Tablet Magazine

After escaping from Warsaw to Kazakhstan ahead of the invading Nazi German armies, the Polish-Jewish art dealer Józef Sandel (1894-1962) returned to his shattered home city to reestablish its once-vibrant Jewish art scene. Sandel would focus much of his attention on Umgekumene yidishe kinstler in poylin (Murdered Jewish Artists in Poland), a two-volume encyclopedia published in 1957 that showcased the lives and work of hundreds of Eastern European Jewish artists murdered by the Nazis. A similar project was undertaken by the Parisian cultural activist Hersh Fenster (1892-1964), whose Undzere farpaynikte kinstler (Our Tortured Artists, 1951) memorialized 80 murdered Paris-based artists of Eastern European origin, many of them his personal friends. Even together, these encyclopedias offer but a modest indication of the colossal creativity generated by and around the many hundreds of Jewish artists that were active throughout Europe before the Holocaust. Still, for the memory of these dead artists, the genre of the encyclopedia proved an efficient showcase. ...

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