A woman who
grew up in North Minneapolis told us this story
about chickens who slept next to her grandmother's
bed each weekend. The following day they
became dinner. While I call it Sleeping with
the Chickens, my husband has renamed it Death Row.
My Aunt
Tillie, my grandmother’s oldest daughter, would decide
to go to Wisconsin to see her sister. They didn’t want my grandmother to live
alone. So who do they pick to go live with my
grandmother? Me...I remember my grandmother had
a one bedroom apartment, it was upstairs.She lived upstairs.She
had a mattress must have been about that thick (holds
hands two to three feet apart), all feathers you know,
and a stool to get up.So
when it was time to go to bed, I crawled in to get into
bed to sleep with her… next to the bed my grandmother
hadtwo live chickens in a
box and I was deathly afraid of chickens and that’s
where I had to sleep that night with the live chickens
there.
Because in
the morning she’d go to the shocket (kosher butcher) and
have the chickens killed.She’d
carry them to the shocket and come back and flick them.Sit in the back yard and flick
‘em.Every time on a
weekend.She’d go like on a
Friday morning before Shabbos started and get her
chickens and when I’d come to sleep with her she’d have
the chickens Friday.And
every time I went I had to go sleep there and I had to
sleep with those chickens.I’ll
never forget that.I was
scared to death that night.
This
interview was with a Polish survivor who was a child
when the war broke out. He claimed he was
older in order to survive. Prior to the events he
describes below, he was working in the crematorium at
Auschwitz.
Then they (the Nazis) need a
transport to go to Warsaw.But
they didn’t take any people who speak Polish, but they
didn’t know … I could speak Polish.So I got in between the French and the Italians
and the Greeks and I got into Warsaw…The Warsaw ghetto was bombed.People were laying on the basements there like
flies. (Note: subsequently said that he was sent into
destroyed buildings for bricks to sell and found corpses
of those who had been trapped in the ghetto.He covered them with
sand.) So what they did is to blow up the rest of it,
the rest of the building and they covered up the other
ones.Then I had to do
clean up with the bricks and the Polish people came in
and they were buying those things, the bricks from the
Germans.The Polish people
came in with a horse and a wagon and they were buying
those bricks from the Germans.When
they got in they had to pay so much and they had to show
me a piece of paper, how many bricks they need to buy.So I gave them the bricks they
needed to buy and sometimes I ask them if they have
bread or something like that. Pretty soon they got
smart, they brought me a bread, they brought me a salami
and I gave them those bricks.I
gave them instead of 20 bricks, I gave them 25 bricks.
See the five bricks they had a hole on the wagon and
they put it in the holder so the Germans, because they
count the bricks when they went out.
They gave them 20 bricks
and going out they had to show the paper that they got
20 bricks, so they went up on the wagon and count the
bricks, but they didn’t count the other ones.
In
the background of this painting is the line of Warsaw
after its destruction. Only a church
remained. I wanted to capture the imagery of a
horse and wagon belonging to the local Poles who were
purchasing the bricks as well as our subject who was
loading the cart with bricks. The sky is dark and
hazy as one would expect in a bombed out city.
One of our interviews was with a woman who lived on
the Iron Range, an area in Northern Minnesota where
Jewish communities have largely disappeared. She
has fond memories of Virginia, Minnesota which today
has a population of about 9,000 and only two remaining
Jews.
I really liked living
(there). We had a Hadassah, we had every
organization the Jewish people have in the cities on a
smaller scale and we made different affairs to raise
money. It was wonderful living there.
The synagogue has been turned into a community center as
the Jewish population diminished. Because the Jewish
population was small there was much more interaction
with their neighbors and she fondly remembers sharing
traditions with her non-Jewish neighbors.
I never once met
a person that I thought was anti-Semitic. My
friends in Virginia were some Gentiles and they had us
for Christmas and I had them for Yom Kippur.
They learned how to make knishes. I taught them how to
make knishes. I used to make bagels.
We were the best of friends.
In deciding how to capture this I studied videos of
people making knishes and combined them in an image of
hands engaged in a shared activity. Behind them is
the suggestion of a Christmas tree to reflect the
sharing of traditions.
When I do an interview I begin
with a basic history. One of the questions is when
their parents died and at what age, normally a routine
question. When I asked Boris, a Russian immigrant
and survivor, when his mother died, I got the response
"She was shot when she was 39". With that I
knew this was not going to be an easy interview.
He then elaborated and told me that his mother, father
and two sisters were in a concentration camp and
building a bunker for Hitler. When they finished,
they were executed. Boris was a child at the time.
After the war he searched for a picture of anyone in his
family. This painting is based on the one image he
located, a sepia colored school picture of his sister
set in the shape of a leaf. I decided to echo that
form in additional leaves with the names of his family
members who perished written in Russian. I wanted
the image to be muted as if seen through a glass.
My interview with Trudy, a
survivor from Stuttgart, started with her early
experience in Nazi Germany. Trudy's father
was taken to a concentration camp and then released on
the condition that he leave Germany. This was
still early before the "Final Solution" had been
defined.
My
father had to report to the Gestapo every week
about his immigration and he was in danger if he
wouldn’t go away they would take him back
(to the concentration camp). So we waited a
little bit and they came up with a trip to Shanghai. Shanghai opened, and let the
Jews come in. I was included too, my
passport was not ready. My parents had to
leave. My parents left in 1939, beginning
September and they said two weeks later goes a
second transport to China, Shanghai and I could be on
that boat. But in those two weeks the war
broke out. That’s how I was stuck in Germany.
Trudy talked about
the abandoned towns of Germany after the war as the
Germans ran from the Russians.
Every night
we stayed overnight in a different house in a
different village and all the villages, this was
in Germany, all the villages
were empty, the houses. The Germans did run
away from the Russians, they left and left
everything behind so we had food.... We went
in and chose a house where we could stay and I was
sick and a few of our friends were sick. ...
Polish soldiers came and asking, they did go
through the houses and asking if anybody was sick
and I said, “I’m sick” and they had a cart, a
wagon with cows in front pulling the wagon and
take me to the hospital.
After the war Trudy
was reunited with her parents in Minneapolis.
Her father lived for six more years.
They
(her parents) went on a trip to New Ulm and he
passed away in the night. After the funeral
of my father I got a postcard in the mail from my
father, from New Ulm, and he writes, “We have such
a good time, everyone speaks German here, German,
born in Germany, raised in Germany and the food is
so good, German food”.
This
painting incorporates many of the images from Trudy's
stories with the postcard as the central image.
The monument in the foreground is Herman the German, a
monument in New Ulm, a Minnesota town with largely
German roots. A procession of vehicles includes
an image from Shanghai and a cart pulled by cows
taking those who were ill to the hospital. The
houses are abandoned with doors open and curtains
flying in the wind. The words of her father are
on the card emphasizing the importance of their German
heritage even when Germany had turned on them.
My interview
with Fannie was filled with legacy stories.
The central image in this painting is drawn
from a story she told about her mother.
My mother
was always afraid that we wouldn’t remember
anything she said or did ... and she wanted
the children to know that she had a life...
all of the things that she did and saw and
heard and she was afraid that it would all
be forgotten. And so she chose me as
her spokesperson. She would always grab me
in from play and there would be a cup of
coffee and milk and a caramel roll and she’d
say “Ess”, Eat, listen to what I say and
then “Shreibses arupt”, write it down.
I said, uh huh,uh huh, and I’d be busy
eating my caramel roll and drinking my
coffee and she’d keep me for about an hour
and when she was all through talking she’d
say, “Go out to play”. I didn’t
shreibe arupt, I didn’t write it down.
And one day I came home, she was staying
with us and she was burning all kinds of
papers, citizenship papers, a whole bunch of
them was on the floor in a bag. And
she was destroying them. And I yelled,
“What are you doing?” And she says,
“Did you shreibe, write it down?” And at
first I didn’t know what she was talking
about, and I said, “no”. "Well so what
do I need all this for? Who’s going to
care? No one’s going to care! "
And then I said, “Mama, please.” Well
she stopped destroying and ...in my old age
I discovered I could write, I didn’t know
how, but the kids bought me a word
processor. I was 77 and I remembered
Shreibses arupt, that would be the title.
When I asked her if there was something
she grew up with that is still part of her
life she replied "Benching licht".
Benching licht, Blessing the candles
on Friday night. My grandmother who came
to live with us had her set of candles, my
mother had her set of candles. And you
see my mother, when they were packing her up
to send her to America so she could
marry her boyfriend, you see the first thing
that his mother put in the trunk were a pair
of candlesticks. They are over 200 years
old.
The final image relates to a story
that is too lengthy to relate in
full. In 1926 there was a fire in
the shteibl next to the synagogue and her
father was convinced it was because they
used candles instead of electric
lights. He consulted his neighbor
who was a tinsmith about whether it was
possible to create candelabras with
electric lights. With his neighbor's
assistance he created a design which his
neighbor executed with scraps from his
workplace. Two beautiful candleabras
were created that are still in the
synagogue today.
When I begin
a painting I think about all of the
stories from the person and what images I
associate with them. I realized that
many of Fannie's stories related to light,
fire and legacy so I began with a ground
that was the color of fire. I then
pulled out the suggestion of the
candelabras in the background and used an
image I had of her mother as the central
figure holding the flaming papers of her
legacy. A candle in the 200 year old
candlestick symbolizes the passing of
time.
I was going to school on March 15, 1935 on the
day Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, I was there.
My parents were in Romania. I went to school on that
day. They had sentries in front. I walked up
the steps of the school. By the entrance were a
bunch of hoodlums with swastikas on their
sleeve. “Juden raus”. They wouldn’t
let any Jews into that school.
I went and packed my
bags. The railroads were already run by the German
army so I had to get permission to buy a ticket.
There happened to be a sympathetic officer so I was able
to buy a ticket. I believe that was the last train
that left Czechoslovakia for (Romania).
My mother’s history is
that at age 5 her family moved to the US so my mother
was brought up here. At that time in 1939 the war
started already and Czechoslovakia was already occupied
and Romania was going to be next. So my parents
made frantic efforts to get out. They were on a quota
system, so many but not more. Because of her
background in America, she went to school
here. She had to show evidence to the
American consulate that she had been in America.
By chance her sister who lived in America was a good
friend of her former teacher and she once met her and
asked her, ”Is there any evidence that my sister Bessie
was your student?” She says she has a class
picture. So my mother had to show that picture to
the American Consulate and said, “This is me, I was
there”. And on that basis she was able to get a
visa to get the whole family in.
When my family got out
we boarded a ship in Genoa, Italy. That was the
last refugee ship that left Italy. On the way to
the United States, Italy declared war on France in
1940. And from then on they dropped the refugees
off in New York and the ship went back empty back to
Italy and there was no more trafficking.
After Pearl Harbor, Walter joined the army. He was
sent to Camp Ritchie. Camp Ritchie was a basic
training camp for people who spoke German fluently, most
were refugees from Central Europe. They were taught
to interrogate prisoners of war. After the war he was
stationed in Czechoslovakia where he was at the beginning
of the war.
Every time we went by
jeep through a town I saw in the middle of town there
was a big bulletin board. This was a time when the
concentration camps were being liberated and the
International Red Cross published the names of the
people who were released and they put them on the
bulletin board. My mother had a lot of relatives
who were sent to the concentration camps and she got
hold of one of those lists and she found a name that she
knew, that was a second cousin of hers. He had
just been released from Theresienstadt and he was coming
home. My mother wrote to me, "Would it
be possible for me to visit that family?" I was
anxious to meet a relative. I found the address
and I knocked on the door. The people came to the
door slightly opening it. What is a man in uniform doing
here? They were suspicious of people in uniform
anyway. So they opened the door and I said,
“Bessie Schwartz my mother is sending you greetings”.
I was intrigued with the idea of the cracked door with
family members peering out and moving from suspicion to
joy. Walter became good friends with the family and
later in life reconnected with the daughter. His
experience as a Ritchie boy was an important part of his
legacy so I wanted to do an image with him in
uniform. I was also struck by the chanciness of his
escape, the last boat, the last train and a school picture
all figured in the story. There is also a circular
motif to reflect the oddity of his story coming full
circle back to Czechoslovakia.
So many
of Shirley's memories were very visible through a
child's eye. Here she recounted speaking Yiddish
to her father's customers and her dread of dealing with
the fish that he sold. Those two ideas made it
into this painting.
And we spoke only
Jewish (Yiddish), only, there was no such thing as not
speaking Jewish. And my father had the meat
market and everything in his meat market, all his
books, books that people had orders, every customer
had a book with his name in it. Everything was
written in Jewish you see. I would help in the butcher
shop. I started to help in there when I was ten
or eleven years old. I knew all the customers. I
spoke Jewish when they came in to them and they knew
who I was and if my father had a cold and couldn’t
come in, he would cut up a lot of the meat and stuff
and get it ready so I could wait on the people.
And I would write in English in their book and then I
would tell my father and he would translate it into
Jewish. The only thing I
wouldn’t help with, they used to have fresh fish on
weekends on the other window. My father had made
a tin, separate for each type of fish. Usually
my mother used to take care of that, but when my
mother couldn’t be there, or when she had to help my
dad, they put me in there. I was scared of those
damn fish, they wiggled and jumped all over the place.
I would say to the customer, “ You want this one?
(pointing) and he would say, “Yeah” and I’d say,
“would you pick it up please and put it in” and they
said yes, they knew.
I began this painting with
the idea of "those damn fish" and Yiddish. I used
the suggestion of a scale on which one of the fish
resides with its tail flopping. Unfurled around it
is butcher block paper which transformed itself to a
stream on which Yiddish fish swim. The Yiddish for
fish is written upon this swath of white, resembling
fish scales. I wanted the fish to be dominant
around this young girl as they no doubt appeared through
her child's eye.
Shirley had fond memories of the
North Side of Minneapolis and recounted for us her
memory as a child of the old Lyndale shul.
We went to the old
shul on Lyndale, the Lyndale shul. That was a
beautiful building, it was just gorgeous, it really
was the prettiest one ever built in this whole
state. It had the columns. When you walked in
there you felt you were in a shul, you were in a house
of worship. You weren’t just in a fancy place
where this one had candy and this one was serving…No
you went to a shul. And of course the women sat
upstairs. I sat upstairs with my mother.
And I don’t know how anybody would pray there because
everybody was talking to somebody else, kissing all
the kids and talking to someone else.
And
if it got late, they’d go to shul and they’d have
services, a week before the holidays they’d have a
late service until 11 o’clock at night. It was always
later with the orthodox shuls because they had more to
say. It always took more than it said so in the
book. They had more to read, they had more to
say, then they would stop and they would talk to
somebody here and they’d talk to somebody there and
they’d stand there with a big gavel and say, “Lozan
shah”. You know people would talk so they would say
“Lozan shah”. Well so that’s what they did so we
didn’t get home until late. The kids, a lot of
us, I was a kid then, my mother would give me her coat
and I’d cover up and lay down on the empty seats
around there and sleep until they were through.
My father would carry me home.
When I painted this image I thought about the women's
balcony as a unique world, separate from that of the
men. I wanted it to be defined while the world
of the men below was blurred and indistinct. I
pictured it from a child's perspective, being lulled
to sleep by the voices and with her mother's hand
resting on her creating a sense of safety and
security.
Zelda
is a presence at Beth Jacob where
she is known as Grandma
Zelda. When we asked her how
her role evolved she replied,
Through
the children. Because I
always love children and they
know it. The kids at Beth
Jacob know it. I’m only
known as Grandma Zelda, Grandma
Zelda. Two little boys
came up to me and one said, “Hi
Grandma Zelda, how are you?
“ And the other one looked
at him and said, She your
grandma? And the first one
said “Yes she’s my grandma and
she’s everybody’s grandma. And
he goes like this (pointing) and
listen she could be your grandma
too if you want her to so the
second one says, “Do you think
she would be” and the first one
said, “All you have to do is ask
her”, so he comes up to me and
he says, “Can I ask you
something?” And I jokingly
said, “Is it going to cost me
money?”and he said , “no, would
you be my Grandma
Zelda?” I almost…I
had tears in my eyes. I said, “I
would be happy to be your
Grandma Zelda, but when you see
me what are you going to say to
me? “No problem, if
it’s on Shabbos I’ll say Good
Shabbos Grandma Zelda. If
its on any other time I’ll say,
Hi Grandma Zelda, how are you?”
Kids
to me are beautiful, I love
children. I’ll take all the time
in the world to talk to them and
if they have anything to say
that they want me to help them,
I’ll be there for them because I
love kids.
I
was never married, but I have a
lot of grandchildren. I
have a lot of
grandchildren.
When I began this
painting it seemed that it had to
be a portrait as Zelda was so
central to the story. As it
evolved I felt that I needed to
have children filling the frame as
well as her role to so many
children was also an important
part of the story. But that
story resided in a home, that of
Beth Jacob so I selected an
architectural detail of the
building and housed Zelda and her
countless grandchildren within it.
