Looking Jewish: visual culture and modern diaspora

214 Pages·2015·7.726 MB·English

by  Zemel, Carol M

LOOKING JEWISH
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L OOK I NG
J EW I S H
VISUAL CULTURE
and
MODERN DIASPORA
S
carol zemel
Indiana University Press
Bloomington & Indianapolis
This book is a publication of Manufactured in the United States of America
Indiana University Press Library of Congress
Office of Scholarly Publishing Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street Zemel, Carol M.
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA Looking Jewish : visual culture and
modern diaspora / Carol Zemel.
iupress.indiana.edu pages cm
Includes bibliographical
Telephone [phone] references and index.
Fax [phone] ISBN 978-0-253-00598-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
— ISBN 978-0-253-01542-6 (ebook) 1. Jewish
© 2015 by Carol Zemel art. 2. Jews in art. 3. Art, Modern—20th
century. 4. Art, Modern—21st century. I. Title.
All rights reserved N7415.Z46 2015
704.03’924—dc23
No part of this book may be reproduced or 2014044170
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying 1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
and recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
The Association of American University
Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes
the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the
minimum requirements of the American Cover: Photograph of Pearl Rabinowicz,
National Standard for Information 1900–1941. Daughter of Rabbi Yerachmiel
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Tzvi Rabinowicz, Byaler Rebbe. Died with
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. her husband, Shalom Alter Perlow, 1941.
To the memory of my parents:
Joseph William Moscovitch, z"l
(Vaslui, Rumania, 1900–Montreal, 1949)
Beatrice (Rebekah) Greenblatt, z"l
(Izyaslavl, Ukraine, 1913–Montreal, 1981)
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CONTENTS
Preface ix
Introduction 1
1 B eyond the Ghetto Walls: Shtetl to Nation in Photography
by Alter Kacyzne and Moshe Vorobeichic 17
2 Modern Artist, Modern Jew: Bruno Schulz’s Diasporas 53
3 Z ’chor! Roman Vishniac’s Photo-Eulogy of
Eastern European Jews 80
4 D ifference in Diaspora: The Yiddishe Mama,
the Jewish Mother, the Jewish Princess, and Their Men 104
5 D iasporic Values in Contemporary Art:
R. B. Kitaj, Ben Katchor, Vera Frenkel 137
Notes 161
Bibliography 179
Index 189
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PREFACE
I
began this book many years ago, in what became a major reorien-
tation of my scholarly work. I had just finished a book on Vincent
van Gogh, and I returned to Amsterdam, the city that had nourished my
interests for so many years, to seek a new direction. One rainy afternoon,
I wandered into a bookstore across from the Amsterdams Historisch Mu-
seum, and saw among the tables, a remaindered stack of Roman Vish-
niac’s A Vanished World. “Oh, yes,” I remembered about the expensive
publication, “those are the pictures of Jewish life I’ve wanted to see.” Now
the price was right. Still, I hesitated, moved away and back again several
times, and finally decided that any images that left me, an art historian, so
uncertain were surely worth investigating. I write about my ambivalent
response to Vishniac’s publication in chapter 3 of this volume. Visits in
the next few days to the library of the Joods Historisch Museum led me
to Moshe Vorobeichic’s Ghetto Lane in Vilna. Naïve as I was about the
pictorial repertoire of Eastern Europe’s Jewish culture, the photographic
combination of Vishniac and Vorobeichic emboldened me to explore the
field of Jewish visual culture and self-imaging.
The new direction resonated with my long-held interest in my family’s
history. I was the child who badgered my parents, grandparents, great-
aunts and -uncles about daily life in Vaslui in Rumania and Izyaslavl in the
former Russian Pale. They indulged my curiosity, but with a certain reti-
cence: they reported fragments—who was related to whom, who lived in
ix