UTW 33

Everyone’s Zayde – Portrait of Dodye Feig

Art: 1997
Media: Ink on paper
Framed: 36 inches H x 30 W

Zadie, which is also spelled in transliteration into English as zayde, is the Yiddish word for grandfather, grandpa, granddad.

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Dodye Feig was the beloved maternal grandfather of Elie Wiesel. In the first volume of Wiesel’s autobiography, “All Rivers Run to the Sea,” Wiesel writes of his childhood recollections of Feig, although he doesn’t write of what happened to Feig (during the Holocaust, i.e. how Feig was murdered).

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I first saw the photo while reading the book, which I had borrowed from the public library.

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When the drawing was in-progress, it was 1996 or ’97, I invited Yosaif August, who I had chatted with at a Congregation Eitz Or synagogue service, to visit my studio. The studio was in Seattle’s Pioneer Square district; this was before the 2001 Nisqually quake led the City of Seattle engineering department to shutter the building, which was at 540 First Ave So.

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At the time of Yosaif August’s visit, the portrait was done but the wings weren’t yet drawn. Backboarded and acetated for protection, it was mounted on a wall in my art studio. On viewing it, he exclaimed “It’s everyone’s zayde!”

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Later, I took the drawing to the ornithology dept at the Burke Museum, where I asked an ornithology staffer if they had any wings from the region around Hungary – Rumania where Wiesel and his family hailed from, but they didn’t. I then asked if they had any wings from the region around Israel – Palestine - Jordan, so I could give Feig a metaphoric return to Zion. That would symbolically  fulfilling the famous saying of Jewish people of countless generations: “Next year in Jerusalem!” and the prayer “If I forget thee O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither!”

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They didn’t have any birds’ wings from that area either, so then I asked if they had any wings of birds which migrate over the region. They had wings from a bird called a bee-eater. It was from Kazakhstan, which migrates to Africa. For compositional reasons of my own desire I elongated the wing on viewer’s right (on the left shoulder of the portrait of Feig).

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Bibliography

The Columbia Missourian, reproduction of the drawing accompanying front page article: “Lest We Forget,” by Kathryn Larson, Missourian Staff Writer, May 1, 1997.
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The Ashen Rainbow – Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust, by Ori Z. Soltes, Eshel Books, Laurel, MD., 2007. Reproduction of the drawing.