The Search for Belonging

One of the more curious Jewish customs is that of placing small stones on the graves of our loved ones. I’ve always liked this particular practice; not only does it produce a striking image, it’s both ecologically elegant as well as budget-friendly. But after a recent trip out to Mount Carmel cemetery in Queens, I came home with a slightly different perspective.

I was at the cemetery as part of a group taking part in the new-old ritual of feldmestn (cemetery and grave measuring), as described in my last column. And I’d been thinking about something that co-leader of the ritual Annie Cohen had said to me in our conversation, a few days before we came back together at Mount Carmel. In 2019, after a summer spent, in part, seeing memorials to Holocaust victims in Warsaw and other Eastern European locales, Cohen had started to feel, in her words, “really heavy.” These monuments are often stone, sometimes even great hunks of granite or marble. And on top of them, we place our own pieces of stone as witnesses. Stone upon stone upon stone. As Cohen said to me, we are “weighing them down and their trauma has to stand here for us … I want them to be free, I want to let them go somehow.” In designing her own take on feldmestn, Cohen wanted to bring movement and lightness to that weight. When we measure graves with thread, and turn that thread into candle wicks, those candles become a flickering link between our world and theirs.

Seeing the many graves with stones atop them, I started to think of those stones as a kind of paperweight, placed there to keep the memory of our loved ones from slipping away with the breeze. But if you can embrace the ghostly implications of the feldmestn ritual, you begin to see that we don’t need to necessarily hold down our beloved departed. They are with us, in the cemetery, or anywhere, waiting for us to call on them. And they can speak for us in places where we are not yet able to go. Between granite and thread, we can be comforted in the knowledge that our relationship with the dead is a dynamic one.

Even in places that demand the presence of these larger-than-life monuments, one can also sense the need for movement. Yonia Fain (1913-2013), the Yiddish poet, painter, and former president of the Congress for Jewish Culture, beautifully captured this paradox in his poem “In varshe” (In Warsaw), in which a now-elderly man returns to Warsaw to seek out traces of his earlier life. If you’ve been to modern day Warsaw, finding traces of its Jewish past is a difficult task. Much of the city was destroyed during the war, and the Jewish ghetto was razed to the ground by the Germans after the final, brutal battle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

But in 1939, Fain was a young artist who had recently earned an MFA at the University of Vilnius and was then living in the cosmopolitan capital of Warsaw. He and his wife fled the city when the Nazis invaded, eventually, miraculously, finding refuge in the city of Shanghai, where they spent the rest of the war in relative safety.

Ikh bin in varshe
Farn yidishn monument geshtanen
Di geto gezukht
Un bloyz skulpturn gefunen …

I am in Warsaw
Standing before its Jewish monuments
Searching for the ghetto
But finding only sculptures …

(translation mine)

The narrator of the poem describes the “blind bird of sorrow” burying its head in the “heavy brass folds” of the sculpture. The wind carries on it the “heavy” sound of bells, a terrifying thing to the child inside the bent old man.

The sculptures themselves look out with surprise. Do they come from the “European tradition of monuments”? Or from the traditional European gehenom (hell). And finally, the narrator flees, as if from an attack, or, perhaps, he flees like one terrified

Tsu vern a shteyn tsvishn shteyner

To become a stone between stones

Fain masterfully captures the contradiction of memorial via monument. A monument cannot grow nor can it flee or fight back. It recalls the dead because it is dead.

As an artist trained in the high European culture of the interwar period, and a refugee from that very same high culture, Fain was also clearly grappling with his own place within it, trapped between the menacing sound of bells carried on the air, and the deathly heaviness of commemoration culture.

Even for Jewish artists who were not wartime refugees from Europe, the question of their “belonging” seems to always be a live one. Most of us have probably had the experience of going to a modern art museum and wrinkling our brows at the absurdity of a placard describing an artist like Mark Rothko, for example, as “Latvian-American.” The modern state of Latvia did not exist at the time Rothko was born, nor did the Russian- and Yiddish-speaking Rothko speak Latvian, and so on. But to explain the heavy complexity of modern European history on a museum placard is perhaps too daunting an ask.

Maybe the answer to this particular conundrum is not bigger exhibit placards, but more art. At least, that’s the answer one can find in the intriguing and welcome new show curated by artist-scholar-high-culture trickster Yevgeniy Fiks, “Modern-ish: Yonia Fain and the Art History of Yiddishland.”

Alongside an excellent selection of Fain’s paintings, the exhibit features Fiks’ own invented routes of modernism. Atop a vintage map of the world, arrows crisscross the globe, connecting “monparnassism” and “post-vilnakeit”; “malakhovkeit” and “yehupetism.” It’s seriously funny in exactly the way you’d imagine from the artist who previously published “Soviet Moscow’s Yiddish-Gay Dictionary” (2016), a trilingual lexicon for an imagined past.

In a recent conversation with the co-curators of “Modern-ish,” they told me that the exhibit “proposes an alternative, outsider 20th century modern art history that accounts for the immigrant, uprooted, displaced, and resettled Jewish artists, originally from Eastern Europe and with strong connections to the Yiddish language and culture.” Excluded from the art history narratives of the countries from which these artists came, the show, “proposes a ‘Yiddish art history’ that transcends/upends the borders of nation-states. ‘Modern-ish’ is a critical intervention into the global art history and into the national art historical narratives of countries of Eastern Europe.”

It is the kind of framing that suits an artist like Fain particularly well. Fain survived the war by obtaining one of the famed “Sugihara” visas to Japan. From there, he went to Shanghai, where he remained until the end of the war. Afterward, he spent a number of years in Mexico, where he continued his artistic work, including a 600-square-foot mural painted for the Pantheon Dolores in Mexico City. In Mexico, Fain was a colleague of Diego Rivera, who wrote and lectured about his work.

From Mexico, Fain moved to New York City in 1953, where he continued to make art and teach painting. Fain was closely involved with the Congress for Jewish Culture, a Yiddish-language organization founded in 1948. The congress supported not just Yiddish literature, but fine arts, too. Fain, however, was never just a painter or just a poet. When his sight began to deteriorate in the last 10 years of his life, he composed poems in his head for dictation. The drawings he made after he lost his vision are included in his final volume of poetry, Der finfter zman (The Fifth Season). When I asked the current executive director of the congress, Shane Baker, about Fain, he quoted Rozka Alexander, a previous leader of the congress, on Fain: “When the pen failed him, he picked up the brush; and when the brush failed him, he picked up the pen.”

In a world weighed down by monuments of brass and marble, Yonia Fain’s dedication to art, and to Yiddish, offers its own unique kind of commemoration.

FAIN: “Modern-ish: Yonia Fain and the Art History of Yiddishland” will celebrate its opening on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023, 7:30-9 p.m. The show will be up until Dec. 9, Tuesday-Friday, 12-6 p.m. James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave....Also: A related exhibition called Yonia Fain: Refugee Modernism will open on October 18 at the art gallery of Mercer County Community College. See their website for more information. 

MORE SOUL CANDLES: In my last column, I wrote about the women recovering and reinventing the old Ashkenazi practice of measuring graves to make candles, called feldmestn in Yiddish. If you’d like to know more about that, and other witchy aspects of Ashkenazi folk magic and ritual, I will be teaching a brand new four-week course for the Yiddish Book Center called “Between Heaven and Earth: Yiddish Women’s Folklore, Rituals, & Magic.” The course will take place over four Wednesdays, Oct. 11, 18, 25, and Nov. 1, 2023, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Click here for more information and to register.

ALSO: Coming up in London, England, is a double bill featuring two of my favorite Yiddish projects that draw on texts from the archives: Yiddish Glory and the Yale Fortunoff Songs From Testimonies. Sponsored by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. Sept. 6, tickets here .... The pre-High Holidays time crunch is upon us, which means multiple events on the same day, or, as we might say in Yiddish, tsvey khasenes, nor eyn tukhes (two weddings and only one tush for dancing). On Sept. 10 at noon, Yiddish Artists and Friends Actors Club (YAFAC) will once again meet at Mount Hebron Cemetery, at Block 67, the Yiddish Theatrical Alliance. A musical program and cantorial service will honor the memories of the artists of the Yiddish theater … Also on Sept. 10, a morning walking tour through the Longwood section of the South Bronx, sponsored by Fordham University Center for Jewish Studies. The walking tour has very limited space, so sign up now. After the walking tour, the Fordham campus in the Bronx will host a reception for the opening of a new exhibit called The Light of the Revival: Stained Glass Design for Restituted Synagogues of Ukraine by Eugeny Kotlyar. That event is both in-person at the Walsh Family Library and will be streamed for virtual viewers. Register here … On Sept. 27, YIVO will present its annual Nusakh Vilne Memorial, commemorating the Jewish community of Vilne through poetry and music. This year’s program is called Secrets of the Great Synagogue of Vilna, with an in-person film screening of a new documentary and concert. 6:30 p.m. at YIVO. Register here … Submissions deadline for the Bubbe Awards for new Jewish music has been extended until Sept. 14. Get your brilliant compositions in today! ... Do you need Yiddish holiday greeting cards and want to support Ukraine at the same time? Of course you do. Helena over at Yiddish Krom (Yiddish Shop) is offering not just beautiful holiday cards, but a range of thoughtfully designed items made in Ukraine. She is also a graduate of the 2023 YIVO summer program, so make sure to check out her shop and support the next generation of Yiddish kultur-tuers.