The Object of Jewish Literature by Barbara E. Mann;

Author:Barbara E. Mann; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-11-16T21:00:00+00:00

Nota Koslowsky, local landmanschaftn, in Tshenstokhover yidn (1947). Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

In addition to Felshtin, Koslowsky, a painter and prolific illustrator of children’s literature, produced similar kinds of drawings and elements of visual design for at least two other memorial books: Czenstochover Yidn (New York, 1947) and Braynsk (New York, 1948).47 The illustrations for Czenstochover Yidn—published in an oversized format (twenty-nine centimeters), weighing nearly five pounds, Yiddish text in double columns—are downright whimsical, featuring small stick figures and fanciful flourishes as page headers. While the gap between children’s literature and memorial books may seem vast, both genres trade on memory and nostalgia.48

Indeed, given their visual resonance with other forms, the images of Khurban Proskurov and Felshtin—with their resemblance to the art nouveau style associated with Zionism and with children’s literature, respectively—overflow the boundaries of the book, reminding viewers of other settings in which that particular style appears. The shared visual language potentially stitches together distinctly different literary or textual traditions, suggesting the emergence of specific visual vocabularies in twentieth-century Jewish cultures.49 The yizker book images share some iconic features with other postwar visual discourse about the Shoah, especially art created by survivors; however, they form a distinct subgroup of this work, given their inclusion in the yizker book, with its particular generic conventions.

Some memorial book images even more overtly unsettle or resist the surrounding narrative; these images must be encountered on their own terms. Visual images are immediately and even involuntarily absorbed; one can always look away, but once you have seen an image, the initial emotional response—be it empathy, shock, fear, or disgust—lingers.50 With this in mind, we can appreciate the power of two different memorial book images that remove the traditional prayer shawl from its usual context. During the war, liturgical objects such as prayer shawls and sacred texts seem to have been special targets of looting.51 A short narrative from one of the earliest memorial books, Es shtarbt a shtetl: Megiles Skalat (Munich, March 1948), describes the varying uses to which these sacred materials were put: “There was a new style of clothing in the villages around Skalat: the black-striped women’s skirts sewn from stolen talaysim [prayer shawls]. The peasant market, however, suffered a shortage in parchment torn from the Scrolls of the Law, which shoemakers had long since learned to convert into lining and padding for boots and shoes.”52 A few pages before the text, the memorial book features a photo of a girl with her back to the camera, dressed in a shirt or dress made from a prayer shawl, captioned A kleyd fun a tallis (clothing from a prayer shawl). The placement of the prayer shawl on the girl’s body is both offensive and sensational, and the girl glances surreptitiously over her shoulder, as if to acknowledge her potential complicity in the image’s scandalous quality, made all the more palpable by its inclusion in the memorial book.

Another image of a prayer shawl was included in two different memorial books:

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