Fein began to make national flags out of white fabric, using sewing, embroidery, and appliqué to fashion in monochrome the design that would, in ordinary circumstances, have made a colorful banner. He began with the American flag but quickly realized, he says, “The U.S. flag alone seemed out of balance.” So, he decided to re-create all 193 flags of the United Nations in white-on-white. It’s taken him almost 10 years to complete the task in time for the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11.

The process proved painstaking. For the better half of the decade, Fein seemed plagued by fits and starts. The sewing, while soothing, began isolating him, and by 2006 Fein had to acknowledge a growing need to share the process with others and make community-building part of the flag-making. He began standing in public with eight flags, engaging people in discussion about the project. And he sought production assistance from a group of dedicated volunteers of all skill levels. These helpers—schoolchildren, congregants at his synagogue, Facebook fans of the project, other artists, and the public—ironed fabric, sewed stripes, and finished edges.

He completed the last flag this spring and took the installation to Vassar College, where he had received his bachelor’s in art in 1993, as part of a symposium he co-led with Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick (the two are married) on issues of art, politics, and peace. “Aaron has a bone-deep vision of a world in which remembrance and healing can coexist,” Lithwick says. “That’s the truest expression of Tikkun Olam I can imagine.”

“Flags are visceral representations of political ideas,” Fein says. Among the resonant symbols the project evokes is the traditional white flag of surrender. But in this case, any surrender intended would be something closer to giving in to the nature of change, as well as, more personally for Fein, letting go of social defenses and making himself vulnerable as he shared his flags with the public.

As a Jew, Fein perhaps inevitably felt some traditional resonances arise as he worked on “White Flags.” When setting up the installation at Vassar this spring, he suddenly realized he’d created a kind of a room among the hanging flags. “I began to see that the installation could welcome and provide refuge to visitors from all sides, like the Tent of Abraham.” He also fashioned the flags into the skin of his family’s sukkah. The physical and symbolic ephemerality of the flags seemed the perfect enclosure to reinforce the transitory symbolism of Sukkot. “Living with White Flags over the years,” he says, “these things in my life would come to me, like Abraham’s tent, which for me was a good way to describe a longing that I have about a world I’d like to help create.”

For the most part, I would leave Exit Art’s stark, hollow exhibition space with the same cry on my lips that unites so many uninformed visitors of contemporary galleries: This is art? Even I can do that. I was often outraged, but I was never bored. And I returned, year after year, strangely drawn to the highly conceptual spectacles on display. I didn’t understand much about the art at Exit Art, but I was strangely drawn to it.

When I read Jeanette Ingberman’s obituary this weekend, my fascination became a bit clearer. The co-founder of Exit Art—together with her partner, the artist Papo Colo—died of leukemia at 59 last week. The obituary in the New York Times touched on all the expected milestones: doyenne of the avant-garde, champion of artists, believer in socially and politically conscious art. But the most curious revelation came somewhere toward the bottom, along with other dutiful bits of biography: Ingberman, the obituary said, attended Yeshiva of Flatbush, the renowned modern Orthodox day school in Brooklyn.

Suddenly, all those spirited, odd installations made perfect sense. They were conceived by a woman trained in forms, or, more accurately, trained to wander down all possible avenues of one particular form, the Talmud. While Judaism’s prohibition on idols might have made for a poor aesthetic tradition, its proclivity toward concepts, toward translating grand and ethereal notions into daily practices, made it stellar training for anyone interested in the heady world of idea-driven modern art.

In this light, I revised my view of the installations I had seen at Exit Art. Taken at face value, the works still seemed banal. The painted eggs, for example, represented fragility; piled up, they were meant to evoke the aftermath of a massacre. And the sweeping man was Sisyphus with a broom, here to remind us of the repetitiveness and the futility of our existence. For both works, and many more like them, the meaning is immediately clear, the experience not particularly interesting. But when you see the same works through a different lens, sharper and more Talmudic, a hidden layer appears. Suddenly, the sweeping man is inviting you to meditate not only on the futility of life but also on the futility of the acts of creating art and, perhaps, of consuming it. All art, after all, is transient: Even a great painting exists for us, godlike, only during the rare and brief moments in which we interact with it. When we leave the museum and go home, we’re left with a memory, an idea. Art is terribly ephemeral that way, and to understand it, to enjoy it, we build systems of looking and recalling.

The art Ingberman promoted challenged those systems repeatedly. In a 2000 interview with the Times, she explained her philosophy bluntly. “We’re constantly asking ourselves: ‘What is an exhibition, anyway?’ ” She knew, of course, that there was no answer. A yeshiva graduate, she was no stranger to the thankless and endless and intoxicating task of dedicating one’s life to interpreting something that is by definition fleeting and ultimately unknowable. But she never stopped trying, and it’s why I, and so many others, kept coming back even if the immediate reaction was bafflement or dislike; we, too, understood that our mission as spectators was to follow Ingberman’s lead and wonder with her, wonder about what art is and how we are to make sense of it in our own lives. Ingberman is gone, but her work, like that of the best Talmudic scholars, lives on, inviting us to argue.

The cancelled loan included works by Paul Poiret for an upcoming exhibit on the French fashion designer.

Laura Gilbert reports:

“The ‘loans won’t be going forward,’ Mr. Holzer said, ‘in response to’ Russia’s embargo on lending art to U.S. museums. ‘As long as the loan embargo is in place, the museum believes it can no longer lend’ to Russian museums. A ‘one sided’ relationship would, he said, be ‘unfair.’”

Breaking: Met Cancels Loans to Kremlin Museum [NY Observer]
Earlier: Art Wars

The New York Times’ City Room blog reports that the space, two adjacent storefront units (with 19 foot ceilings!) in the Chelsea neighborhood designed by architect Cass Gilbert in 1929, features Assyrian motifs in stone reliefs above the entryways: “Most prominent among them are mirror-image bas reliefs over the lobby and service entrances depicting chariot-borne hunters aiming bows and arrows at loping antelopes, with catlike creatures crouched under the horses. These panels are flanked by pairs of lion heads and forelegs.”

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, senior rabbi of Beth Simchat Torah, has embraced the temple’s inherited artwork, even finding teaching lessons within the reliefs:

“Far from being a liability, the rabbi said, Assyrian architecture could serve an instructional purpose, particularly as Tisha B’av approaches—the holiday, which begins Monday at sundown this year, in which Jews observe the destruction of the first and second temples in particular, as well as the loss more generally of holy places and things held dear.”

‘Gay Synagogue’ Finds a Home, Full of Ancient Assyrians [City Room]
In a Move Freighted With Symbolism, CBST Purchases First Home [NY Jewish Week]

This is the latest round of a legal battle that has been waged since the 1980s, when elements of the Schneerson library—long thought to have been lost or destroyed by the Nazis—were found in Russia’s State Library. The contentious dispute, which saw Chabad employing various legal means trying to get the collection back to the U.S., has caused serious strain in the art world as more institutions become inadvertently involved in what is essentially a property dispute.

The collection, which had grown to include 12,000 books and 50,000 documents, was curated by the Russian-based Chabad-Lubavitch movement for centuries, and believed to have been confiscated during World War II.

Court Calls Russia’s Fear of Chabad Art Seizure Legitimate [New York Observer]
Dispute Derails Art Loans From Russia [NYT]
How Chabad Triggered a Superpower Art War [Jewish Chronicle]

• Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is out of the hospital. She was shot point-blank in the head five months ago. Wow. [JTA]

• Mentioned this earlier, but it seems that in an email Sarah Palin referred to a Jewish former Alaska state representative as “Bird-Nose.” You be the judge! [JTA]

• “A Jerusalem rabbinical court recently sentenced a wandering dog to death by stoning.” Reincarnation was involved. Holy hell. [Ynet/Failed Messiah]

• The Krakow Factory, of Schindler’s List fame, is now a contemporary art museum. But here’s the secret: The art doesn’t actually work! [ArtInfo]

• The perilous occupation otherwise known as translating James Joyce into Russian. [Arty Semite]

Listen to Joyce read from Finnegans Wake. And then you can come to Housing Works Bookstore and see Ulysses acted out before your very eyes.

YouCities from Alex Itin on Vimeo.

Bella Meyer, the owner of Fleurs Bella, an elegant flower shop near New York’s Union Square, calls the flower the true miracle. “To discover its essence—opening, life, death—is to experience an unimaginable mystery,” she says. Meyer traces her love of blossoms to her childhood and to time spent in the company of her grandfather, Marc Chagall. The artist is best known for his depictions of the shtetl—shabby houses, sad-eyed musicians, and melancholy goats—but, according to his granddaughter, he loved flowers, and he took great pleasure in capturing them in his art.

Meyer, 55, grew up in Basel, Switzerland, but spent her summers with Chagall in Southern France, where he lived until his death in 1985. The outdoor markets then overflowed in the warm months with great varieties of flowers and produce, and Meyer recalls delighting her grandfather with the bouquets she brought home. He saw in the “upward-reaching motion of each individual flower a symbol,” Meyer says, and for him, painting flowers may have been “the most visual way to express spirituality.”

Meyer earned a doctorate in medieval art history from the Sorbonne and moved to the United States in 1980. She held a smattering of jobs—from designing props for the theater (which she continues to do, on occasion, for productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) to working as a puppeteer—but none have satisfied her as much as floral design, she says. A number of years ago, she designed a blossom-laden chuppah for her friends’ wedding and she realized that flowers—in their variety and richness, she says, they’re natural art supplies—are a particularly powerful medium for her. She started Fleurs Bella in 2003 as a floral design company and set up the shop just under two years ago.

“Cut flowers,” she says, “have no other purpose aside from being given.” She always keeps a stash just outside the shop, with a sign that says “take one please.” About once a month, she ventures out onto the streets with what she calls “flower graffiti,” tucking small bouquets into alleyways or subway stations. Occasionally she’ll thrust her flowers at random strangers. Not everyone is thrilled. She recalls one man who yelled at her: ”’I don’t want to be happy!’”

Traditional Judaism doesn’t place much of a premium on beauty or happiness. And so it is especially heartening that flowers are so much a part of the festivities on Shavuot; more than decoration, they infuse joy and a sense of aesthetics into the holiday, suggesting that these are not, after all, anathema to Jewish beliefs and practices, and that even as we mark a particularly solemn moment in our history we can find room for both beauty and happiness.

Click below to see images of Fleurs Bella, Bella Meyer’s shop.

• The new Text/Context, which is published in a partnership between The Jewish Week and Nexbook Inc., has dropped. [Text/Context]

In a late article today, Mideast columnist Lee Smith profiles José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister who is now a major international actor in defending Israel. [Tablet Magazine]

• Noting that President Ahmadinejad is visiting Lebanon next month, influential columnist Aluf Benn has an idea: Kidnap him. [Haaretz]

• Arthur Penn, director of one of the most important films in American history, Bonnie and Clyde (to understand why, read this), died at 88. [NYT]

• They’re young. They’re in love. They’re Polish neo-Nazi skinheads who turned out to be Jewish and are now practicing Orthodox Jews. [JPost]

• Borat is please to explain how great and impressive Israeli coalition government function for benefit of mankind. [Haaretz]

• David Miliband, one-time foreign secretary and older brother of new Labour leader Ed, is backing away from high-profile politics in deference to his victorious sibling. [AP/NYT]

• Jewish Fiction.net. Bookmark it.

• Don Draper’s love interest on this season of Mad Men is (like in season one) a Jew. [LAT]

• Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon see their best hope for returning to the land not in a peace deal but in continued violence that eventually leads to Israel caving. [Christian Science Monitor]

• In 2000, as peace talks faltered, Yasser Arafat ordered Hamas to conduct terrorist attacks. [JPost]

• Jewish groups and U.S. museums are coming into conflict over art restitution claims, reports frequent Tablet Magazine contributor Robin Cembalest. [ARTnews]

• What is up with Jews not really drinking much alcohol? [Forward]

• There are more American Jews living in poverty than ever before. [Jewish Week]

• Why the rest of America is going kosher. [TNR’s The Book]

• A profile/interview of controversial Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. [The Independent]

Some commenters saw a Zionist conspiracy (when they weren’t expressing disdain for the video’s “bad taste”). But could the Israeli government, or any sympathetic organization, have masterminded something so anarchic, brazenly neglecting to tout Israel’s holy sites and instead pitching the Azrieli Mall highway bridge? Another theory: Maybe the artists were spontaneously moved by their love for Israel on their way home from an evangelical church. Yet others speculated it was all a big prank staged by an Israeli backpacker trawling the Incan ruins of Peru, who thought it’d be funny to juxtapose their song with footage of the Tel Aviv pride parade.

In truth, credit (or blame, if you prefer) lies with a different set of rootless cosmopolitans: several creative-class Argentine Jews (and one quarter-Jew) living in Madrid, Buenos Aires, and New York, only one of whom has actually been to Israel, and none of whom even met the singers during the video’s production. Their intention, these impresarios say somewhat vaguely, was to fight preconceived notions that Israel is a sad and scary place.

“It’s not a song in favor of Israel,” said Gastón Cleiman, an advertising man in Buenos Aires who wrote the song’s lyrics and who, along with Sebastian Muller, dreamed up the idea. “It’s a song against prejudice.” Cleiman is freelancer; Muller works for an interactive firm in Madrid whose clients include Nike and Coca-Cola. Both men swear the project was their own initiative, with neither official money nor messaging. The music was written by Gaby Kerpel, another Argentine Jew, who also scored De La Guarda and Fuerza Bruta and is part of a Latin electronic collective known as Zizek and performs reinterpreted Colombian cumbia under the alter ego King Coyo, and the video was directed by Picky Talarico, better known for directing Latin mega-stars’ videos and high-profile commercials.

It started with Muller and Cleiman, who were channeling their mutual obsession with the millions-strong YouTube sensations Wendy (who, at 8, recorded sugary-voiced videos about her thirst for breast milk and beer), La Tigresa (a surgically enhanced hairdresser from the Peruvian Amazon fond of leopard print and reborn as a singer at 65), and Delfín, an amiable but stone-faced Ecuadorean whose first rise to his feet in indignation had been for a disco-beat ode to 9/11.

“One sees them and is seduced,” Cleiman said, speaking in Spanish. “These are things upon which you cannot force reason, because then surely you will find defects. But the truth is, you cannot stop watching them.”

“I feel they are doing something new that relies on authenticity,” Muller, who studied film at Tel Aviv University, told me earnestly, in Hebrew. “They haven’t learned the rules of how to communicate with images. It’s a kind of dogma without consciousness.”

Muller conceded that some of the singers’ fan base was ironic or mocking. “For many people, the combination of authenticity, of pop-culture kitsch and the bizarre is an ugly aesthetic,” he said. “But once you break from your prejudice, you can get to a different approach. Once you break those barriers, you are free.” He likened the process of changing one’s perception of the video—in part because of its pure addictiveness—to changing one’s view of Israel.

That’s the argument he presented to the singers, too. “They also had preconceived notions about Israel,” Muller said. “So, we said, what do they think when people write negative things about them on the Internet?” All three signed on.

This time, parts of the Internet responded with enthusiastiasm, bringing the performers unimagined international fame and tributes. The breathlessly heralded “pasito de Delfín” dance in “En Tus Tierras Bailaré” has spawned homages by someone in an Iron Man costume in a park, by well-off children in a kiddie pool, and by at least one woman in drag.

***

Sitting in a Manhattan bar, Talarico, the video’s director, recalled how pleased he was when Muller forwarded him YouTube comments complaining that the video looked like the work of a beginner student, and a not very good one.

Talarico’s usual clients are the likes of Julio Iglesias, Nelly Furtado, and Juanes, but when Cleiman called and asked him to recommend a director for “En Tus Tierras Bailaré,” Talarico volunteered himself.

“I have this concept of art as being when you manage to do something without your mind interfering, without being led by preconceptions and prejudices,” he said. “For me, there’s always an opinion, there’s always self-consciousness. I think these people don’t have that. So, I think they’re true artists.”

Cleiman had written the lyrics to Kerpel’s music on a boat to Uruguay, trying to mimic the imperfect rhyming and simplicity of the singers’ previous work. “I’m trying to remember a phrase of Picasso’s—It took many years for me to learn how to paint like a child,” he said.

All of them had labored to make themselves invisible, befitting a video that Alma Guillermoprieto, writing on the New York Review of Books blog, saw as evidence of “the chaotic transformation of a culture that has always had an infinite and joyful capacity for self-invention. This is not outsider but insider art of the deepest sort, forged in a hot-hot crucible, and it is we who stand on the outside, peering wistfully at the screen.” For the Argentines involved, cultural insiders by profession but arguably outsiders as Jews and in a country that has always held itself apart from Latin America, the wistful peering was in awe, at footage shot in Peru and Ecuador by local directors given only the loosest instructions.

“After 200 music videos and 400 commercials, it was like an undoing,” said Talarico. “A deconstruction.”

He intentionally used footage of Israel that defied logic. “If we were doing a corporate video for Israel and we had a voice-over saying, ‘Visit Jerusalem,’ then fine, we use Jerusalem. But this was not like a video of a party where you can see the brand of whiskey.” It’s not clear to him whether the video changed the way anyone thinks about Israel, but it doesn’t really matter that much to him. “With Israel, there’s something in my blood”—he has a Jewish grandparent—“but if someone had approached me to do this video for Afghanistan or Argentina, I would have done it too.”

Meanwhile, the video’s wild success has meant the artists now have mobility beyond the virtual. La Tigresa has already been brought to Buenos Aires by a party promoter, where patrons at a chic restaurant she ate in burst into “En Tus Tierras Bailaré,” where she was stopped in the street for photos and hailed as a gay icon. Kerpel wants to collaborate with Wendy Sulca. Agencies are calling Cleiman and Talarico, seeking to tap this confusing enthusiasm.

And Muller is seeking partners or donors for a worldwide tour that would span Latin America, Miami, New York, and end up in Israel. “That’s our dream and their dream,” he said. “They already know a lot about the country because we showed it to them. And they have a connection. But they want to be there physically.”

• The legendary Leonard Nimoy, 79, announced his retirement from show business. [Before It's News]

• The Christian Broadcasting Network features an interview with photojournalist David Rubinger, who has documented much of Israel’s history and describes the face of the first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion as “Like granite.” [CBN]

• Israel’s national museum unveiled a restored Renaissance-era Hebrew manuscript documenting Jewish law and adorned with gold and gems. [AP]

• Los Angeles’s South Robertson Neighborhood Council has elected Orthodox 15-year-old Rachel Lester, the youngest elected public representative in the city. [JTA]

• Virginia has recalled a license plate reading “14CV88,” allegedly a coded reference to Hitler. That may sound paranoid, but check out the photo of the truck that boasted it. [AP via VIN]

We’re not sure whether the archive will include film, as the English version hasn’t yet launched (but should be coming soon). In the meantime, a glimpse into the delightfully “degenerate” world of filmmaker Hans Richter in his piece “One More Ghost Before Breakfast,” the original sound version of which was destroyed by the Nazis:

‘Degenerate Art’ Database Shows 21,000 Works Seized by Nazis [Bloomberg]

Although the differences and grievances, rather than the similarities, between the two groups are hot topics these days, Sudin uses side-by-side pieces to highlight the parallels between the adjacent worlds. “Rocker” and “Hassid Dancing” each show an individual spiritedly engaged with music, while “Gottleib’s Deli” and “Kellog’s Diner” portray the two cornerstone eateries. Sudin’s two favorite works, “2am Hipster Party (Where’s Waldo)” and “2am Hassidic Fabregen” are meant to evoke “the same party, the same enthusiasm,” explained Sudin. She also brings a sense of humor to her work: her “Hipster Bible” bears the word “Irony” in biblical script, and in a depiction of Williamsburg’s controversial bike lane, she makes the composition of Bedford Avenue look like a game of Frogger.

Sudin got the gig by responding to a posting by Aish looking for Jewish art. “It occurred to us that we have all these walls,” explained Adam Jacobs, Managing Director of the Aish Center, who saw an opportunity to meet new groups of people and “let them know about what we do.” Jacobs said the organization is looking for artwork “consistent in our messaging: innovative, true to tradition but artistic and modern.” He aims to start collating Jewish artists on Aish’s website and let them sell their artwork from there. Sudin, originally from the greater Springfield, MA, community, based this series, which has also shown at the Workman’s Circle Building in Murray Hill, on one of her graduating theses from the Pratt Institute. “I see myself as standing in between. I feel connected to both sides, but I’m neither and I can sympathize with both sides,” she said, her hair completely covered in a vibrant yellow scarf, but nose ring showing. “I started college right when hipsterdom started to take off…I lost some friends because of the hipster community.”

Hipsters and Hasids

Sutton, who calls his distinct taste “old new,” wears custom suits lined with sumptuous fabric from vintage women’s dresses. But the centerpiece of his aesthetic is his enormous collection of botanical art. Selections from that collection are on display at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh through the end of June. The images of intricate single flowers, exquisitely detailed diagrams of seed pods, and carefully arranged branches hanging in each room of Sutton’s home serve as a reminder that the baroque handiwork surrounding them was inspired by the lush gaudiness of nature itself.

In keeping with his affinity for the natural world, Sutton, a 46-year-old former stockbroker, now invests his money in eco-friendly endeavors including wind farms and a Canadian geothermal drilling company. He was born and raised in Beirut (his family moved to the Lebanese capital from Syria), and he lived in Israel from 1984 to 1990. It was there that he purchased his first landscape—a work by Shmuel Cheruvi, who fulfilled Sutton’s desire to see someone “paint the Israeli landscape before it gets too built up.”

Sutton has long been committed to environmentalism—in the early 1990s, before a city-wide recycling program was instituted in New York, Sutton would “drive around and pick up my friends’ paper,” he said, and then drop it off at a local recycling facility. He’s also always been a collector, an attribute that’s in his blood. His grandfather collected silver, which he would sometimes trade with Russian refugees for money or bread while living in Istanbul during World War I. “I didn’t know how to have seder not on a massive silver display,” said Sutton, fussily straightening the light above a painting of the Israeli desert. (“We have an aggressive new housekeeper,” he explained.)

On a tour of his upstairs gallery (which abuts a mini-gym and a luxurious bathroom outfitted with a bidet), Sutton, who has little use for contemporary art, expounded on the relationship of art to its time—the 19th century was “fuzzy,” said Sutton, lending itself well to impressionism, while the 1950s presented the unanswerable question of “what is nuclear war?,” he continued, resulting in abstract work like that of Jackson Pollack. As for today, Sutton contends that we’ve returned to nature, and that “realism is back.” Sutton is evidently gleeful at this turn of the tide, which he also sees as a connection to Judaism: “One of the first things in the Bible is that you cannot tear down a fruit tree, even in the siege of a city,” he said. “God tells Adam: ‘Watch over the world.’”

*Correction, November 30: This post originally stated that the Muslim holiday Tabaski marked Abraham’s binding of his son Isaac.

Widower, 83, Clears Out Attic—and Finds £100k of Lost Art [Daily Mail]

Von Brunn writes in the AskART biography that he was born in St. Louis in 1920. His father, Elmer, whose forebears he says came to America from “Germany/Austria” in 1845, worked as the superintendent of a steel mill and designed a plant that manufactured 40-mm shells for the U.S. military during the war. His mother, Hope, was an “accomplished pianist,” he claims. As a child, von Brunn says, he wandered limestone bluffs overlooking the Mississippi, and, armed with Scribner’s Illustrated Classics and a set of oil paints from “grossemutter,” dreamed of painting like “Pyle, Schoonover, and Wyeth.”

But in college, at Washington University, von Brunn writes, he found art classes dominated by “Marxist/Liberal” concepts, and his beloved American realism and “Western Culture” replaced by “expressionism”—not-so-well-concealed code, presumably, for “degenerate Jewish art.” “We see the results today in expensive art produced by monkeys, elephants, Pollack and pianists who play with their elbows,” von Brunn writes, archly.

He goes on to claim that he painted watercolors in his spare time as a PT boat captain in the Mediterranean and Pacific theaters during the war, and moved to New York in 1947 to study figure painting at the Central Park School of Art. He apparently also “tried to crack into the newspaper business but all doors were closed to conservatives”—so, instead, he went into ad copywriting, but he writes that he also illustrated books for William Morrow. He got married, had a son, and exhibited his easel paintings at “the Commodore Hotel, the Hotel Biltmore, Abercrombie & Fitch, and the Eastside Gallery.”

In other words, von Brunn was living the Madison Avenue dream, and was on his way to a split-level in the suburbs, just like Don Draper. But, instead, something snapped. “The so-called ‘Holocaust’ burst upon the scene,” he writes, and colleagues began advising him to drop the “von” from his name, telling him he’d “never make it in New York” if he didn’t. His descent into Holocaust revisionism began with the gift of John O. Beatty’s Iron Curtain Over America, from one of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s senior military commanders, Pedro del Valle; in due course, he writes, his wife, Patricia Beverley-Giddings, got fed up with his “political posture” and filed for divorce. By then von Brunn was living with her in Maryland, where he tried to start his own ad agency, but on the night of his 48th birthday, he was arrested after a bar brawl with “a prominent Jewish businessman” that started because he made an “unfavorable” comment about Abe Fortas, the Jewish Supreme Court justice.

Von Brunn wound up going to prison for two years, he writes, after being convicted of drunken driving and resisting arrest. The rest of his life unspools as a tale of resentment growing unchecked. He painted cloud formations, he developed a staph infection, he moved to Florida and married a nightclub singer named Pat Taylor, and he moved to Northern California, where he published books including Zionist Rape of the Holy Land (originally titled Conquest through Immigration). He describes an arson fire that drove him back East, “where he devised a scheme to expose his enemies”—his 1981 attempted shotgun takeover of the Federal Reserve, a “caper” that landed him in a federal penitentiary. Taylor divorced him while he served six-and-a-half years of an 11-year sentence, and on his release, in 1989, von Brunn writes that he went to live with his sister, Alyce, and claims he began showing his artwork under an assumed name after “pusillanimous” gallery owners refused to exhibit him.

“In small towns across America the blind and cowardly scramble, push and shove getting and spending while their homes are burning and their complexions grow progressively darker,” von Brunn finishes with a flourish. “Von Brunn paints and plots.”

James von Brunn [AskArt; subscription required]

Though currently on exhibit at the Jewish Museum, Alex Katz’s paintings do little to reveal the religion of their maker. In fact, critics have delicately approached this Jewish artist’s decidedly non-Jewish aesthetic with vague appraisals that tiptoe around the problematic discussion of what, exactly, a Jewish aesthetic might be. Ken Johnson, writing in The New York Times, compared a gathering in one Katz painting to “a scene from a John Cheever novel,” while Holland Cotter suggested, in the same paper, that Katz lent his subjects a “preppy-bohemian glamour.” Out of politesse, both critics avoided calling Katz’s treatment of his subjects flat-out “waspy,” though both imply such a conclusion. The work—frontal portraits manifest in flat colors, with few physical details like wrinkles or blemishes—elicits a sense that it may be easier to identify what is not Jewish about a work of art than to identify what is. And that maybe God is in the details after all.

Katz’s subjects are for the most part free of any obvious ethnic attributes. He leaves the viewer with only a handful of visual cues: the beach, sunglasses, soirees, summer homes, bucolic landscapes. Most upwardly mobile Jews would be hard-pressed to surrender any part of that list as the provenance of non-Jews; in rational terms, those cultural clues are more the marks of class than religion. So, what makes the work Cheever-like? And “preppy-bohemian”? Is it possible that Jews are still identified with struggle—more than parties and boating—in artwork, even if they, themselves, are not struggling? In other words, are Jews addicted to their roles as empaths, identifying with struggle regardless of their specific lots?

Through March 18, 2007, the Jewish Museum hosts “Alex Katz Paints Ada,” featuring more than 40 of Katz’s portraits of his wife, painted over a half century. With such a venue comes the requisite conflation of Katz’s art and Judaism, though the merger rests on the facts of Katz’s birth more than on a particular aesthetic or social agenda. On the one hand, both his parents immigrated from Russia at the turn of the century and his mother was a Yiddish actress. On the other, he was born in Sheepshead Bay but raised in St Albans, Queens, “a neighborhood where there was only one other Jewish family,” he told me recently, adding that he never had a bar mitzvah. “I’m not religious at all.”

In a 2004 interview with Clare Henry of London’s Financial Times, Katz explains the way his father influenced his own process, “My Russian father was very disorganized. His way of putting tools away was to open the cellar door and throw—then he was furious when he couldn’t find them. Although I felt inadequate to him in many ways—he was a charismatic figure—I decided that was inefficient. But I have his explosive energy. It’s very Russian to have high energy and work fast.’” Katz’s father was both influence and counter-influence on his son; the painter is ultra-organized and systematic about his approach, and his work is controlled and disciplined, minimal in comparison to his father’s chaos.

Edith Halpert in the 1920s

The ambitious Mrs. Halpert told dealers she was curious about their business, and they answered her questions about standard receipt formats and insurance policies. She called herself “a little girl from Odessa,” and delivered that line “with her hands on her hips and a shimmy,” according to a newly released biography, The Girl with the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market by Lindsay Pollock, who writes a column on the art market for Bloomberg News.

Edith’s gallerist-mentors lived to regret spilling trade secrets to this high-cheekboned, blue-eyed brunette flapper. By the early 1930s she was grossing $100,000 a year at a Greenwich Village venture called the Downtown Gallery. Bluebloods like Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Newport heiress Edith Wetmore, and Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield were shopping at Edith’s and enjoying the slumming thrill of peering into the speakeasies near her West 13th Street rowhouse. She wangled exclusive or semi-exclusive rights to works by important American modernists (Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, Ben Shahn) as well as talented but now-obscure second tier (Abraham Walkowitz, Bernard Karfiol, Peggy Bacon).

Mention Halpert’s name now to art dealers or collectors and most will draw blanks. She died of a brain tumor in 1970, a hard-drinking, forgetful, litigious, embittered, and sometimes paranoid recluse. But her nervy early methods of running a gallery live on.

In her heyday uptown dealers mostly flogged dubious Old Masters and fine French furniture. She set out to introduce contemporary American art to the masses, whipping up multi-dealer public art shows, allowing her customers to pay on installment plans, and hounding museums into acquiring and displaying her wares. Her boozy parties were legendary.

“My rackets,” she called her business in a 1960s interview. But she wasn’t a huckster. In many ways, she was a quintessential left-leaning immigrant, fighting for the rights of the oppressed, an heir to her forebears’ anti-Czarist sentiments. She cut into her profits by subsidizing starving painters like Charles Sheeler and Stuart Davis, and her idealism comes through in her correspondence with close friends. “I haven’t done right by my artists and American art,” she fretted in a 1941 letter to a lover, written after a brief illness kept her from work.

But business was in her blood: Her father Gregor (source of her made-up maiden name) was a prosperous grain broker, and Halpert and her sister Sonia each had a nanny. When Halpert was a toddler, Gregor died of tuberculosis and her mother Frances (née Lukowowick) moved the family to Harlem, insisting the girls speak English, rather than Yiddish or Russian, at home. Halpert helped out at her mother’s struggling candy store on Madison Avenue at 105th Street, and probably never graduated from high school.

At 14, having adopted the name Edith Georgiana Fein, she started taking night art classes at the National Academy of Design. Soon after, she joined the People’s Art Guild, a short-lived artists’ union (1915-1917) that brought Jewish artists’ work to Lower East Side settlement houses and cafeterias. By 17 she was supporting the family as a fashion illustrator for department stores. She visited galleries run by the few mavericks—Alfred Stieglitz and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney—interested in recent American work. She went, she explained toward the end of her life, “wherever artists could be found, seen, or respectfully heard, and attended every meeting that was free.”

Edith and Sam Halpert in Paris, 1925

In 1918 she married Sam Halpert, a Fauve-influenced painter (and Bialystoker born Smuel Galprin) nearly twice her age. An artist friend named Leon Kroll told her she had little talent, so she burned her art supplies and reinvented herself as a marketing executive and efficiency advisor for garment manufacturers. She earned $16,000 a year, while Sam sold about $800 worth of paintings annually. He blamed her for his failures, and later bitterly called her “Lady Duveen,” after Joseph Duveen, the Jewish art dealer who hawked so many Old Masters to robber barons. In 1925, Edith quit working for a few months, hoping to save the marriage by playing wife. After a particularly boring summer vacation at a Maine artists’ colony, she left Sam (they finally divorced in 1930) to start a gallery.

She bought an early 1800s townhouse at 113 West 13th Street, at the northern fringe of bohemian artists’ country, and moved into the top-floor apartment. The New York Evening Post Literary Review soon gushed that the gallery “presented so attractive an appearance that one reviewer found it hard to leave.” She commissioned a glass-roofed backyard addition from Donald Deskey, the interior designer who later designed Radio City Music Hall, stocking it with murals and sculpture from Downtown Gallery artists. Edith kept the place open until 11 p.m., six days a week, and changed shows at the breakneck pace of one every three weeks.

Customers of every ethnicity, persuasion, and class were welcome. Her male assistant was young, gay, and black, and although she wasn’t observant, she could still take on “a more kibbitzy voice” with her coreligionists, Pollock says. (Many of her artists and collectors were Jewish immigrants like her, aggressively assimilating, replacing their ancestors’ faith with a fervor for high culture.) Newbie collectors could buy monographs or lithographs, and Halpert had her artists’ designs licensed for affordable housewares and accessories: silk scarves, alabaster jewelry, drinking glasses, wallpaper, copper ashtrays.

Marguerite Zorach’s The Picnic, with Edith Halpert in blue between her lover Eddie Cahill and the artist, 1928

When the Great Depression scared even the wealthiest collectors away from contemporary art, Halpert changed tactics. She started dressing as “a helpless, frumpy matron,” Pollock writes, trawling the New England and mid-Atlantic countryside for folk art: weathervanes, cigar-store figures, chalkware roosters, ship figureheads. She especially liked eerie, powerful, unfussy pieces that seemed to foreshadow modernism. The Rockefellers were still acquiring this material—Abby Rockefeller Jr. was setting up a folk art museum in Colonial Williamsburg—as were Henry and Edsel Ford. (Halpert knew about Henry’s anti-Semitism, but cheerfully feigned indifference in order to close deals.) She helped organize splashy exhibits at Rockefeller Center and Grand Central Terminal, and briefly took a job in Washington, D.C., helping the Federal Arts Project choose grantees.

Halpert started losing her edge as early as 1940, when she tired of bohemia and moved her gallery and home to East 51st Street. Not many of her postwar signings caught on, with the exception of Jacob Lawrence and Stieglitz’s stable (including Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe), which she took over after his death in 1946. In the 1960s, her taste began to diverge even more dramatically from the marketplace. The Pop artists and Abstract Expressionists were, she thought, being coddled by foundations, novelty-craving curators, and star-struck collectors “who stand there and catch the next picture that comes off the easel.” Her friends and artists drifted away. When she couldn’t find anyone to dine with, according to one former staffer, she spent her evenings “obsessively arranging and re-arranging her bureau drawers, rolling her many pairs of stockings perfectly and re-folding exactly her underwear and nightgowns.” Only one artist, a Hawaiian-born painter named Ruben Tam, showed up at her funeral.

She had coyly promised her collection to several museums, but at the last minute she revoked her will and died intestate. A niece and a nephew unloaded more than 200 of Edith’s best pieces at a 1973 Parke Bernet auction, clearing $3.6 million.

Only a few institutions—the Whitney, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum—have kept Edith’s former holdings on regular display. The Museum of Modern Art’s 2004 renovation relegated her American modernists to a corridor along the elevator banks. “It’s as if they’re the poor stepchildren of the collection,” Pollock said recently. “I get very defensive about her and her artists. When people told me they remembered this difficult woman, I wanted to say, ‘But if you’d only known her when she started out! She was a pistol! She was amazing!’”

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In 1911, painter Chaim Soutine arrived in Paris and fell in with a group of Montparnasse bohemians, among them Amedeo Modigliani, who later became his roommate and closest friend. With little money and time to kill, Soutine began spending his days in the Louvre, taking in the masterpieces previously unknown to him. In particular, he was fascinated by Rembrandt’s Carcass of an Ox, an anatomic study in which the titular hunk of meat hangs split open, ribcage exposed. Soon, Soutine was producing similar works: still-lifes of slaughtered animals, from sleek brown rabbits limply resting on snowy white cloth to a pair of chickens.

In Soutine’s crowd, artists were expected to defy tradition. Modigliani, who shared many of Soutine’s retrograde tastes when it came to portraiture, was venturing into more experimental territory with his sculptures, exploring non-Western sources for inspiration; Chagall was painting dreamlike sequences of shtetl life; and Jacques Lipchitz was making sculptures that were decidedly cubist and, in the 1920s at least, entirely abstract.

Soutine, on the other hand, was paying homage to Rembrandt, Courbet, and Chardin. He was a “dedicated traditionalist of the purest vein,” Lipchitz—a close friend—said in a 1945 Partisan Review interview. Though his paintings clearly reflect the dominant style of his day—flat, abstracted forms and heavy brushstrokes—they also employ the lush, saturated colors of Rembrandt.

Over the course of his short career—he died in 1943, at age 49, of a perforated ulcer—Soutine painted hallucinatory landscapes reminiscent of Van Gogh (whom he said he loathed) and dark brooding portraits, but his slaughterhouse still-lifes have proved to be his most potent, personal, and enduring works. In the eviscerated fowl, flayed rabbits, gutted fish, and hanging cows, the depressive Soutine found his perfect subjects, which both gave form to his darkest anxieties and alluded to his cherished forerunners, the paintings he’d copied for tourists in his early days in Paris.

If he didn’t share the Modernists’ desire to slough off tradition, it’s because he’d never been shackled to it in the first place. Born in a Pale of Settlement shtetl, the 10th of 11 children, Soutine spent his early years in yeshiva. According to the Soutine myth—which may have been perpetuated by the artist himself—at 13 he attempted to paint a local rabbi and wound up in the hospital after being beaten by the rabbi’s sons. His assailants, upon threat of being reported to the police, paid Soutine’s parents 25 rubles, which the young painter used to run away to Vilna, where he lived for three years as an art student and projectionist before finding a patron and moving to Paris.

In that cosmopolitan city, he sought to free himself from the insularity of his religious upbringing and found refuge in the old masters his friends dismissed. And though they did not dismiss Soutine—his unbridled ambition and rare talent would not let them—his traditionalist values made him an anomaly and outsider in Montparnasse.

It’s ironic, then, that in the years after his death—particularly in the 1950s and 1960s—Soutine was championed by a new group of iconoclasts: the abstract-expressionists. Cheim and Read‘s New Landscape/New Still Life: Chaim Soutine and Modern Art is the latest attempt to parse Soutine’s influence on that group. The show, curated by Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, opens with Carcass of Beef (1925)—Soutine’s bloodier, abstract take on Rembrandt’s Carcass—and, after a brief digression into pastoral landscapes of the villages of Céret and Cagnes, ends with some of the artist’s best slaughterhouse still-lifes. Scattered throughout are mostly abstract works by Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Susan Rothenberg, Philip Guston, and Joan Mitchell, which serve, oddly enough, to make Soutine’s paintings look all the more modern.

In Still Life with Fowl (1918), two chickens lay next to each other, red gashes across their slim throats, draped together like lovers who’ve committed suicide. In Pheasant (1926-27), the animal’s extended body is attractively laid out as if it were a reclining nude. Soutine’s paint strokes are uneven and the heavy texture of the paint reminds the viewer of de Kooning or Pollock. The carcasses are maimed, ugly, bloodied and their ultimate end is always in sight. In Rabbit With Two Forks (1924), the utensils practically grasp the animal, reminding one of what it truly is: a meal. There’s a complex interaction between artist and subject in these paintings. Soutine recognizes that by taking the dead animals out of the butcher shop and painting them, he takes much of their essence away—transforming their grotesque appearance into art. Yet he also understands that in the act of painting, the artist must also recognize the harsh reality of the world.

What fascinates many painters, as the critic Clement Greenberg notes, is the way Soutine’s paintings speak “so vividly of the self-torture of modern painting, its inherent difficulties and frustrations, but also of the possibilities of triumph just within its reach.” Soutine himself knew more of difficulty than triumph. His health was poor. He made little money from his work and never in his lifetime gained the fame he desired. He tended toward depression.

“Doesn’t Chaim mean ‘life’?” Modigliani once asked his friend. To which Soutine replied: “I’ve forgotten.”

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In 1907, a 23-year-old writer from Kiev named Dovid Bergelson decided to send fragments of his latest work, an impressionistic account of shtetl life titled At the Depot,” to I.L. Peretz, the eminence grise of Yiddish letters. Peretz did not respond, so Bergelson boarded a train for Warsaw, where he sought out Peretz and regaled him with the story in person. Peretz was impressed.

Bergelson did not lack for confidence. Born into a wealthy family in rural Ukraine, he spent his youth studying Hebrew religious works and Russian literature, dabbling as a writer in both languages before taking up Yiddish. I would prefer to be first in Yiddish than second in Russian,” he confided to Shmuel Niger, an eminent Yiddish literary critic.

Yiddish was the right instrument for Bergelson, who plied it to become its greatest modernist. The Shadows of Berlin, a collection of short stories Bergelson wrote about his voluntary exile in the city in the 1920s, and published this month by City Lights Books in a translation by Joachim Neugroschel, confirms that status. A product of the backward, clannish shtetl, Bergelson believed it had no place in the rapidly modernizing world of pre-revolutionary Russia, but he was equally doubtful of the unsavory spectrum of radical revolutionaries who wanted to replace the monarchy. Bergelson’s skepticism of ideology served him poorly in life (it claimed his life, in fact) but sublimely in art. Bergelson’s constitutional pessimism made for a literary style acutely attuned to the psychological dislocations of the modern age.

No language was better suited to this endeavor than Yiddish, as no language’s literature was less burdened by history. A pedestrian counterpart to Hebrew, the sacred language of Scripture scrupulously defended from contamination, Yiddish lived on the street, a ductile argot unguided by precedent. It graduated to literary maturity only in the 1880s, a mere generation before Bergelson’s arrival on the scene.

It had been long enough for him to reject the prevailing literary style, the folksy, forgiving emotionalism of Mendele Moykher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem, as well as the tendency of Yiddish literature in general to heroize the old shtetl’s resignation, endurance, and woe. The shtetl had changed.

Soon after assuming the throne in 1855, Czar Alexander II had eased restrictions on Jewish residence, schooling, and commerce in the Pale of Settlement, generating significant economic opportunity for the Jewish community, but his assassination in 1881 reversed many of the reforms. Battered by pogroms and economic stagnation, the shtetls of the Pale languished.

This atrophy was the lifeblood of Bergelson’s fiction. He portrayed it like no Yiddish writer before him. His language was Yiddish, but his style was Russian. Like the nouveau riche Jews of the period, their social climbing arrested by the new repression, Bergelson looked beyond rather than within; his writing recalled Tolstoy’s plotting, Chekhov’s introspection, and Andrei Bely’s Symbolist experiments of perspective. The result was a modernist style informed by an anxiety about the degeneration of the familiar world. He was ‘gray’ Bergelson,” says Seth Wolitz, a Bergelson specialist and professor of Yiddish literature at the University of Texas at Austin, invoking Moshe Kulbak, a Yiddish poet who coined the moniker. He saw only ruins.”

After meeting Peretz, Bergelson published several short works to increasing acclaim, but it was his novel After All Is Said and Done (1913) that anointed him the vanguard voice of Yiddish fiction. The story of well-educated and independent Mirel Hurvitz, who is stymied by her disorientation in a Jewish society now governed by the self-interest and decadence of the parvenus who benefited from Alexander II’s economic reforms, it gave Bergelson’s programmatic skepticism its most resonant expression. Mirel, Yiddish literature’s first emancipated woman, is an emblem of Jewish society unmoored. She tries to determine a path in life and establish her feelings for a variety of suitors, but stumbles in a fog of indecision.

Lionized by the petit-bourgeois strivers he savaged in the novel—Bergelson was as worldly as they wished to become—the work perfected his trademark style, a psychological impressionism that subordinated meaning to mood. In a world where the significance of events and behavior is impossible to determine or control, his characters function according to half-understood motivations, which they communicate in half-spoken words. The narrator appears to know no more than they do.

The Revolution seemed to usher in a more benign period than gray Bergelson” had anticipated. The Ukrainian Parliament committed significant funds to Yiddish education, and Bergelson became a leader of the Yiddish Kultur-lige, a powerful institution devoted to promoting Yiddish culture. The Russian Civil War soured that goodwill, however, and pogroms proliferated. Bergelson barely survived one himself, though an unpublished manuscript of his perished. In 1921, he moved to Berlin, following in the footsteps of many fellow Yiddishists sympathetic to the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution but wary of its violence.

Despite Berlin’s hyperinflation, Bergelson lived comfortably, thanks in part to the hard currency he received from contributions to American publications such as the Jewish Daily Forward, but he felt disconnected from the disintegrating culture that informed his work back home. Bergelson, who had never visited Western Europe, was awestruck by Berlin’s energy and sophistication, but also found it impersonal and foreign, a place where, in the words of the Yiddish mystical writer Der Nister, the Jewish intellectuals are left without roots, [and] rot.”

In The Shadows of Berlin, the city is oppressively busy, at once enslaved by capitalist routine and self-interest and released into decadence by the abandon of the interwar years. In For 12,000 Bucks He Fasts Forty Days,” for instance, depraved Berliners turn an act of atonement into a carnival amusement, taunting an emaciated boy under glass with sausages and beer.

Stylistically, the stories recall After All Is Said and Done. In Among the Refugees,” a perturbed young émigré, his whole body [like] the gray dust on the far roads of small towns,” reels from the dislocation of exile until he decides to murder a notorious Ukrainian pogromist hiding in Berlin. For unexplained reasons, however, the only life the young man can end is his own. In Blindness,” another émigré, burdened by the dispossessions of exile, succumbs to grief, the concrete causes of her decline as unspecified as the way she dies.

The language is brilliant—Shmuel Niger compared Bergelson’s words to pearls strung on a silken thread,” according to scholar Joseph Sherman—but the stories are a distinctly cerebral pleasure, their mood a greater priority for the author than storytelling or character development.

By the mid-1920s, Bergelson was beginning to realize that he would have to act on his disenchantment with Berlin. The Deutschmark was stabilized in 1924, greatly increasing the cost of living, and right-wing extremism grew more menacing. Bergelson considered leaving, but his options were limited. Yiddish culture in Poland, for which he always maintained a tribalist disdain, was, in his view, conservative and obscurantist, its literature compromised by commercial considerations. Palestine was a Zionist pipe dream where Yiddish was a lingua non grata. America was the land of assimilation, where Yiddish was destined to fade.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, on the other hand, Yiddish seemed to be flourishing, with theaters, schools, and publications subsidized by the state. It was mainstream to go back to Russia in the mid-1920s,” Gennady Estraikh, author of the recently published In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism, says. To become pro-Soviet in the 1920s didn’t mean you had to be a Communist.” At the same time, according to Seth Wolitz, the rise of Stalin meant that exiles had to come home, or become suspect.” Bergelson, who still loved to be liked,” in Estraikh’s words, was assured that he would be received like a legend, with a lavish apartment and income. His lingering anxiety about the Bolsheviks’ unscrupulous rule notwithstanding, he decided to yoke himself to the Soviets.

On March 2, 1926, Bergelson published a letter in the Moscow Yiddish daily Der Emes (The Truth) declaring himself a pro-Soviet writer who had sinned by abandoning the Soviet Union. For all its bombast, this was a cautious confederacy—Bergelson was still uncertain and wanted to buy time. In the letter, he added that his betrayal meant that he had to serve a penitential sentence abroad before receiving the privilege of return. He spent the next seven years casting around for destinations, visiting Denmark and the United States and ultimately dismissing the former as a poor incubator of Jewish culture and the latter as a variation on the capitalism of Berlin.

He returned to the Soviet Union in 1934; the decision would soon come to seem like a tragic miscalculation. By the early 1930s, ideological calcification had established socialist realism as the only acceptable method of Soviet literature. In the purges toward the end of the decade, Yiddishists made natural victims—their devotion to Jewish culture made their loyalty to the Soviet Union suspect.

Initially the troubles did not directly affect Bergelson. He was celebrated, his writing regularly reissued. The price he paid was his integrity. Bergelson’s pro-Soviet work, which tended to explore the nexus of Jewishness and Soviet Communism, never lost the equivocality and pensiveness of his earlier output, but, having had to make room for propaganda, never fully resembled it either. The Revolution discredited the petit bourgeoisie, whom Bergelson skewered with such skill and which constituted his core audience, and he didn’t really know how to depict the smiling worker. But he tried. He regularly revised his output to accord with Stalin’s ever changing dictates, made all the customary denunciations of the West and bourgeois Yiddishists in Poland and the United States, and sang the glories of the proletariat. As Shmuel Niger put it in a 1934 review of Birebidzhaner, a boosterish evaluation of the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Far East, Bergelson, whose previous work was usually an act of hatred,” in this novel, learns to love.”

Bergelson couldn’t love enough. Though World War II postponed the campaign to suppress Soviet Yiddish culture, it was revived soon afterward. In January 1949, Bergelson was arrested on trumped-up charges, as were dozens of other Yiddishists. After a show trial in the summer of 1952, Bergelson was shot, along with 12 others, in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison. Execution day, August 12, was his 68th birthday.