s about things making sense to people, part of the accumulated culture of their communities.
– John Yates (English Heritage’s Inspector for historic buildings in the West Midlands)

 

Art restitution is a painful exercise for everyone involved and required creative thinking by all parties and a willingness [Read more…]

Filed Under: Search for Rynecki paintings
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