“They Called Me Mayer July”

In Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter in Krakow, there is a very renowned & well put together little museum called the Galicia Jewish Museum which contains lots of interesting documentation including an extensive collection of photographs chronicling the past of the Jewish community in Krakow and throughout the Galicia region (which used to include parts of what is now Ukraine). While I was there, there was also an exhibition showcasing the work of Mayer Kirshenblatt, a Canadian citizen who was born in Opatow, a small Polish town once home to a thriving Jewish community, like many Polish towns were, but moved to Canada with his family for economic reasons, shortly before the Holocaust began. Mayer's work, produced many decades later, portrays his own experiences of growing up in Opatow, as he recalls them.

The collection of paintings constitutes a different type of commemoration than memorials to the dead, the immortalised places of suffering which are captured in the photographs of the museum or the physical remains of places like Auschwitz, or the restored Jewish graveyards. Its subject is life rather than death, and arguably that moment of life that is most vivid and colourful, childhood – perhaps the time when we are most impressionable, most attentive and curious about our surroundings, most “alive”.

This seems to be true for Mayer, as not only has he conserved an astonishingly detailed and clear picture in his mind of his childhood moments, his depictions seem to come directly from the child he used to be, as even his style of painting is reminiscent of the way a child paints. Schematical, simple, and not pre-occupied with resembling too closely the reality. The style is one which is completely untainted by any grief related to the tragedy of events which were to follow, since Mayer and his family left Opatow before the holocaust. As a result, his style is infused with a kind of childish innocence, depicting stories that are also full of the small joys of everyday life, in spite of elements of adversity.

I found this exhibition to be a refreshing and rejuvenating take on the Jewish life that used to inhabit Kazimierz. Rather than mourning what has been lost, it celebrates what once was. It presents an impossibly idyllic view of a place, in such a way that Mayer’s clear love for his old home shines through the portraits, nostalgic but not romanticised yearning for this place and a time that he left behind, and could never return to.