(Author: Ute Ben Yosef, Vol. 68, No. 1, Pesach 2013)
In November this year, South Africa’s Mother City will have the privilege of hosting an exhibition of paintings by the eminent artist Samuel Bak. It is being brought to these shores by the Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, and hosted by the South African Jewish Museum. Bak is an internationally acclaimed artist of upheaval and displacement. His work is based on his personal experience of the great catastrophe he experienced as a child in Vilna, Lithuania, where he was born in 1933.
Bak’s message should resonate not only with Cape Town’s Jewish citizens, many of whose families originated in Lithuania, but among all its residents. Throughout the years, ever since its establishment as a Dutch settlement in 1652, Cape Town’s inhabitants have been placed in the roles of victims, persecutors and bystanders, with human rights abuses taking place as a matter of course. It began with its original inhabitants, the Khoisan, being driven out by the Dutch East Indian Company settlers. Thereafter, slaves were brought into the colony from Java and Madagascar. It culminated in a society constituted along lines of legalised racism, with the roles of workers and overlords being determined by skin colour.
During the 19th Century, waves of settlers arrived in Cape Town from Holland, Germany, Britain and other European countries. This included many Jews, mainly coming from Eastern Europe. After 1948 the Apartheid era, with its dream of permanently entrenching white supremacy, enforced the removals of people into designated group areas along racial lines, leaving a legacy of trauma and emotional upheaval from which the city has yet to heal. When this nightmare was over and democracy was established, people streamed in from other parts of the African continent fleeing wars and genocide. They came from Rwanda, the Congo, Kenya, Somalia, Angola, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, swelling the ranks of the displaced and carrying with them their disorientation and sense of being-here-and-not-belonging. They were met with outbursts of xenophobia, which still flares up on occasion. Cape Town exists upon a fault line between alluring tourist haven and toxic repository of human despair, degradation and, yes, lingering discrimination which has not yet been rooted out.
Samuel Bak, survivor of the Shoah, has set himself the task of visualizing universal questions about the great human catastrophe on behalf of those who did not survive to do so. His message will resonate among all who have needed to rebuild their lives from broken shards. Born of the nightmare of helplessness, horror and dread, his visual images have an exceptional power to pose challenging questions. Their boldness has the capacity to produce a cathartic reaction of healing among those who view it.
Born during a most fateful year of European history – in 1933, Hitler ascended to power in Germany – Samuel Bak nevertheless enjoyed a happy childhood. He was sheltered in a cultured family, loved and spoiled by his grandparents on both sides and protected by his affectionate parents, Mitzia and Jonas. When he was fi ve years old, whilst walking home with his mother, a street thug spat at him, calling him “Zjid- filthy kike”. He did not know what that meant. His parents decided to transfer him to a Jewish kindergarten and introduce him to the culture for which he had suffered such abuse. There, he became fluent in Yiddish. At an early stage, his precocious talent was evident, and was encouraged by his wonderfully gifted maternal uncle in Berlin, the musician, composer, conductor and expressionist painter Arno Nadel. There was never a doubt that he would become an artist.
Then, when Samuel was just eight years old, nightmare struck. The Germans occupied Vilna, the “Jerusalem of the North” known everywhere for its distinguished Yiddish culture, learned rabbis and scholars, abundance of libraries and archives and variety of religious academies. The trauma that unfolded within this special space and time would remain imprinted in his soul and become the template of his art. Bak remembers when Jews had to wear armbands, then yellow stars, and then being forbidden to use sidewalks. Finally, Vilna became engulfed in the forces of destruction. Jews were picked up from the streets and herded to the woods of Ponary outside the city, to be murdered in their thousands. Among them were both of his maternal grandparents, Shifra and Khone, and his paternal grandparents, Rachel and Chaim.
Samuel and his mother were placed in the Vilna Ghetto while his father was transferred to a forced labour camp. Because his mother’s aunt Janina had converted to Catholicism and was in close contact with the nuns of the St Catherine Convent, they managed to escape from the ghetto and fi nd shelter there. Later, Jonas managed to join them and, together with Mitzia’s sister, Yetta, and her husband they spent eight months in hiding protected by the Benedictine sisters – until the Nazis occupied the convent. They found an escape route above the ceilings and fled back to the ghetto. There, Samuel was befriended by the Yiddish writers Avraham Sutzkever and Shmerke Kaczerginski. They encouraged the nine year-old boy to participate in an art exhibition which was held in the ghetto. They also entrusted him with the Pinkas, the record book of the Jews of Vilna, which he filled with drawings of the life around him.
On 23 September 1943, the Vilna Ghetto was liquidated. Jonas was transferred by the SS to the HkP 526 forced labour camp and Samuel and Mitzia lived there with him, in the most terrible conditions and in constant fear. But at least they were together as a family. In this labour camp, an ‘Aktion’ took place during which 250 children were called out, lined up and shot. Samuel escaped once again by hiding under a bed, but heard the dreadful cries reverberating through the camp.
Samuel’s parents worked out an escape plan. Mitzia fled, alone, to Aunt Janina and Jonas carried the ten-year-old Samuel out of the camp to his work place in a sack of sawdust. There, he dropped him out of a window and Samuel had to flee and not look back, into the arms of a very frightened rescuer, great-aunt Janina’s maid. By sheer chance, luck, coincidence, and the resoluteness of his parents, Samuel and his mother survived the catastrophe: “How was I to understand the randomness that regulates human destinies, the game of chance that has granted me life?”1
In Fig.1, Samuel Bak depicts himself as the child artist who has the duty to paint pictures commemorating what he has seen and experienced so that it will not be forgotten. With a dazed look, he emerges from the sack in which his father smuggled him to freedom. In his hand he holds a pencil. Behind him, the outlines of the Warsaw ghetto boy are discernible, with his hands held up as in a crucifixion. His figure is assembled like a collage, slightly withered, like a fading memory: “…The Presence of the Warsaw boy’s figure in my art is for me an act of remembrance that safeguards our collective memory”.2
The shoes in front of the Warsaw ghetto boy are reminiscent of the countless shoes assembled in Auschwitz. An empty canvas on the top left hand corner is waiting to be filled with images. In the words of the Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer, the canvas indicates the role that art has to play “in the arduous labour of renewal.”3 In the foreground are sheets of paper, on which testimonies are yet to be written. They are held down by pebble stones, customarily placed on Jewish graves. Next to them a sepulchral cavity appears in the ground filled with, perhaps, headstones. In the background, smoking chimneys appear over what in Bak’s iconography represents an empty vessel of stone, and shtetlhouses with rising smoke.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] Fig.1. Self Portrait. 1946Watercolor on Paper. 38.1×30,5cmImage courtesy of Pucker Gallery This self-portrait connects Bak with the Warsaw Ghetto child and with him all the children that have perished. This includes his childhood friend and namesake, Samek Epstein. He thought much about the fact that he could have met with the same destiny as Samek, who had been discovered by the Nazis hiding in a cupboard and shot. Bak had to try and find a way to ease this burden and has found that by remembering he would give meaning to Samek’s life: “It gives me comfort to think that in some way I can live today for the two of us and that his future wasn’t totally obliterated, since by living in me he is still being remembered and he helps me to remember all of Them.”4 At Janina’s home, Samuel was reunited with his mother but they had to leave urgently because of the danger they brought to her. They did not know where to go. They stood on a bridge with the raging river Viliya below, Samuel clinging to his mother’s coat, leaning against the handrail looking down on the water, carrying with it chunks of ice, branches and other debris. Suddenly Mitzia grabbed him and ran with him once again to the Benedictine Convent, where Sister Maria Mikulska, Father Stakaukas and Vladas Zemaitis hid them with a group of other Jews until the liberation of Vilna by the Red Army in mid-July 1945. Their new life as dazed survivors began, first in Vilna, where they looked at the devastation and learned the terrible news that Jonas had not survived. A few days before liberation, he had been taken to the Ponary forest and machine-gunned to death, like his parents and parents-in-law before him. Samuel and his mother then travelled to Poland, staying for a while in Lodz. From there, they went to Berlin in search of their uncle, Arno Nadel, but he and his wife had been murdered in Auschwitz. They now made their way south to the American zone, reaching the Landsberg Displaced Persons camp in Bavaria. Ironically, this was the same town in which Hitler had written Mein Kampf. Their traumatic experiences were etched into their subconscious, while on the surface they tried to continue with a new life of adjustment. This is captured in Fig.2, in which Bak retrieves shadows of reality and refl ects upon the impossibility of memory to reconstruct what has existed.5 He said that this painting depicts his own family. However, the people he represented here in the form of a surreal frontal photograph, one of them the Warsaw Ghetto child, are Jews who perished and had become his family through their shared fate: “For me, being a painter means being possessed by a world of ghosts; and making the best of it…”6 These figures appear – less as people than as metaphors – their fragmented features and bodies built up in parts by prostheses and fragments. In the middle foreground we see a monumental egg, similar to a stone monument, riddled by bullet holes:7“The Family sums up many of my artistic themes. The rear plan is a dark and smoke-laden sky….these afflicted people gather [to be included in] their huge family portrait and look at us inquiringly, asking to be remembered.”8 Fig. 2. The Family 1974Oil on Canvas. 45×35.3cmImage courtesy of Pucker Gallery Wherever they had sojourned after the liberation, Mitzia arranged for Samuel to have art classes. While still in Vilna he was trained under a specialist in stage design.9 Then he had a teacher who insisted on his drawing from classicistic statues10. In Lodz, he was taught by a Professor who tried to tear him away from the academic style.11 Thus, he learned at an early stage of his artistic development that there is no such a thing as a unique style.12 While they lived in the Landsberg DP camp, Mitzia enrolled him in Munich for lessons with a member of the Munich Art Academy, Prof Blocherer. On the days when he came to Munich by train, he visited the art galleries, the Alte Pinakothek (the old masters) and the Neue Pinakothek – (19th and early 20th Century art). He also saw an exhibition of modern art held in Munich by the Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris. In the Landsberg DP camp, Samuel turned thirteen, the age to celebrate his barmitzvah. But now he took a stand which was to become the underlying theme in his art: “Since our God had broken [H]is promises, I didn’t see why I should make any commitment to [H]im”.13 On the other hand, he felt “an almost inescapable need to give testimony.”14 Until today, Samuel Bak feels the necessity to produce works of art every day of his life:15 “Like a Jew who visits a cemetery and leaves small stones on the graves of his beloved ones, I add painting upon painting as acts of remembrance.”16 In the Landsberg DP camp, Mitzia married Nathan Markovsky, fondly known as Markusha, who had survived the horrors of Dachau. He had lost his first daughter in the Kovno Ghetto and then his wife and second child. The three of them became a new family, supporting and sheltering each other from the trauma of the past. In 1948, the family was brought with other refugees to Marseille, where they boarded the Pan York which brought them to Haifa. After the Israeli War of Independence, they settled in Tel Aviv. In 1952, Bak began studying at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem and from 1953 to 1956 served in the Israeli Defence Force. Life in Israel was fraught with emotional challenges. Holocaust survivors at that time had the further trauma of being stigmatized for having “allowed themselves” to be “led like sheep to the slaughter”. Bak learned to speak and write Hebrew. He gradually absorbed the culture and the images of the new Jewish state of which he became a part. In 1956 Bak, now a recognised member of the Israeli avant-garde participated in exhibitions and worked as stage designer for the Habimah and Ohel Theatres in Tel Aviv under the producer Peter Frey, creating costumes and stage décor. For this work, he won the first prize from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation which brought him to Paris – a yearning fulfilled. There he began studies at the École des Beaux-Arts17. Paris was still the world centre of modern art, exuding the spirit of the great Paris School, Picasso, Braque, the Surrealists, with new breakthroughs into abstract art which became his style during his early period. His abstract and semi-abstract paintings have a palpable intensity and radiate a powerful, brooding energy. Something is looming within the interaction of colour planes and forms, which was unrecognizable but expressing “that fear I wanted to touch with the paintings”.18 In 1959, Bak married Annalis. They had three daughters, Ilana, Daniela and Michal, who presently live in Paris. He has four grandsons, Rafael, Tom, Tufa and Noam. After a painful divorce, he married Joseé, who has become the sustenance of his life and his art. Bak exhibited at various prestigious art galleries throughout Europe. When he began exhibiting in America, he developed a close relationship with the Pucker Gallery in Boston. This distinguished gallery, which not only exhibits works by prominent artists, but is actively involved in educational art programmes, is known as a centre for questioning and learning. Together with his wife Sue, Bernie Pucker became Bak’s close friend and, in his own words, a “major catalyst and sustainer” of his art.19The Baks decided to move to Boston in order to be close to the Puckers, purchasing a house in Weston, Massachusetts. The Pucker gallery has exhibited Bak’s canvases for over four decades in memorable exhibitions, each time under a specific theme. Each exhibition was accompanied by a scholarly publication. Bernie and Sue Pucker have generously donated these publications to the Jacob Gitlin Library and thus the art of Samuel Bak has become known in Cape Town’s art circles. At the 1959 Venice Biennale, Bak for the first time became acquainted with American Pop Art, a form of realism with an ironic twist. During the 1960s, his style evolved into a visual language based on the old Renaissance masters – which he turned into the language of the Jewish experience. His visual language is often compared to surrealism. But his paintings are not surrealistic, as they have nothing to do with fantasy. They are linked to a definite historical reality. There are no direct representations of the horror or mass death in the art of Samuel Bak. He works through symbolic substitutes. The viewer is invited to ‘read’ his visual texts, akin to literary interpretation. Langer has formulated a method of decoding Bak’s visual language and the following paintings have been chosen as examples following his guideline. Fig. 3. Memento for Jonas II 2001 Oil on Canvas. 24×18” Image courtesy of Pucker Gallery Fig.3: This painting is a monument to Samuel Bak’s father. A cracked tombstone is fastened by a girth. Uprooted trees of the Ponary forest in which Jonas was murdered float in the air. Bak uprooted these trees in his paintings so that they should not grow on the masses of dead people, among them his father, and his four grandparents. ‘Jonah’ is the Hebrew for dove, hence the symbol of the dove on the memorial. In this painting, Bak eternalises his personal loss. The image is imprinted within the collective Jewish memory. But not only Jewish memory. Throughout the life of Samuel Bak these wounds were opened time and again with the occurrence of other human catastrophes: “Whenever on the television or in the papers, I see those heaps of anonymous bodies lying strewn in streets of Beirut, Kosovo, Africa or elsewhere, a howling sound resounds in my mind – the name Ponar”.20 Fig.3: In the light of an arid mountain within a vast landscape in a blue and purplish hue we see the tablets of the law, the two yods for God’s name on the left tablet. They are otherwise bare and stand above a wreckage of numerous tablets strewn across the mountain slope. At the bottom of the two blank tablets lies a smaller one, bearing the Hebrew aleph and bet, of the first Commandments about the worship of God. The giant 6 is broken. It alludes to the 6th Commandment: “Thou shalt not murder” and at the same time to the Six Million. At the bottom of the hill broken letters of the “Shema Yisrael” (Hear, oh Israel) appear. The tablets of the Word of God have turned into tombstones: “How shall the cry of ‘Shema Yisrael’ be heard in this cold and barren atmosphere, lacking human presence or divine? Can memories besieged by catastrophe ignite the spark for a renewed covenant?”21 Fig. 4Shema YisraelOil on Canvas. 200x160Image courtesy of Pucker Gallery Fig.5: The foliage of an uprooted tree is depicted in the shape of Yellow Stars. Its trunk is severed from its roots, supported by three poles, one of which is fastened by a rope to a ruined brick wall. The trunk too has been ripped out, its roots having grown long and thin, crawling around in search of soil. It rests in a container which looks like a suit-case, on a pillar or log, ready to be rolled away. The stump has a single living branch which may express hope. A strange pink light dominates the scene within an immense and barren landscape. Fig. 5. Destinies 1995-1996Oil on Canvas. 200x160Image Courtesy of Pucker Gallery Fig.6: We see a ship built of stone, with the Star of David imprinted on its prow, of which some slabs reveal a ghetto building. The sea is calm. The ship contains houses, damaged or intact, and two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. They are bare – nothing is written on them. The chimneys are those of the death camps exuding smoke which is almost petrified. As Langer points out, Bak here visualized the poem by Nelly Sachs: O you chimneys, O you fingers And Israel’s body as smoke in the air22 The commandments have disappeared from the tablets, the ship has been turned to stone, and the stones are reminiscent of the Western Wall, another symbol of destruction of the Jews in another era. And there is no departure because there is nobody to depart. The viewer is left with the dark uncertainty: where can the experience of the Holocaust lead to? So this “Journey” is not a journey at all and the title is ironical. It is a scene of utter immobility in time and space, or in the words of Langer: a “journey into the cemetery of remembrance.”23 Fig.7: The motif of the broken key unable to open the lock is a metaphor for an insoluble question. Langer, in his analysis of this particular painting, quotes the last poems by Nelly Sachs, entitled: “glowing enigmas”. One of the poems: “despair”, is about the struggle of the poet as well as the painter to find verbal and visual metaphors with which the inheritance of loss can be overcome. It is about the struggle to find a language, or an image that describes the unimaginable. Fig. 6. Journey. 1991 Oil on Canvas. 200x160Image courtesy of Pucker Gallery This painting is part of a diptych (two panels). It reveals the difficulty of the transition from the horror of the past to the present. Here the key to the “hidden question” is broken. Its bit consists of two Yods (designating the name of God) gleaming in a light from an unknown source, beneath a vast sky with a dark cloud. Underneath a rubble of rocks are the outlines of a synagogue, also broken, its windows in the shape of the tablets. It is crushed by the ruins of a stone arch. The hidden question (“Where was God?”) remains unanswered. A destroyed culture and its faith are separated from their divine origin. Samuel Bak sees himself as a painter of questions for which he does not know the answer. Bak’s stepfather, Nathan Markovsky, had tried to teach him to play chess. After his death, chess became a prominent motif in Bak’s art in his honour and memory. Chess is a war game, a game of contest, a struggle, demanding careful planning to attack or retreat, in order to defeat one’s opponent. For Bak, the game of chess is a symbol of the rational mind. But at the same time it represents the absurdity of war, and the failure to prevent it.24 In Fig.8, chess figures are hiding in the slit or a battle trench on a huge chess board consisting of stone slabs whose surface has broken as if after an earthquake, or a battle. They are standing in the slit in which architectural archways forming catacomb-like structures are visible. On the right 10 we recognize a white queen and a black king. The rest of the group in this ditch are pawns and rooks. Fig.7. The Hidden Question. (Part II). 1994 Oil on Canvas. 160x140cmImage courtesy of Pucker Gallery The scene refers indirectly to Nathan. A man of sophistication and intellect, he gradually succumbed to dementia, the process of which – and his efforts to cover it up – was very humiliating for him. Thus the chess motif in Bak’s art, apart from being a metaphor of the Holocaust, is also very personal. It is about the disintegration of consciousness, of mental decline, of the state of incoherence which he experienced with his stepfather. In a painting entitled The Sounds of Silence(1995) a quartet is depicted, playing – its music inaudibly. The bodies of the musicians are assembled by different materials – One is blindfolded with the uniform of the concentration camp, another wears a mask. They wear wooden wings nailed together in fragments which may mean that the sounds they create come with difficulty. They do not seem to interact as in an ensemble, but each one plays quietly by himself. Fig. 8. Underground II. 1990/1997 Oil on canvas. 86,5×127 cm Image courtesy of Pucker Gallery Langer, in his description of this painting, again quotes Nelly Sachs: We the rescued, From whose hollow bones death had begun To whittle his flutes And on whose sinews he had already Stroked his bow – Our bodies continue to lament With their mutilated music.25 At their feet lie the fragmented parchments of the Vilna Ghetto – and a damaged Torah scroll. In the same way in which these musicians create sounds in the midst of ruins, Samuel Bak creates his paintings. Art must triumph over the catastrophe and form a message to the living – even with great difficulty. To him art means “rebuilding from destruction”.26 In 2000, something that for Samuel Bak had seemed to be unthinkable took place. Invited by the Lithuanian historian Rimantas Stankevicius to return to Vilna, he accepted the invitation and, accompanied by Joseé, visited the places of his childhood. He saw the building of the new Jewish Museum of Vilna, for whose inauguration the director Emanuel Zingeris planned a retrospective exhibition of his works. For the opening of this on 24 September 2001, Bak travelled to Vilna for a second time, accompanied by Josée and his three daughters from Paris. Also joining him was Bernie Pucker, under whose auspices this stupendous exhibition took place. Pucker called this memorable trip to Vilna with Samuel Bak and his family “The essence of life and death”.27 The Jewish Museum housed Samuel Bak’s early ghetto drawings and the Pinkas. The chief exhibition of over 100 paintings took place in the National Gallery of Vilnius. In 2002, he was in Vilna once more to speak at a ceremony in memory of those who had saved Jews in the Holocaust; a special honour was devoted to Sister Maria Mikulska, of blessed memory. During these visits to Vilna more memories which had been frozen in oblivion were revived. Samuel Bak’s art assumed a new perspective. He saw his former home in Wilenska str 10, which had been turned into a centre of Lithuanuan school projects for the teaching of the Holocaust. He went to the Ponary Forest. And he visited the places of his childhood trauma. On his return to Boston, Bak began painting with a new passion. His palette became brighter and the scenes are more personal, more emotional. The still life Hidden Tikkun (1999) is a design of fragments in different perspectives and stages of disarray, with the Hebrew letters Tikkun (the Khufhalf hidden). Tikkun means to heal the world. The serenity of the traditional still life is broken up and reassembled through a masterful composition. The shining surface of the broken pitcher displays a handle in the form of a question mark. The pear is a most important symbol in the art of Samuel Bak. For him it means life because he regards it as the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The rickety table is seen from different perspectives. Samuel Bak’s still lifes convey his most important message, namely that one can repair, but not restore a fractured civilization: “My still lifes are portraits of the families that have survived”.28 Samuel Bak paints a world of destruction, of broken parts and links this inextricably with the formal perfection of his style.29For Bak, Tikkun first of all unites people.30 Samuel Bak always remembered the words of his mother: “Distance yourself from emotions that hurt, do not succumb to self-pity; and above all, keep your pride intact”31 And yet he has to come to grips with the most devastating human experiences: “The profoundest experience in life is the experience of loss”.32 Bak’s paintings are visual texts, which invite the viewer to decipher their content. He makes use of allegories, metaphors and the device of substitution. For example, in a painting entitled Interruption (2001), which belongs to the period after his return to Vilna, he depicts an abandoned teddy bear as a metaphor for the child whose toy it had been, and with that – for all the children whose lives had been interrupted so cruelly. In this artistic device of substitution, an inanimate object replaces a human reality. The teddy-bear, with his damaged body, speaks to us like a real child. Another device of substitution are Samuel Bak’s paintings of books as replacements for the Jewish people who have perished. Vilna housed the famous Strashun Library, a Judaica collection ranging from early holy texts to the latest secular books. As a child, Bak frequented this library and saturated himself amongst others, with the works of Yiddish authors. During the Nazi occupation some of the library’s books were hidden by the Jews of Vilna, a large number was destroyed and some were looted by the Nazis for their bizarre plan for a museum of Jewish culture. In his art Samuel Bak deconstructs the world of his own experience and that of the collective Jewish history which stretches from the story of Genesis to the chimneys of Auschwitz. He forges them into existential questions. But what is more, for him these paintings have assumed a life of their own, as independent entities: “My paintings know that they owe their existence to the miracle of my survival.”33 Bak thus places an obligation on the post-Holocaust viewer to work actively in the reversal of the destruction of the Shoah. His paintings are a bulwark against collective amnesia. To forget would be an act of further extinction: “…The Ruins of memory are now a permanent part of our human heritage. Any effort to build a future while ignoring those ruins would compromise our allegiance to both decency and hope…”34 Dr Ute Ben Yosef, former long-serving librarian of the Jacob Gitlin Library in Cape Town, has written and lectured extensively on aspects of Jewish art. Her book The Graven Image: The Life and Work of Moses Kottler, published by Perskor, appeared in 1989. NOTES
Early Artistic Training
The Pucker Gallery in Boston
Description of selected paintings
The Return to Vilna
Further Reflections on the Art of Samuel Bak
