Engraved memories

My father Ilya Schor died 59 years ago today, June 7, 1961, a week after my 11th birthday. Every year in the weeks preceding this anniversary, I experience a rise in anxiety, depression, paranoia even, always ascribing it to contemporary circumstances until the date is upon me. He was 57 years old, had been a heavy smoker from his teens until sometime before I was born, and basically died of cardiovascular failure of all sorts–though I always felt that in a time of better medical care he would not have died, but then my sister Naomi Schor died of vascular issues as well when she was 58, so who knows. His symptoms were misdiagnosed as anxiety but I also have written that because he had a succession of small heart attacks in the weeks after watching the daily broadcasts of the Eichmann trials, my sister and I had independently come to the same conclusion–he died of Eichmann).

This spring a few things happened in the weeks before this anniversary, related to my father’s life and work.

First, I was contacted by Shimon Briman, a journalist and historian from Israel, born in Ukraine, who has in recent years done a lot of work researching the Jewish community of the town of Zloczow, where my father was born and raised, a town which changed nationalities a few times, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Poland, to now the Ukraine, where it is referred to as Zolochiv (having spent my life remembering the Polish spelling with its characteristic surplus of consonants, I am not going to change how I spell it). He had many questions for me but also was able to answer questions I had about the nature of the town: I have always been confused by the semi-rural shtetl my father depicted and pictures of the town in the early twentieth century depicting a typical provincial Western city of that time period, with fine shops and hotels. In fact these two worlds were co-existent, as I have gotten fleeting intimations of before, but what I did not know was that it was a Jewish town, that is to say the bourgeoisie, the administration, all Jewish. He sent me pictures of the synagogue that my father often painted and of the rubble of the empty lot that exists now where it had once stood. I am glad my father did not ever see that empty lot. The Jews of Zloczow were murdered in the town in a succession of pogroms: there were no deportations to concentration camps, just slaughter in place.

Ilya Schor, Staircase to the Womens Balcony of the Synagogue, Zloczow, gouache on board, 1950s

Ilya Schor, Marriage Scene: Blessing of the Bride and Groom , 1958–59, gouache, cut paper, and gold leaf on board. The Jewish Museum, New York, Gift of Mira Schor, 2004-63 (this illumination was made for my sister Naomi Schor, and donated in her honor to the Jewish Museum in NYC)

Empty dirt lot where the synagogue was, Zloczow, now Zolochiv, in the Ukraine.

Empty field, location of the old Jewish cemetery, Zloczow, now Zolochiv; possible resting place of my grandfather Naftali Schorr who died in 1930.

Briman sent me a picture of the grassy field which was the cemetery–the headstones all were destroyed during the Holocaust, but apparently the human remains are still there. So the dust of my grandfather’s bones may lie there still. He has posted a touching tribute to my father with lovely pictures from the collection of the son of one of my father’s friends from his childhood.

At around the same time I was contacted by a young woman art historian at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts who as part of an assignment to research women art students was interested in researching my mother Resia Schor’s career, having discovered her through some school documents in the Academy Archives. Through this connection I was able to obtain some of my father’s Academy documents. Here is one document from 1930 ((unfortunately I don’t read Polish so I don’t know what it says). In 1930, he was 26 years old. (He was renamed Ilya by a Russian friend in Paris in the late 1930s and that became his name when he arrived in the United States)

Next, I received an email asking me to comment on a work by my father. The query came in a neutral tone, without prejudicial wording, but I had a sense of what it was about and the minute I saw the pictures I understood what my task was. I spent the week before my birthday and the approaching anniversary of my father’s death meticulously trying to explain why I felt this work was a forgery–there are fake Ilya Schors (in the area of Judaica). My mother always said that my father always said if an artist is copied that is a real compliment, a testimonial to having a recognizable style! Some recent fake Ilya Schors I have seen are boldly improbable, bearing almost no resemblance and clearly, brazenly brand new, though with a faked signature. But a couple of objects that I’ve been asked to consider have been more disturbing., In these, someone with some skill has gone to quite a lot of trouble to produce a work that might pass–actually I literally mean one person seems to be responsible for some ambitious attempts, because I am now becoming an expert in this forger’s hand as well. I will post no pictures, obviously. In fact posting pictures of my father’s silver work is always a danger. But I have shared online (in a previous birthday post, from 2013) what I consider one of his masterpieces, in part because because I am fairly certain it was destroyed in a synagogue fire decades ago.

Ilya Schor, silver Torah Crown, 1950s, most likely destroyed in a synagogue fire was no longer in existence at time of retrospective of my fathers work at the Jewish Museum in NYC in 1965.

As I went over the pictures comparing them detail by detail to similar works I had complete verification of (and by the way I have learned that an artist’s estate cannot say that something is a fake because you could be sued, you can only say that you can’t verify), at times I wept because while, when I see one of the impostures, I experience a deep sense of injury to something at the core of my being, when I recognize the trace of my father’s hand in an engraved line into silver, I can feel him making it. As a child I watched him work. That was 60 or more years ago, so it amazes me to re-experience how much I learned at that time. It is a fully embodied memory of artistic gestures. When he was a teenager, before he went to art school in Warsaw, he had trained with a goldsmith and engraver, encouraged by his older brother Moses who thought the talented boy should learn a profession so that he could earn a living, a wise and as it turns out providential decision. He was extremely deft, swift, and certain in each mark. In engraving gold, silver, or hard wood, you cannot make a mistake. He also brought to each mark and flourish a particular joy coming from the culture of the pre-Holocaust Hadisim of Eastern Europe into which he was born. It is the character of this joy, suffused with humble piety and a kind of sadness, as expressed in silver and gold and in engravings and paintings, that makes his work unique and notable, and thus worthy of fakery.

That same week someone put up for sale, on eBay of all places, a truly exquisite Kiddush cup by my father, one that had been sold at a Judaica auction at Sotheby’s some time in the past thirty years. The price was ambitious, especially for eBay, so I am concerned about that, but I immediately saw/felt my father’s craft. But even though it has been on eBay so that some forger out there might be able to give it a go, I still am reluctant to share the screen shots I took of details. Still I will share just one, on the chance that my blog is obscure enough that no one with evil designs (literally) will see it.

screen shot of one detail of a silver Kiddush Cup by Ilya Schor, recently for sale on eBay (!!!)

As I have just celebrated my 70th birthday, I am concerned that once I am gone, there will be no one as qualified as I am to comment on the possible authenticity of an Ilya Schor work. I realized as I was comparing details between the real and the …what I think is not real work…that it is imperative that I leave a map of my reasoning, which may direct future art historians or art appraisers through my experience and visual line of thought. This is one more thing I feel that I must do as part of the cultural autobiography/biography of my parents’ life and work–“The Schor Project” as I call the work that I have not done except in small fragments such as this post as I struggle to achieve a place for my own work and to deal with the everyday. Each immersion in a detail of the past, each art work, letter, document, is an emotional journey that is difficult to recover from enough to meet the challenges of the present.

Mira and Ilya Schor, June 1950. A couple of months before I was born my parents moved into Apt.11B in the same building I currently live in; the images on the wall are my father’s design for the room I shared with my sister, I’m not sure if he block printed directly to the wall himself or made, or had made, wallpaper based from some kind of block or screen.

My father and me, at the Great Neck home of David and Norma Levitt, close friends and collectors, taken in 1960 or early 1961. I can tell you that it was hard to become a teenage girl with that “punim” but without that father (“punim” is the Yiddish word for face and expression)

It is part of the myth of American exceptionalism that there is, that there must be closure, that there is a schedule for grief, that things can be put into the past and left there. Our current political moment is stark evidence that there is no such thing as closure, historically, or personally.

“upright kneeling, silent screaming, motionless dance”

I’ve been saving Holocaust-related obituaries for years, of resistance heroes and righteous Christians, and stories of miraculous survival. As that generation is coming to its end, there are fewer and fewer of such obits. Here, from the December 30, 2019 copy of The New York Times, is the obituary of George Sakheim, who, as a 22 year old American soldier, worked as a translator at the Nuremberg trials; a refugee from Nazi Germany, he found himself translating the testimony of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. Simultaneously instances of anti-Semitism along with other discrimination and xenophobia are increasing around the world. Thus recent white supremacist chants of “Jews will not replace us” is a chilling echo of Höss’s testimony on the “final solution:” ”If we do not exterminate the Jewish race completely now, then the Jewish race will annihilate the German people.”

The December 29 machete attack on a group of Hasidic Jews in upstate New York celebrating the last night of Chanukah is deeply upsetting, as are all of the recent hate crimes committed during the hateful influence of the trump regime (today the information about the suspect in the Chanukah is complex: first version, he is a diagnosed schizophrenic and thus it was not a hate crime; second updated version, in the past month the suspect had done numerous online searches of an anti-Semitic nature–this consideration of the responsibility or political volition on the part of a mentally ill person and the role of the political discourse of that is that person’s context, makes me think of an Op Ed piece I read a while back in the Times, indicating that while in America the voices that schizophrenics report hearing tend to be violent in nature, in other countries the voices may tell the person “to do domestic chores.”

I looked to my father Ilya Schor‘s work for his many representations of the Hasidic community of pre-War Eastern Europe and chose a small painting on a gold leaf background, Hasid with a Streimel, a symbolized portrait of his own father, Naftali Schorr, a Hasidic folk artist from Zloczow—the seriousness and interiority of the face always struck me and influenced my being in the world even though my parents brought me up in a resolutely secular manner with no religious training.

Another work by my father, a wood engraving of Musicians in the Shtel reminds me of a story from Martin Buber‘s Tales of the Hasidim-Later Masters which along with my father’s work has informed my understanding of Judaism.

“Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vorki was asked what constitutes a true Jew. He said: ‘Three things are fitting for us: upright kneeling, silent screaming, motionless dance.'”

Birthday Postcard, Naomi Schor

I’m going to Paris next week for the first time in 26 years. Despite my French education at the Lyçée Français de New York, I have spent relatively little time in Paris, in France, and have complex feelings about speaking French–having been bilingual, I allowed the language to rust. Yet my emotions about Paris run deep. Last week, looking at a map of the Arrondissement I will be staying in, reading names of streets and boulevards, I began to sob and, at great expense, bought myself one extra day.

October 10 is my sister Naomi Schor’s birthday. She would be 76 years old. She died 18 years ago December 2, 2001. It is such a long time ago. I sat down in the subway the other day and realized the lady sitting down next to me was an old friend of my sister’s. She was off to work, a professor, like my sister, but she was still teaching. I am meeting another friend of my sister’s in Paris and we plan to toast our long friendships and the role Paris played in our lives, at La Coupole.

I bring this up because my sister loved Paris and knew it well, spending in the aggregate several years of her life there. Before that my parents, young Polish artists, had lived in Paris, fleeing for their lives in June 1941. They would have probably settled there permanently had it not been for the war.

I will let my sister speak:

from her 1992 essay, “Cartes Postales,” in Critical Inquiry, Winter 1992: she noted that collectors of postcards are advised to focus on one category, often the city or even the street where they live:

“from the outset [as a collector turn of the century postcards] I was drawn to postcards of a place where I neither live nor work, France, and very quickly within France, Paris. This choice suggests the inadequacy of a model based strictly on an unexamined notion of one’s place of birth, work, or daily life as grounding one’s identity, what Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty call the “unproblematic geographic location of home.” This model cannot account for the possibility of a dis-location constituting the foundation of one’s being, or at any rate one’s collecting, but as we have seen for the collector being and collecting are intimately related. In Martin and Mohanty’s text the “illusion of home,” or of at-homeness is shattered by the realization that “these buildings and streets witnessed and obscured particular race, class, and gender struggles.” This is the postmodern, post-colonialist condition: what is at first experienced as a secure, identity-giving and sheltering space is revealed to be a place of bloody struggle and exclusion. Like the unheimlich, in whose semantic field it participates, home is a word whose positive connotations are undermined by an antithetical and negative meaning.
For me the home that is not home is Paris: but what is hidden there is a form of violence and racial struggle not generally understood today when the trinity of race, class, and gender is invoked. I am speaking of anti-Semitism, theirs not mine. My parents, Polish Jews, left Poland in the late thirties with the intention of settling in Paris. In June 1941, they along with thousands of others fleeing Hitler’s impending arrival left Paris and headed South. They were among the lucky ones; unlike Benjamin and the countless others who did not make it, they eventually crossed the border between France and Spain and settled in New York. French was my first language and the language in which I was educated. In 1958 I visited Europe and Paris for the first time. Since then, as a professional student of the French language and culture I have been back often. Perhaps someday, I fantasize, I shall retire to Paris. For now I have chosen to write on it, in order to come to terms with a longing, a fascination, an ambivalence, unfinished business.

These are pictures taken on October 8, 1965 as my sister departed New York City for Paris on a Fulbright Scholarship. She had first visited Paris in 1958 when my parents took us back on what effectively was a test of their new identities as Americans, as New Yorkers. Having fled the city they loved, returning as successful naturalized citizens with two American children, might they be tempted to return to live in Paris? The trip clarified that their lives were now in America. My sister returned to France August 1961, shortly after my father’s death, having won a poetry contest whose first prize was a trip to France where she was treated like a visiting celebrity on a countrywide tour. Now she was returning for real, as a “Fulbrighter!” I am always struck by these pictures, captured by the ship photographer, first of her walking alone towards the boat, exemplifying the difference between us then and later, her dignity and sober elegance and her love of travel and adventure, second as what for me was always the epitome of elegance, an Audrey Hepburn moment, sunglasses, about to go up the gang plank, one patent leather clad foot tipped up ever so delicately as she balanced her bag on her knee.

I don’t think she could have taken the blow of the fire at Notre Dame

correction

Only when I received tonight’s blog post in my email did I realize I had propelled us all into the future, to the nineteenth anniversary of September 11. The title and link has been changed, sorry for the confusion.

September 11 eighteen years later

I witnessed parts of what happened on September 11 with my own ears and eyes –in that order: ears>the roar of the first plane over Western Tribeca and the crash into the North Tower, then eyes>the explosion of the South Tower into a huge mushrooming cloud of flame created as I discovered later by the second plane, which, observing from the North, I did not see. At a museum with a few of my friends about a year later, seeing a film of that moment of the black plane coming out of nowhere to plow into the tower we gasped, again, as shocked, more shocked. A murder had been committed, of thousands of people, of two buildings.

Over the years new buildings have been built, trees grow, a memorial is built, the nation goes on. Buildings representing capitalism were pulverized, but the city is plagued by a proliferation of new towers celebrating oligarchy.The planes stabbed at the heart of a city yet the city appeared to heal, but the country was mortally wounded. The attack was successful. The idea of this country, the illusion of exceptionalism was murdered, with the Trump regime evidence of the pustulent unhealed wound, the orange creature that burst into corrupt being in the explosion.

The war in Iraq in particular was a sin, a giant blundering into the unleashing of a cascade of local sectarian hatreds going back centuries which we had no understanding of, couldn’t even keep straight. We have yet to atone and we no longer pay attention.

Because September 11 and the days we lived through in its immediate aftermath were so intense, I have been thinking also of how much of has happened just to my group of friends since that day–not just the normal passage of time and ageing, and the loss of aged parents, but also shocking untimely losses and devastating illnesses.

The anniversary perhaps inevitably pushes one into the gloomily elegiac, it is so easy to fall into that tone. And it is of course not all gloom and doom on any one day, friendships have endured and new ones thrive, and there come days at this time of year which are exceptionally beautiful in the clarity and beauty of the light and the temperateness of the air. Then one emails a friend and says, it’s one of those September 11 blue skies and air.

The past week the Towers of Light have been turned on and off unpredictably. Last Thursday evening I saw this view from the Upper East Side, one beam piercing a foggy sky, the other beam stuck lower in the firmament. By the time I got home only a half hour later, the sky was clear and the lights gone, the previous view a mirage.

Here is the link to the texts and photo essays about September 11 and its aftermath that I’ve written and published on A Year of Positive Thinking over the years #9/11