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Painting the unpaintable
Samuel Bak heals the horrors of the Holocaust
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

" Return to Vilna I and II "
At the Pucker Gallery, 171 Newbury Street, Boston, August 31 through October 4 and October 5 through November 20.

Painted in Words: A Memoir
By Samuel Bak. Foreword by Amos Oz. Pucker Art Publications/Indiana University Press, 512 pages, $40.

Samuel Bak: The Art of SpeakingAbout the Unspeakable
Videotape produced by Rob Cooper in association with the Pucker Gallery, 36:50, $90.

Samuel Bak: Between Worlds: Paintings andDrawings from 1946 to 2001
Pucker Art Publications, 360 pages, $90.


In his " Great Elegy for John Donne, " Joseph Brodsky writes of the " healing needle " that stitches up " the throbbing void " between Donne’s " soul and his own dreaming flesh. " It’s a powerful image from a great Russian poem of the past century, and it comes to mind when I look at the latest work from Samuel Bak. The show that will open at the Pucker Gallery this Saturday documents the artist’s return, both actual and spritual, to Vilna (then in Poland, now Vilnius in Lithuania), where he grew up and where his father and his grandparents were murdered by the Nazis in the course of their exterminating virtually all of the city’s 80,000 Jews. " Return to Vilna " finds Bak taking his own healing needle and attempting to stitch up the horrific void between past and present, soul and flesh, love and death, in a gigantic act of " tikkun, " or repair. The show is so big — 69 paintings — that the Pucker is presenting it in two parts; the second will begin October 5.

Bak was born in Vilna in 1933, part of a thriving Jewish community that attracted the nickname the " Jerusalem of Lithuania. " That changed with the onset of World War II. In 1940, the Red Army occupied East Poland, and a Soviet general " nationalized " the apartment of Bak’s maternal grandparents, Khone and Shifra, who went to live with his paternal grandparents, Hayim and Rachel. In 1941, Hayim and Khone went out to stand in line for bread; they were seized by Lithuanian bounty hunters and handed over to the Nazis. A few months later, on Yom Kippur, Rachel and Shifra were taken away and, like their husbands, murdered on the outskirts of Vilna in the woods of Ponar (now Paneriai), the " Jewish killing ground. " Samuel and his parents were evicted from their apartment and sent to the Vilna ghetto; subsequently the ghetto was liquidated and the lucky ones were sent to a labor camp in Ponar. The camp’s children were taken away and murdered; Samuel escaped by hiding. Only a few weeks before the camp was liberated, in July 1944, his father, Jonas, was murdered in Ponar. Only Samuel and his mother survived. All this and more is told in Bak’s recently published Painted in Words: A Memoir, which alternately fascinates (how can one man observe and remember with such precision?) and horrifies (how can human beings endure such atrocities?); also just out are a videotape look at the artist, Samuel Bak: The Art of Speaking About the Unspeakable (it will be viewable on request during the run of the show), and the monograph Samuel Bak: Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001.

" Return to Vilna " is Bak’s return to painting with images rather than words. Many of his familiar tropes are here. Stones that could be the building blocks of houses or the Tablets of the Law or grave markers or crematoriums but are often just rubble. Shabbat candles whose flame alludes to the yod (y) of the divine name but whose smoke echoes the smoke from crematorium chimneys; houses whose chimneys do the same, or else houses that seem made out of tin, houses with no substance, no stability, the houses of Jewish existence. Books, avatars of the Pinkas, the book of records of Vilna’s Jewish community, which was entrusted to young Samuel’s care; houses made of books, the symbol of Jewish learning. Leaves of books that litter the ground like the leaves from trees but can also resemble the divine yod or a faded yellow Star of David. Pears, which for Bak represent the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; a ladder, Jacob’s Ladder, the hope of escape. The dove that Noah released in search of land after the Flood. Objects dangling from ropes, as if we were all God’s marionettes, or Jews hanged for being Jews. And objects strapped into place, as if God’s Creation were so flawed it had to be patched up.

There are some new images as well. The teddy bear that Bak in Painted in Words describes as " the irreplaceable companion of my sleep " ; his pillow, a kind of security blanket that he had to leave behind in the muddy street when he and his mother were evicted and sent to the ghetto; and the cup, spoon, and saucer that represent stable family life. But the focal image of " Return to Vilna " is the tree. It represents Bak’s family tree, anyone’s family tree, God’s Tree of Knowledge, our rootedness in the past, our reaching up to Heaven. The forest is the artist’s metaphor for the family of humankind (actual faces being, in Bak’s work, a scary or painful image to be depicted only on special occasions). But the forest of Ponar is the place where the artist’s father and grandparents and hundreds of thousands of other Jews were shot. So repeatedly in this show we see trees suspended in midair, their roots extirpated, or else with a section between roots and branches that’s been cut out, leaving a throbbing void that’s beyond the scope of ordinary healing.

In the group titled Under the Trees, the deracinated trunks are blowing in the wind, the Jewish community uprooted and herded on to the next ghetto/labor camp/death camp; the ground, meanwhile, is a rocky landscape of gravestones that conjure the Tablets of the Law. In From the Other Side of the World, trees and ghetto houses and gate arches are hurtling across the ocean to a land where they will try to put down new roots. In the Sefarim ( " books " ) series, books hang from tree branches, their pages the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge. In Transport a tree lies felled by Nazi lightning; leaves are everywhere, and a tiny wooden cart filled with books prepares to depart. Roots, Cornerstones, Yellow Sky, Façades, Reconstruction, Evidence, and Persistence witness the loss of learning; in Reconstruction you can see the word Srdm ( " Midrash " ), in Evidence the Tablets of the Law.

To the Gate (always departing) and Where It Ends show Vilna’s streets flooded with cups, saucers, and spoons, metaphors for people whose lives were just like yours and mine before they were hauled away and butchered. In Remnants, the cups are replaced by keys to the apartments that these people were no longer allowed to occupy. In At the Gate, where the gate looks like a gallows, a bottle is held in place by ropes — or garroted. In Recollections, familiar household items have turned to stone and float in an icy waste just off a serene landscape, under a sky that’s part ceiling.

But Bak’s most chilling metaphor here is the teddy bear. Interruption shows a bear that’s part stone, abandoned on a shelf. The bears of Skies Were the Limit and Under a Blue Sky are mutilated creatures flung onto the dustheap of history. Most hideous is the blindfolded teddy bear of Damage. It sits on a crumbling table, arms and legs torn off and strewn among branches. Two other bears on the table have already been exterminated; they’re wrapped in white shrouds. Hanging from above is the remnant of a pear — the food that lured these bears to their doom? Outside more tree trunks hover in the air; twin towers suggest a church, and there’s smoke.

The centerpiece of " Return to Vilna " is the quartet of large paintings dedicated to Bak’s grandparents. In each there’s a missing section of tree trunk, and the individual’s name is spelled out in stone-monolith Hebrew letters. Shifra’s has a melting ice-cream cone with two flavors; in Painted in Words we learn that it was she who revealed to young Samuel the secret of ice cream, which his parents had always served him warm out of a fear that cold food would aggravate his bronchitis. Rachel’s has a boat with a curtain-rod mast and curtain sail, in tribute to the sailing game she played with her grandson in the living room of her apartment. Hayim’s includes an oversized spool of ribbon and pair of shears (he was a tailor) plus a clock, a reference to his indulgence of young Samuel’s passion for taking timepieces apart and trying to reassemble them. Many of the pieces dedicated to Bak’s father, Jonas, come with a dove (the Hebrew word for dove is hnwy, " yonah " ).

As for Vilna itself, its ghetto houses huddle in mute dread, and its streets are filled with rubble — leaves, pages, cups, stones — that’s all too clearly the Nazis’ human " garbage. " But Bak bestows upon this world a kind of rainbow light, warm, natural sea greens and autumn red-browns rooted in the palette of Albrecht Altdorfer and Pieter Brueghel and Hieronymus Bosch, colors that belie the horrors they witness. And everything in his painting is a thread to something else. Po-Ner " redeems " Ponar with its play on the Hebrew words hp ( " po " = " here " ) and rn ( " ner " = " candle " ); an arrow points to the turned-to-stone candle, whose flame seems as inert as God’s covenant with His people. Bitter humor, yes, but keeping the line of communication open to God’s response. In the wake of the Holocaust, of seeing your world not just decimated but humiliated, that’s as much as any human healing needle can do.

The opening reception for " Return to Vilna I " is Saturday, August 31, from 3 to 6 p.m. The artist will be present.

 

Issue Date: August 29 - September 5, 2002
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