“THE IMAGINATION OF REMEMBRANCE: THE PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS OF POLISH - JEWISH HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR TOBY KNOBEL FLUEK – A SLIDE PRESENTATION”
This paper was completed January 2002.
Quotes are by Segan unless noted otherwise; footnotes & an appendix follow the text.
A. BACKGROUND TO THE AUTHOR: UPBRINGING, EDUCATION, ART
Akiva Kenneth Segan (nee Kenneth Ralph Segan) was born in New York 5ity, 1950, attending N.Y.C. public schools. While religious observance was minimal in a home with anti-Vietnam war and pro-civil rights sympathies (during the years of race-hate inspired murders and demonstrations in the American South) he attended a Reform Temple (synagogue) as a youngster and visited regularly as a child and teen with his three living east European-raised immigrant grandparents, an important influence later in life.
An artist professionally, Segan received a B.A. in art, Southern Illinois U. ’77; M.F.A., U. of Missouri ’80, printmaking & drawing. He attended English-language summer studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow ’84; Jagiellonian U, Krakow ’85; and was International Artist-in-Residence, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland ’87.
“My studies and travels in Poland led to an almost immediate artistic response to confronting the trauma that is the vast Jewish graveyard that is Poland.”
B. SEGAN’S HOLOCAUST ART
In 1991 Segan began creating the massive “Under the Wings of G-D” art series on the Shoah, described as a “restoration of dignity to the memory of those brutally murdered by the Nazi’s, Fascists, their collaborators and the silence of the world.” “Under the Wings…” artworks are drawn from photos of murdered victims and from actual birds’ wings, offering audiences a “metaphoric and poetic” imagery that can be readily understood in a non-threatening format.
“Since 1994 I have used the drawings as a learning tool, offering the Shoah and its numerous lessons to help students address the conflicts, war and war crimes, and the racial, ethnic and religious hate that consume the world in 2002: Israel-Palestine, Northern Ireland, Kashmir, Somalia, East Timor, September 11, etc.”
In 1999 during Segan’s first visit to Israel [Second Int’l Conference, ‘99] he learned that Zlata Barshewsky, his mother’s grandmother, had been a resident of the Jewish Home for the Aged in Bialystok through the 1930’s. It is assumed she perished at the Treblinka death camp in February ’42 following the deportations from Bialystok. Family relatives in Vilna visited her as late as 1939; and Segan’s grandfather regularly corresponded with her until the war; she was never heard from again.
C. ISRAEL BERNBAUM AND TEACHING THE SHOAH WITH SLIDE CLASSES
In early 1992, two months after beginning the “wings” series, Segan located Israel Bernbaum’s book: “My Brother’s Keeper: The Holocaust Through the Eyes of an Artist” (Putnam, NY ’85). In print in Germany as “Ich Bin Meines Bruders Huter,” it is out-of-print in English. For a list of other publications featuring Bernbaum’s artwork, please see Appendix.
D. BERNBAUM’S AND FLUEK’S SHOAH ART BOOKS – DIFFERENT APPROACHES
Bernbaum wrote the text, and, comparable to Fluek’s “Memories” book, it features Bernbaum’s Shoah-themed paintings. Both used their personal experiences as Polish-raised Jews as the springboard to adhress, through very personally inspired interpretative art and using their own words, what happened. While Fluek’s book is drawn entirely from her own experiences, Bernbaum, who fled to the Soviet Union days before the Warsaw Ghetto was sealed in and who survived as a soldier in the Red Army, draws his inspiration through the depiction of what happened to the Jews of Warsaw and Poland, from secondhand sources.
E. DESIGN DIFFERENCES IN MY BROTHER’S KEEPER AND MEMORIES OF MY LIFE
Stylistically, the onlyndifference between Fluek’s book and Bernbaum’s is the inclusion of archival photos and diagrams (e.g. the Warsaw Ghetto and its streets) in the latter’s book.
F. BERNBAUM’S SLIDE CLASSES INSPIRE SEGAN
Bernbaum gave slide presentations to high school students in the U.S. and Germany. After Bernbaum’s death in late 1992. in late 1994 Segan created a slide class combining examples from Bernbaum’s works and “Under the Wings…” art. For Segan this meant moving his Shoah ‘wings’ art series out of the realm of “art for art’s sake - albeit one with an educational message that audiences would learn solely at exhibits - to direct teaching.”
Titled “Holocaust Education Through Art: ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ & ‘Under the Wings of G-D,’ ” in this first class Segan created he interspersed archival photos and other imagery with Bernbaum’s and Segan’s art, all chosen with the goal of engaging youngsters in an accessible format to teach the otherwise overwhelmingly complex history of the Holocaust in one-time school presentations in the course of one hour formats.
“Thus I included images on stereotyping of Native Americans (American Indians) and of African-Americans, drawn from postwar American product advertising and popular children’s books and movies from the 1980’s and ‘90’s, with the goal of addressing stereotyping and prejudice directed at people’s other than Jews.”
In late 2000 Segan ceased presenting that class and in 2001 he created two unique and separate slide classes, each focusing solely on one artist. Both classes include examples of paintings by the other artist (Bernbaum/Segan) along with examples of art by murdered Jewish artists Charlotte Salomon and Felix Nussbaum. Slide additions of drawings by Polish-Jewish artist Bruno Schulz and paintings by late Rumanian-Jewish slave labor survivor Arnold Daghani are planned.
G. HOLOCAUST EDUCATION THROUGH ART - A CYBER ART GALLERY
In 2001 Segan created a website: www.holocaust-art.org with the goal of offering viewers worldwide a cyber-viewable art gallery with selections from Under the Wings of G-D artworks. It includes extensive text addressing historical and aesthetic topics on the wings art, plus information on “real-world” (non-cyber) Slide Classes and Exhibits (presented by Segan) available for schools, colleges, houses of worship and other venues. Forthcoming plans include a “Responses” section with essays and other responses written by students, clergy and others.
H. BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND OF TOBY KNOBEL FLUEK
Segan’s introduction to Fluek’s art was on finding the beautifully designed, small (8 ¾” height x 7 3/8” width) hardcover book di“Memories of My Life in a Polish Village 1930-1949” at Seattle Public Library around ‘95. Fluek authored the text. The following biography appears in the book:
“A Note about the Author: Toby Knobel Fluek was born in the village of Czernica, Poland. In 1939 Soviet forces occupied the village, and in 1942, following the invasion of the Nazi’s, the Knobel family was forced to leave their home and live rn the Brody ghetto. Toby and her sister escaped from Brody in March 1943, and she remained in hiding in her village until liberation a year later. Only Toby and her mother survived the war; her father, two sisters, and a brother perished. In 1949 Toby married, and, with her husband, emigrated to the United States.
“Toby Fluek has studied at the Art Students League and with the artist Joe Hing Lowe. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited at Queensboro College, The Rockland Center for Holocaust Studies, and the Bronx Community Galleries [all in greater New York], among other places. Her work and her experiences have been featured in the documentary film Image Before My Eyes, produced by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. She lives with her husband in New York City.”
Additional exhibit, awards and bibliographic data on Fluek are in Who’s Who in American Art (Jacques Cattell Press, USA). Born 1926 in Czernica, Poland (now in Ukraine), she would have been about 19 at the end of the war.
I. PUBLICATIONS FEATURING FLUEK’S ART
To the best of my knowledge (December 2001) her artworks appear in the following publications, excluding websites:
1) Book: “Memories of My Life in a Polish Village 1930-49” (Alfred A. Knopf, NY ’90). 110 pages including color and monochromatic art reproductions.
2) Book: “Passover As I Remember It” (pub: Alfred A. Knopf, NY ’94.) Currently out-of-print. Children’s book co-authored with her daughter Lillian Fluek Finkler. Not seen by Segan at the time this paper was written.
3) Film/video “Image Before My Eyes” (YIVO, NY, 1981). Fluek was interviewed for the film, with approximately one minute and fifty seconds footage of her talking about her childhood and relations with gentile neighbors, her family, and the Jewish store. Nine of her paintings and drawings are shown as part of this footage.
4) Film: “The Well” (1981, by David Greenwald.) Includes footage showing nine of her paintings. Not seen by the author at the time this paper was written; I don’t know if this is available in VHS; or if Greenwald was the producer or director.
J. MEMORIES OF MY LIFE: FORMAT, LAYOUT, DESIGN, CHAPTER TOPICS
There is one painting or drawing per page. Each is neatly and cleanly laid out on an expanse of white paper so text and art are presented in a very easy-to-view design that neither hinders nor detracts from the art whatsoever. Every page with an artwork has a text accompaniment printed below the artwork. The seven chapters are: 1) My Family at Work; 2) Preparations for the Sabbath; 3) The Holidays; 4) Our Neighbors; 5) The Russian Occupation; 6) The German Occupation; 7) Liberation.
Her age at the time of the events she visually and textually describes is unstated; as are facts of artistic interest to the general public (and this writer) on the dimensions, art media and year of completion of each artwork.
K. TOBY KNOBEL FLUEK AND CREATING A NEW SLIDE CLASS
“Having chosen her work to create a workshop proposal for the conference theme of The Legacy of Survivors, the acceptance of my proposal for a workshop presented me with a challenge to create a new slide class for school presentations. A main goal for me was to evaluate how her book can be used most effectively as a teaching tool.”
L. CONSIDERATIONS IN CREATING A NEW SLIDE CLASS
With 93 paintings and drawings in the Memories book, the first daunting question is selecting those works that would best illustrate her story. The time-period she addresses is 19 years long. The topics she covers are incredibly diverse: from early childhood and family members to her time in hiding and liberation, any one of which could readily warrant a full class session of 50 minutes!
Would I then add, as in my “My Brother’s Keeper” and “Under the Wings of G-D”classes, slides of archival and/or family Holocaust-era photos, and if so, of what and whom?
A slide of her would be appropriate, of course. I pondered: Would it be worthwhile to create an entire new set of slides pertaining to the region of Fluek’s childhood: the village of Czernica, the larger nearby town of Podkamien, or the larger city of Brody, from whose ghetto she escaped and from which she was one of the few to survive the war?
A rationale for adding such material is based on the positive responses from audience attendees of the “My Brothers Keeper” and “Under the Wings of G-D” classes. Dr. Deborah Schultz, Curator of the Arnold Daghani [1] Collection at the University of Sussex, England, wrote the following to Segan [in reference to Segan’s two presentations of “the original” Holocaust Education Through Art class at the University of Sussex , October ’99]:
“…your contextualization of contemporary visual art with historical photographs of Polish Jews, as well as anti-Semitic German hate propoganda from the 1930’s against the Jews, was very powerful.” [letter to Segan dated 2 November 1999]
Thus the consideration of the addition of thematically related slides external to Fluek’s life and art is potentially an important one “not the least of which because my small but growing photo slide collection contains none of the above, but also because of practical considerations of monetary costs in having slides professionally made from book plate art and/or photos, or other materials.
M. THE MEMORIES BOOK AS INSTRUCTIVE READER
Can teachers use the book by itself as a teaching tool in the classroom? Several ways this could be facilitated in class come to mind: The use of “out loud” in-classroom readings of selections from the book, by students; the use of small group discussions; essay writing assignments; and the reading aloud of essays by students (either their own or by classmates), with discussion. There are undoubtedly other ways in which the book can be used as a text for students.
N. PUBLIC VIEWING OF SHOAH ART WITH TEXT AND WITHOUT IN SHOAH ART BY BAK, WITKIN, BERBAUM, FLUEK AND SEGAN: DIFFERING METHODOLOGY - A BRIEF ANALYSIS:
In examining art on Shoah themes in books and at art exhibits (both “real world” and cyberspace) it is my view that there are two prevalent presentation styles: Those with profuse explanatory text and those without.
Two examples of living artists exhibiting art without text (excluding “Label Copy” cards at gallery / museum exhibits stating the Title, Year of completion and Media of the individual artwork) are Vilna-raised child Holocaust survivor painter Samuel Bak and American Jewish painter Jerome Witkin.
Bak, a survivor currently reniding in Massachusetts (USA), drew as a young ccildnin hilna; a “document that survives from the art jury committee in the Vilna ghetto from March 16, 1943 indicated approval for exhibiting 27 sketches by “S. Bak (9 years old).” [2]
Witkin, an “empathizer,” [3] was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1939 and resides in upstate NY. A major focus of his figurative paintings are themes of human rights and “the individual persecuted;” included among them are works directly addressing the Shoah.
Witkin’s painting “The Beating Station Berlin 1933” and five of Bak’s paintings toured 17 American museums and public galleries from 1995 to January 2002 as part of the “Witness & Legacy: Contemporary Art About the Holocaust” travelling exhibition. [Witness & Legacy: see footnote 2]The final tour stop for W&L was The Frye Art Museum [Seattle, Wash., USA] Oct. 2001 – January 2002. The only information available on Bak’s and Witkin’s works at the exhibit was the artists Name, the paintings title, media and year of completion.
“I saw the whole exhibit a number of times, where I was struck by the incredible challenge of children, teens and adults forced to interpret for themselves (or not, as the case may be) the imagery and symbolism of the artwork in the exhibit without benefit of any accompanying handouts or signage.”
In my view of the “counterpart display style,” that of Fluek (Memories of My Life…book), Berbaum (My Brother’s Keeper… book) and myself (Under the Wings…. exhibition Label copy and HETA website art galleries), the artwork does not stand on its own at all.
An accompanying text is “both necessary for understanding the art and without which the art would be lost on viewers.” In each of these cases the text and art “work in tandem” with each other.
Hence, the “Witness & Legacy” exhibition would have been well served had either a) the exhibitions original curators b) individual gallery and museum curators hosting the show, or c) local community sponsors [e.g. Holocaust education centers] written accompanying label copy offering gallery goers some useful information to help audiences fathom what they were viewing. This could have included a blurb about each artist and his/her background; what the artists interest or intent was/is in creating this art; or an outsiders interpretation [e,g, the curators] of each work. This could have been easily accomplished with installation “Label Copy” (signage) and/or free handouts to the public at each exhibit venue.
“I cannot imagine an exhibit of Fluek’s artwork without the text that appears in the book. At the Frye, the catalog text was not available for complimentary use in the galleries. Copies were available for sale at $17, a formidable price for students! I saw students at the Frye. who came to the museum with class groups, but who wandered the galleries without benefit of docents….and without any interpretative resource information whatsoever on the artwork they were looking at.
“While I talked with friends about Witness art while I was at the museum, I was approached by individual students who asked my insight for papers they were assigned to write.
“One of these students did not know what the Nazi ghettos were; I assume his class had received no or minimal Holocaust-education preparation (readings, films, etc.) prior to their field trip to the museum from a Seattle-area suburban high school. This lack of preparedness on part of the profsssionals involved is incomprehensible to me. Since the brye installation was preceded by 16 previous gallery/museum venues, one would think that presentation concerns and their problems would have been forwarded from institution to institution hosting the exhibition, but evidently this had not been done.
“While there are those, including this writer, who are thankful that a Seattle museum finally showed artwork here addressing such a major event of recent world history, was it used as fully as it might have? Were there gallery goers who left perplexed, confused or in dismay at what they saw? Addressing how to deal with such challenges is something the establishment Holocaust centers in cities with those facilities could consider addressing. Working with Education-Teacher Training departments at regional universities would be a natural way to proceed.”
O. THE MEMORIES BOOK IN IMAGERY AND TEXT: ‘MY FAMILY AT WORK ‘ - CHAPTER ONE
The first chapter, “My Family at Work,” introduces the format and style of the book. The first page: “Our Farm,” uses easy-to-read text about the village and its demographics: the Jewish and gentile population, respectively, and the nationalities of the non-Jews, who were Polish and Ukrainian. The text accompanies the painting of the page title: Our Farm.
“Occasionally I find myself raising questions about her text, but that is an exception. I was left to guess whether the ten Jewish families, part of a total village population of 250, are considered Polish or Ukrainian, or neither – and why - a question an enterprising or inquisitive student or teacher might raise.” [4]
Fluek continues with an introduction to the lives of the villages Jews, and offers welcome English translations of Yiddish, words, e.g. shochet (ritual slaughterer), cheder (Hebrew school), and shtetl (town), which saves the reader from having to refer to a glossary in the back of the book, as is often done in other Shoah-themed books with foreign language words.
This first chapter, setting the tone of poignancy for the entire book, contains drawings and paintings addressing a variety of village and home topics: some of the rooms of her childhood house, the kitchen, her father, a brother, how the old-fashioned iron (for pressing clothes) worked, the girls from a neighboring village who apprenticed with her sister Surcie as clothesmakers, Surcie and her boyfriend, her school, the mainstay of their diet: potatoes, the cooking of potato latkes (and not just for the major Jewish holidays of Passover and Chanukah), her uncle Mordche and her aunt Rifka. It offers both a lot and does so in a non-threatening way, setting it apart from the popular perception by the public, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, that the Shoah is an overwhelming and wrenching subject to read about or address in art and other interpretative formats.
P. THE IMAGINATION OF REMEMBRANCE
While each drawing or painting is completely self-contained as an image, in the context of the book and Fluek’s story, the pictures “would not work” without the text. While the text could work on its own, e.g. to a visually-impaired reader, it is in her richly drawn and textually stated personal reminiscences which caused me to coin the phrase The Imagination of Remembrance to describe her work.
She remembers well, and in so doing uses her imagination to bring out and pictorially represent those memories – as precious as the family photos one can see in Ann Weiss’s moving tribute in the book“The Last Album – Eyes From the Ashes of Auschwitz – Birkenau.” [5]
“Fluek’s ability to create stories with pictorial illustration is very enticing. She uses her imagination, so many years after the events she describes, as a means of interpretative remembrance. Her work has a “preciousness” to it that is special and unique.”
Q. FLUEK’S STILL LIFE PAINTINGS – AN HISTORIAN’S PERSPECTIVE
The research focus of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at theiUniversity of Minnesota is about visual art addressing Holocaust and genocidal thematic imagery. As they recently added a new section on Fluek’s work to their cyber galleries, I asked CHGS Director Dr. Stephen Feinstein for his thoughts on Fluek’s work. Feinstein [6] responded:
“The main thing that is unique in her work are her still life paintings. It’s a genre that Jews were never involved with, and Fluek has a specifically Jewish form of still life, especially with the still lives with Jewish holidays.
“Her shtetl works have some similarity with Bernbaum’s watercolors of Warsaw [7] before the war, only she deals with smaller communities. There are, of course, other artists who dealt with the nostalgic past: Ilex Beller [8] in Paris, Anatoly Kaplan [9] in Leningrad, [10] and of course Chagall.
I would add to Feinstein’s list of pre-war era Jewish artists who worked on themes of the nostalgic past, among others, the Polish Jewish artist Jacob Steinhardt. [11]
R. FLUEK’S MEDIA
Fluek works in four different media: charcoal, watercolor, pastel and oil paint. In the first chapter there are 7 monochromatic drawings, one color drawing and seven color paintings.
S. MY THOUGHTS ON HER STILL LIFE “TABLEAUX” PAINTINGS
“Like Feinstein, I am drawn to the beauty and exquisite “painterly” rendering of her still-life paintings, e.g. Red Potatoes (My Family at Work, p.14); Grocery Shopping (Preparations for the Sabbath, p. 21); and Cleaning Utensils (The Holidays, p. 31).
“I find these so breathtaking that on each viewing they immediately, if momentarily, draw me away entirely from her other work in the book. They inspire the rare reaction in me, a lifelong museum and gallery visitor, of seeing contemporarily-made art while bringing to mind Flemish and Dutch pre-twentieth century master still life paintings.
“My viewer’s perception [as yet unanswered] is that she probably painted the still life works from actual still life settings set up as installations to work from for the specific purpose of direct observation painting.”
T. STYLISTIC VARIATIONS II – THE MEMORY PAINTINGS
Her other works are “memory” works of a different sort: Created in both drawing and painting media and presumably drawn solely from the imagination without the use of models and props, they are overall far less sophisticated in composition, draughtsmanship, and spatial perspective. Yet they succeed in telling her story as much as the still life tableaux scenes, for the simple reason they are stylistically in a simple, easy to read and easy-to-view form.
There are no surprises, no fantastically challenging metaphors, abstracted visual statements to ponder, or horror images that might frighten away young or adult readers alike.
U. FLUEK’S DRAWINGS AND DRAWINGS AS A WINDOW INTO THE ARTISTS CREATIVITY
As an artist who loves to draw, my own tastes in art include an almost “natural” love of artists drawings. Why? Drawings offer a window into “the artists soul” or at least the direct methodology of the visual artist. While painters will frequently rework a canvas over and over again, most drawings are done with a certain amount of directness and fluidity that is impossible to achieve with other media such as oil, pastels and watercolors.
In her work the difference between her drawings and still life paintings is so dramatic that it’s almost as if there are multiple artists at work in the book. While we know of course that there is but one Toby Fluek, this artistic range intrigues readers. Yet in no way does this variance diminish from the overall quality and moving nature of what she has to say. The drawings depict interior and exterior remcmbrances with self-respect and pathos.
V. SUMMARY
I think her book, drawing on the experiences of a “first hand” survivor – witness, would be especially suitable for upper level elementary school, middle/junior high and high school students. Her descriptions of Jewish religious/ritual activities would be especially useful for non-Jewish audiences.
Her simple prose and precious visual memory depictions inspire me to see if I can adapt the format in my presentations to date to use with her art.
Immediate project goals will be to make a set of slides and test the presentation with Seattle audiences. I should be able to offer workshop attendees a firsthand report on presentations at my workshop.
Footnotes
1] Daghani, a Jewish slave labor survivor born 1909 in Suczawa, in Bukowina (now Romania), sketched in the camps and after the war, documenting with thousands of artworks his experiences. He lived near Brighton, England after the war until his death in 1985. The Dagnani Trust at the Univ. of Sussex includes 6,000 of his artworks.
2] “Witness & Legacy: Contemporary Art About the Holocaust,” Exhibit catalog pub. by Lerner Pub., Minneapolis, Minn. ’95, 2000), p. 13 [footnote 15: “Minutes of the Exhibition Jury, March 16,1943, Vilna Ghetto.” Translation of YIVO Document #466 by Dina Abramowicz]
3] The most frequently used attributions for artists dealing with Shoah themes (excluding artists who perished) are survivor-artists, children of survivors, and empathizers. Witkin and Segan are empathizers.
4] The question of why Jewish nationals and citizens are called Jews within national countries, such as in France, Hungary or Poland, rather than Frenchmen, Hungarian or Polish, or even French Jewish, Jewish Hungarian or Polish-Jewish is a question this writer considers worthy of invaluable discussion time for teachers and students.
In current newspaper and magazine articles addressing Holocaust restitution claims by and /or for slave laborers, the provenance of Shoah art created by camp inmates during the war, and other related Holocaust era topics addressing victims and survivors that appear in publications like The New York Times, this highly problematic national and religious-ethnic labeling that separates victims into Jewish ones of non-nationalistic origins, and those of (non-Jewish) national background, continues on unabated, just as it did prior to World War II.
That some (but not all) of the Jewish survivors have since left the countries of their youth (in the aftermath of the Shoah) should hardly be a justification for this denial of Jews of a national culture within the countries of their origins, especially when so many, as in Poland, embraced non-Orthodox national culture as Jews.
5] The Last Album., pub: W.W. Norton, NY, 2001. Weiss spent years researching those most precious of belongings incoming inmates to Auschwitz had with them on their arrival; 2,400 of these were saved by camp inmates. Four hundred appear in the book. [Ann Weiss workshop, Second Conference: “Eyes from the Ashes – Archival Photos as Teaching Tools”]
6] E-mail from Feinstein to eegan, Dec. 28, 2001
7] At the time of Bernbaum’s death in December 1992 he was working on a series of watercolors portraying (in his own words) “”about how the Jews of Warsaw lived.” He contrasted this theme with his earlier published series “My Brother’s Keeper,”of which he wrote: “My Holocaust paintings are about how the Jewish people of Warsaw died.” (Letter from Bernbaum to Segan, dated October 5,1992)
8] Ilex Beller was a refugee in Paris before the war.
9] For more information on Anatoly Kaplan, see “Russian Jewish Artists” (pub: Prestel, Munich/NY with The Jewish Museum, NY ’95) includes a color plate, essay on his life and work, a selected bibliography and three b&w art reproductions, pages 178-9.
10] Now St.Petersburg
11] Steinhardt was born in Zerkow, Poland, 1887; fought in the German Army in WWI; emigrated to Palestine in 1933 where he died in 1968. Among his graphic works (see Jakob Steinhardt Etchings and Lithographs, Dvir Jerusalem – Tel Aviv, 1981) are many works portraying his grandfather, Polish villages and villagers, etc.
Appendix: Additional publications with Bernbaum art:
“A Mission in Art: Recent Holocaust Art in America” (Mercer Univ. Press ’88, by Vivian Alpert Thompson. Out-of-print. Chapter One –Survivors Art contains 13 text pages on Bernbaum with five small black & white thumbnail reproductions. There are five half-page color plates from My Brother’s Keeper.
The Chicago, USA based education company Social Studies School Services (www.socialstudies.com) published a CD-ROM (’97) on Bernbaum’s work that also includes excerpts from The Diary of Anne Frank.
Pencil drawings in the children’s paperback book “I am a Star” by Inge Auerbacher (Penguin Putnam Book for Young Readers, ’93) are by Bernbaum.