susan@studio409art.com
Travels in Eastern Europe
Poland		A Hole in Time series on the pre-war Jewish community of Radom, Poland
Lithuania		The Silence Speaks Loudly series on the traces of the Jewish community in Lithuania

Susan Weinberg

The Silence Speaks Loudly


click on images to enlarge and read narrative
Prints of many of these images can be ordered at Imagekind

In the summer of 2009 I spent six weeks in Eastern Europe. I went to study Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, to do research in the archives and to visit  the Belarus shtetl from which my grandmother had come.   With no great aptitude for languages, I had no aspirations to fluency or conversation, but I realized that Yiddish was an important part of a culture that no longer exists, the culture from which my family came.  I hoped to incorporate it into my artwork around my family history and cultural heritage. I knew I would develop artwork out of my experience, but wasn't sure what form it would take.  As a figurative artist, my focus has been on people.  But what people?  My family was no longer there, any remaining relatives long murdered in the Holocaust.  I found myself looking at older Lithuanians wondering what their story was.  Lithuania had a high level of complicity with the Nazis, yet there were certainly those who reached out and saved Jews, still more who looked the other way realizing that their own lives could be endangered.  I looked at them with skepticism, unsure of their history.  For more text click here

Gedenken 24 x 72 Acrylic on Canvas also done in two canvases of 24 x 36

click on images below  to enlarge and read narrative

Buried Truths I 2010 24 x 32 Acrylic on Board	Shalom Aleichem I - 2009 24 x 32 Acrylic on Board	Shalom Aleichem II - 2010 24 x 30 Acrylic on Canvas	The Jews Liked Blue 2010 24 x 18 Acrylic on Canvas
What Is Left 2010 24 x 30 Acrylic on Canvas	Parachute Moon 2010 24 x 32 Acrylic on Board	I Was Here 2010 18 x 24 Acrylic on Canvas	The Nation of Israel Lives  2009 24 x 18 Acrylic on Canvas
Ruta 2010 12 x 12 Acrylic on Canvas	That Which is Practiced in Youth 12 x 12 Acrylic on Canvas 2010	Grow Like an Onion 2009 16 x 24 Acrylic on Board	Afikomen 2010 32 x 24 Acrylic on Board
The Beggar 2009 16 x 24 Acrylic on Board	Laugh With the Lizards 2009 16 x 24 Acrylic on Board

During my sojourn in Lithuania, I observed the dark undercurrents that still color Lithuania's relationship with the Jews.  What I hadn't anticipated were the people within the Jewish community, especially those who were our guides and in some cases fellow students.  They too had a history.  Those who were older and from Europe were either survivors, partisans or hidden children.  Those who lived in Soviet times also had the experience of being unable to practice their religion for many years.  These people  began to work their way into my paintings as I sought to tell their stories.  This body of work has also taken me into more semi-abstract imagery and the use of language.  I found myself employing layering as a way to suggest the hidden, what lies beneath the surface.  The cultural program that accompanied the language proved to be an immersion in the Holocaust story of Lithuania, my first brush with it on the ground where it occurred.  I came away with many impressions, foremost the sense of "negative space".  The story of the Jewish community was most often felt in its absence.  In most cases the Jewish history went unnoted.  Former synagogues were often noted as historic buildings, but rarely was there an acknowledgement of what they had been. I encountered people who for much of their youth were unaware that Jews had made up almost half of their city prior to the war.  The complicated history of Lithuania, its relationship to the Jews, and the complicity of many, meant a discomfort with the history that had transpired on their ground.  That discomfort manifests itself in silence.  And so the silence speaks loudly.  My paintings seek to give it voice. Return to artwork