THE BOOK OF FIRE

These paintings, drawings, prints, and artists’ books are graphic statements meant to engage and propel the viewer into a whirlwind of fire and devastation. It is but 55 years ago that the world descended into madness. God looked away as the greatest carnage in human history took place. Civilization crumbled. The Holocaust is the pivotal event of our century, and perhaps of all human history. As an artist it is my obligation to deal with this subject. I write this in desperation as I read statements claiming the Holocaust never happened, of "ethnic Cleansing", the slaughter in what once was Yugoslavia, and the emergence of Neo-Nazi mobs in Germany. REMEMBER!

The Book of Fire and the fire paintings before you are my answer. I asked the distinguished art historian, writer, and critic, Irving Sandler to write about his reaction to THE BOOK of FIRE.

Dear Irving:

You ask Why?

Poland,  for centuries a sanctuary for Jews, became their cemetery. Poland is one of the places where Hitler won the war against the Jews. Of  the millions there are now but a few, and soon there will be none left of the Jews of Poland. All that remain are some artifacts and bits and pieces that give glimpses of  the extraordinary folk tradition of these martyred people. Some claim that only in Poland did a truly Jewish folk art develop. What no longer exists, except in photographs, are the Polish wooden synagogues. Carpenters,  joiners, carvers and artists of consummate skill created sanctuaries made entirely of wood that expressed in their sacred geometry, fenestration, furnishings and painted surfaces an entire theology and eschatology, as well as folklore and mystical vision. They are perhaps the  most beautiful wooden structures ever to spring from profound faith and hope. I searched for them throughout the towns where they once stood only to find emptiness and ruined cemeteries. This became my subject, my passion, my mission, and my obsession - how to convey this loss?

Dear Murray:

I am convinced that the Holocaust is too overwhelming a theme for art to deal with without belittling it, no matter how sympathetic the artist's intentions are. I once asked the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld whether he also believed this, he said "Of course." I asked him how he himself could write could write about the Holocaust. He replied, "How could I not?"

But if the artist does choose to engage the six million dead, the challenge becomes to convey the horror in its immediacy with the artistry that art requires but without aestheticizing the subject, and so distancing it. How to negotiate mass murder and art?

I do not think this can be done, but I am moved to say that Murray Zimiles' edition of prints comes close.

Irving Sandler

This letter so profoundly upset me that I spent days mulling over its implications. Where the past six years of my work devoted to an impossible, perhaps even a hopeless task? No, this art was born from necessity, a necessity to tell my story, and the story of my people, to purge my demons, and to allow me to raise my son honestly.

Yes I would "aestheticize " the Holocaust if that's what it took to tell the story, a story soon to be gone from living memory and that is already unknown to many of my students. I would use the slashing of the brush, the texturing of the palette knife, the blackness of the ink, the blood and fire redness of paint. I would show the moment of destruction of a people, of their most profound creations and their entire world. I had to find a way to show terrifying surges of flames and smoke, the panic and horror of Jews in flight from their sanctuaries.

These paintings, drawings and prints are graphic statements meant to engage and propel the viewer into the whirlwind of fire and devastation. To deny the necessity for me to do this would be to "aestheticize" my soul. To not confront the Holocaust would be a lie. I too, like Aharon Applefeld must answer "How could I not!"

It is but fifty years ago that the world descended into madness. God looked away as civilization crumbled. I was born on November 30 during the week that the "final solution" began. December 7, 1941 brought the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt's "day that will live in infamy" was also the first day of the "final solution, for it was on this day that the first seven hundred Jews were transported to the death camp at Chelmno.

During the year that saw the end of the war my mother died a slow painful death, her leg amputated and her last tortured hours spent in the Reichian "Orgone Box." My poor Brooklyn neighborhood soon saw the influx of the people with blue, numbered tattoos. They never spoke of where they came from, they never joked with the children. They were just there.

My father, a poor laborer, reeling from the loss of his wife and homeland was barely able to cope. Aided in turn by each of my grandmothers, my father struggled to keep a home for me and my older brother. They were soon overwhelmed. In desperation to keep the family together my father spoke to a matchmaker who in short order produced my stepmother. Upon her arrival my childhood ended.

This loveless match, my father's chronic unemployment, the needs of two motherless wild boys, tore at her tolerance. She snapped, the house was her prison, we her victims. Until I left home at the age of sixteen we endured an endless tirade of abuse. The curses, contempt, mental and physical abuse that fell upon our heads were relentless. Nothing would deter the daily tirades, the public shaming; with windows wide open onto the airshaft - courtyard of our apartment building, the venom poured out interminably.

There was no way to stop it or to understand it until, at the age of 45, at a family wedding, I finally understood. I was, at that time, fully absorbed in my work on the Holocaust and wanted to know what had happened to some of our relatives in Besarabia. I asked an aunt about their fate when my stepmother, sitting beside us said, "Do you know what happened to my family?". "No" I replied. She Said: "My brother went to Canada before the war, worked hard and saved money, enough for a ticket for my father. At the last minute father got sick and gave me the ticket. This was in 1938. All my sisters and other brothers, my parents, my grandparents on both sides, all my uncles, aunts, and cousins were killed by the Nazis."

When I finally had a child of my own at age 42 I panicked. What should I tell him about all this? How?

From a young age I had been set on escaping from the ghetto. Aided and polished by my uncle, a prominent artist, and by his wife, an artist and teacher,  I was sent to a  Mid Western college, then to an Ivy League graduate school. In time I married a woman with a lengthy American pedigree, a spiritual searcher, a humanist, one to whom I owe so much- the antithesis of the ghetto.

It became clear that in order to be an honest and loving father, I must deal with my formative past, and not with only what I had become. At first the joy new fatherhood was everywhere to be found in my paintings and drawings. Then the angel of darkness descended upon my work, and so began and continued for many years my attempt to deal with my personal nightmare and the nightmare we call the Holocaust.

In order for me to understand the greatest carnage  in human history, one that had touched me personally, I immersed myself in the subject, reading and weeping for months. I travelled to Jerusalem and Auschwitz- -Birkenau. I both do and do not remember every moment of my visit there. It was as if I held my breath for six hours. I can prove to myself that I went there because of the letter I wrote to my son.

August 18, 1988
Auschwitz, Poland

Dear Andrei:

Again I have trouble sleeping. This time it is nerves. I realize that until I go to Auschwitz-Birkenau I won't be able to enjoy anything in Crakow. It's 70 km from Crakow and the drive is terrible. I am almost sick when I arrive and pull the car out of the parking lot and head back for fear of throwing up. As I approach again I look at every old house and old person and ask "what did you see, what did you know?." As I turn the corner into the museum I meet up with some Americans who have a guide, a very dignified Polish lady whose father-in-law was in Auschwitz for helping Jews. She swore on his death bed that she would continue to help people understand the profundity of this museum. This she has done for the past 15 years. Her voice is soothing yet full of pathos. The Americans are in Warsaw for a conference. I ignore them and we are guided to the gate. There it is, Arbeit Macht Frei, those notorious German words I've heard all my life. The camp is large and of brick construction, the streets orderly. This makes it all the more insane, it could be a housing estate. The museum is simple and devastating. The exhibits include artificial limbs, human hair, baggage and shoes. It's the children's shoes that break my heart. I feel so overwhelmed by the futility and stupidity of the barbarism committed against these innocents. The anger in me is immense. There are thousands of people here and many are Germans. They come with flowers and leave them at various places, shrines, and graves. This place is holy. I touch everything especially the cells and walls of the gas chamber. Here thousands of bodies were cremated in the ovens. At Birkenau, 5 km from Auschwitz is even more horrible because much of it was left as it was found at the time of liberation. Tens of thousands of people were registered. They never registered the old, the pregnant women, and the children. They went from the trains to the ovens. How could this have happened? Who were these people who could do such a thing? After six hours and no food I feel strange, drained. Birkenau is vast and being in the wooden barracks and seeing the tiny wooden bunks where ten people crowded together is almost more then I can take. I've had enough! As I walk back along the railway bed I look for something, anything, to take home. I find part of a leather heel. I don't know if it's very old or off a visitor's shoe, it doesn't matter, it is my souvenir. As I take it I leave some of me behind. This place has broken my heart and will live in me and my art forever. I don't ever want to come back. I don't need to. I can take the walk I just took in my mind and soul. I now realize that something made me start the Holocaust series, something I can't yet understand. In a way it is for Andrei for he symbolizes another end to Judaism for which so many died. It's my way of telling him what happened to my people and for him to respect the five thousand years of history that I inherited. Just maybe he will understand and feel pride in that force that has kept his people alive.

And so, my son, my feelings are for you and I am now weeping for all the children like you who couldn't understand why they weren't allowed to grow up. And for the parents who held them as the gas choked them. Imagine the sense of failure, of outrage, at being unable to save your child. How can Jews believe? How can God....?