Chasing Portraits by Elizabeth Rynecki

Author:Elizabeth Rynecki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-20T17:18:34+00:00

TWELVE

Toronto, Canada

Back in spring 2008, I received a voice mail message from a man with a Polish accent and a Canadian telephone number. His name was Moshe Wertheim, he’d read Grandpa George’s memoir, Surviving Hitler in Poland: One Jew’s Story, which we’d published a few years earlier, and he wanted to talk with me about a passage in the book. Intrigued, I picked up the phone and dialed his number.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Hi,” I said. “This is Elizabeth Rynecki. I’m returning your call.”

He said nothing. It was as if he had recently left a lot of voice mail messages and couldn’t quite remember who I was or why he’d called. So I continued. “You said you read my grandfather’s memoir and you had something to tell me.”

“Oh, yes! Thank you for calling me back,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize your name. How do you say it?” he asked.

“Rye-neck-ee,” I said.

“But you know it’s Rih-net-ski, right?” he said.

“Yes, that’s the Polish pronunciation,” I said. “My family Americanized it in the fifties.”

“You know it probably comes from the Polish word rynek, which refers to a marketplace,” he said.

“Yes, you’re right,” I replied, and tried to be polite. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this explanation of my last name. I wondered where this all was going.

“That’s not what I called to talk to you about,” he said and cleared his throat. “I want to talk to you about your grandfather’s memoir, the one listed on your website.”

“Surviving Hitler in Poland?” I asked. It was the memoir Dad had found in the trunk of Grandpa George’s car in 1992. We’d done some slight editing for spelling and the like and self-published it in 2005.

“Yes,” he said. “I bought it from Amazon. It’s interesting.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“There’s a passage in the book that caught my attention. It’s about one of your great-grandfather’s paintings. The description of the pogrom. I think I may have it.”

“You have what?”

“Your Grandpa George describes a painting in the book—a Russian pogrom. I think it’s hanging in my living room.”

I looked around wildly, then lunged for a copy of the book I saw on the side of my desk, and frantically flipped through its pages trying to find the description. There it was, on the bottom of page 61.

“This one?” I asked, interrupting Mr. Wertheim, who was still talking about the painting hanging in his living room: “‘When the Polish came to power he painted a painting, oil on canvas, which became a controversial one in Warsaw. He created a Russian pogrom, an attack of the Cossacks on a synagogue in which raping of women was shown, dead men wrapped in the holy scrolls, a very strong political painting against the White Russians. Of course the story of Russian pogroms was well-known, but had never been shown in a painting of such dramatic dimensions.’”

“Right. That’s the one,” he said. “I think I have it.”

“But how?” I asked somewhat incredulously.

“After the war,” he said, “my parents bought it.”

“Bought it?”

“My parents, Anatol and Anna, were Polish Jews,” he said.

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