From Shtetl to Pogrom

Every year in elementary school, I would be asked to write a composition on why my grandparents came to America. Every year, my grandfather would say the same thing: There was no food. And the pogroms. A man of few words, he didn’t elaborate. The word itself, pogrom, seemed enough. It wasn’t until I saw Issachar Ber Ryback’s “Pogrom Series” that the word “pogrom” took on actual flesh and blood meaning for me.
I was introduced to Ryback’s work by Benoit Sapiro, the owner of The Minotaure Gallery in Paris. Sapiro, who grew up in Israel, is a passionate crusader for overlooked or forgotten Russian and Central European artists from the first half of the 20th century.
On a visit to his gallery, Sapiro asked if I’d seen the Ryback exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Paris. I’d never heard of Ryback. Sapiro handed me the exhibit’s catalog.
“You’ll see Ryback’s work and you won’t forget it,” he said.
I leafed through the catalog, coming to a section entitled “Pogrom Series.” I turned the page and confronted one image, another, then a next. I couldn’t look at the images, yet I couldn’t look away, either.
Suddenly, my grandfather’s reticence and the “religious persecution” of my childhood compositions became viscerally alive for me. In Ryback’s paintings, I saw what the meaning of pogrom was—slaughter.
Born in 1897, Issachar Ber Ryback was raised in Elisavetgrad, Ukraine (now Kropyvnytskye). In 1912, he was accepted into the Kiev Art School. Under the teaching of Alexandra Exter, he was introduced to modernism and the European and Russian avant-garde. Ryback and a group of young Jewish artists including El Lissitsky and Boris Aronson embraced the new forms. Using the language of modernism to express Jewish motifs and themes, they sought to create a Jewish national art that would synthesize the European avant-garde and the Jewish artistic folk traditions. With Yiddish as its national language and Jewish autonomy over national institutions, a “new Jew,” modern and universal, would be created.

In 1916, Ryback and El Lissitsky traveled to Ukraine and Belarus to preserve traditional Jewish art forms and images of everyday Jewish life in the shtetls. In the stylized images of tombstone engravings and decorative motifs of old synagogues, they discovered a traditional Jewish visual culture. But it was in the shtetls, under the constant threat of pogroms, that they saw the core of Jewish identity

From this visit, Ryback produced his series “Shtetl. My Destroyed Home. A Recollection.” These are not Chagall’s light-infused shtetls of bold colors or lovers and fiddlers floating over rooftops. A fusion of cubism and expressionism, Ryback’s shtetl is a place of asymmetrical planes and muted, somber colors. In one work, a synagogue looms in the foreground, the tortured angles of its towering roof dominating the surrounding area. Scenes of everyday shtetl life are fractured into cubist form. An exhaustion seems to weigh down the shtetl’s inhabitants, their exaggerated features and stooped shoulders highlighting lives of hardship and deprivation. Stolid, work-worn figures of tailors, knife sharpeners, eyes often blank, stare past each other.

Yet, despite this isolation, churches and synagogues appear together in various paintings, symbolizing Jews and Christians living alongside each other. Although they’re different religions and cultures, they’re still neighbors, sharing the same grinding struggle to survive.
Between 1918 and 1920, a wave of pogroms occurred across Ukraine. Estimates are that as many as 250,000 Jews were murdered. In 1919, Ryback’s father, Moses, was murdered in a pogrom in Elisavetgrad that left 350 dead. Ryback fled to Kiev, then Moscow, then to Berlin.

It was in Moscow that Ryback began his “Pogrom Series,” a series of 13 ink and gouache paintings. Although they are all dated 1919, it is believed he worked on them through 1921. Only one depicts an event that actually happened: bandits seizing the steamship Tenishev, brutally murdering 73 Jewish passengers. “On the Eve of the Pogrom,” the only titled painting, is a somber work picturing shtetl elders walking to a synagogue in anxious anticipation of a pogrom. Together, all the works are a relentless narrative of the unbridled violence that was unleashed on the Jewish inhabitants of the shtetls.

Ryback was not the first artist to depict pogroms. Vita Susek, in her article “Laocoon: or the Limits of pogroms representation in visual arts,” traces visual depictions of pogroms in European periodicals of 19th- and early-20th-century paintings. In these earlier works, we see the aftermath of violence—victims fleeing, mourners hunched over bodies—never the violence itself. Ryback was the first artist not only to show perpetrators in the act of brutality, but also the victims’ agony.

Although there are still cubist elements, the “Pogrom Series” paintings are more expressionist, primitive even, evoking the simpler forms of Jewish folk art. The expressionist language amplifies the grotesque violence of the perpetrators, like a fever dream. Darker than the brooding tones of the “Shtetl Series,” the color palette here is broken primarily by the bright orange, yellow-licked flames devouring synagogues and homes and the red, blood-soaked bodies of the victims.

Like a grenade thrown into the viewer’s visual field, the paintings have an explosive force that shoots out, like shrapnel, from the central image to corresponding images of violence surrounding it. Only “On the Eve of the Pogrom” and the Tenishev painting contain a single central narrative image. The victims in the foreground of the other 11 paintings are much larger than the bordering images of terror that intensify the central scene.

A rabbi stands in front of the ark, his arms outspread, fighting to protect the Torah, as a Cossack on horseback tramples the synagogue stairs. Beneath the rabbi’s outstretched arms, his tallit unfurls like a triumphal banner. Behind him, rising flames engulf a woman’s screams, while a group of Cossacks guzzle alcohol. Lower in the canvas, the rabbi, stripped of his tallit, lies dead. The Torah scroll has been thrown to the ground and lies unspooled, abandoned.

In another image, the naked bodies of a husband and wife are bound together in a freshly dug grave, their bodies mere outlines, as if their physicality is reduced to the simplest of forms after the onslaught of such violence. The husband’s face is turned away from his wife’s, suggesting even in death, he’s unable to acknowledge the mutual horror they’ve both endured. The wife’s expression is frozen in grief, her unseeing eyes stare out into a terrified void, as her child clings to her legs. A Russian Orthodox priest stands above the grave. Cloaked in a ceremonial robe, the priest holds a stark, white cross, exhorting the screaming pogromists around him to finish the digging. In the background, the solitary towers of a Russian Orthodox church rise above the murderous crowd. The synagogue, central to many of the “Shtetl Series” images, is nowhere to be seen. The earlier time of peaceful coexistence is over.

A young woman lies, sprawled in her bed, her dress pulled down from her body, her red hair spread out beneath her head, its color echoing the flames blazing throughout the village in a smaller scene below. The young woman’s stricken face looks down at her naked baby suckling at her bare breast, while a Cossack stands beside the bed holding the pointed blade of a scimitar. Below the woman’s skirts, pulled up and twisted around her naked legs, we see a stream of blood flow onto the mattress. A goat, its tongue red as the blood, licks the woman’s arm, the animal as indifferent as the Cossack women watching the rape in the doorway of the young woman’s house.

In painting after painting—a fetus ripped from its mother’s womb, dismembered bodies, a rabbi fleeing up the stairs of a synagogue, raised arms, pleading for mercy—there is no sacred space or sanctuary from the terror. Nor is there nobility in the paintings’ endless suffering. The only nobility lies in Ryback’s fearlessness in showing us a nightmare, so deeply rooted in Jewish history and its psyche, that it transcends the specifics of time and space.

In the winter of 1923, Ryback exhibited the series of 13 watercolors at his first solo show in Berlin. After seeing the exhibit, Rachel Wischnitzer, an art historian, published “On the Eve of the Pogrom,” but nothing more. “There were more powerful works,” she is quoted as saying, but “we did not have the courage to reproduce them.”

Throughout his work, Ryback confronted the darkness that permeates Jewish existence. But his creativity extended beyond that darkness. In addition to his paintings, he was an illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor and stage designer.

Exhibited in Kiev, Moscow, Berlin, and Paris, Ryback was often compared to the already established Chagall, and viewed by many as the next, great Jewish artist. Had he lived longer, he might have been. In 1935, three days after his first retrospective exhibit in Paris, he died suddenly of tuberculosis. He was 38.

In the chaos and aftermath of World War II, Ryback’s work fell into oblivion. It wasn’t until 1963 that his widow, Sonia Ryback, established a permanent home for his art in Israel. While the majority of his works are in the Museum Ryback in Bat Yam, most of the “Pogrom Series” is located in the Mishkan Museum of Art in Ein Harod. Viewing the “Pogrom Series” now is a chilling harbinger not only of the Nazi genocide, but of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, as well. Created before the widespread documentary testimony of photography or video postings, the paintings have a verisimilitude of their own. Stylized as the images are, there is an explicitness to the violence depicted that echoes specific atrocities of the Oct. 7 attacks and showcase a fateful timelessness to human barbarousness and Jewish suffering. In forcing us to look, to see, Ryback takes on a mantle of tragic honor.