The Brooklyn Rail

Modernist Yiddish art and literature flourished during an impossible cultural moment between the turn of the twentieth century and the establishment of the state of Israel. Its relevance waned after most of its speaking population was lost, its existence judged obsolete by the ascendance of Zionism. Prior to the war it found a second home in the United States and the USSR, but assimilation and persecution eventually caused it to recede into marginality. The concept of “Yiddishland,” which encompasses both a geographical region in Eastern Europe and an international community of diasporic Jews, came to resemble so many dusty books and aging faces by the twenty-first century. Today it is sustained by a small community of Yiddishist organizations, universities, and Hasidic communities. The Yiddishland envisioned by figures like Peretz Markish that embraced diaspora as emancipatory condition (“without beginning, without end”), succumbed to the tensions of cosmopolitanism in the face of unwelcoming state powers. Yonia Fain drifted through this history as both free agent and exemplar of its idea. Fleeing the Nazi invasion of Poland after studying art at the University of Vilnius years earlier, Fain was propelled from Japanese-occupied Shanghai to Mexico City, and finally New York City. Over the course of this journey, he developed a particular style and outlook, much influenced by Expressionism, Japanese painting, and Diego Rivera, who first advocated for his work when Fain was teaching in Mexico City. He then went on to exhibit widely in New York City until the 1960s, teaching at the Brooklyn Museum, NYU, and Hofstra University until his death in 2013 at the age of 100. Equally painter and poet, Fain’s literary work was inseparable from painting. Modern-ish aims to represent the richness of Fain’s life and career by exhibiting his paintings, books, ephemera, and a video interview all in the same space. Wall text is in Yiddish and English.

Fain’s paintings and drawings are dark to say the least. Rag-figures, solitary figures, screaming figures, crowds of figures are pulled through gestural fragmentation. The wresting of the body from itself. Drawings like Not My Child (1941–1946), The Beginning of the Day (1941–1946), and Alone (1941–1946), carved from the page by shadow, exhaustion of the public sphere seems to rest in the lines of their faces. But despite the impact of Fain’s imagery, his titles fall flat. Titles like Crucifixion (1966), Holocaust (no date), Alone (1997) and Alone (1941–1946), Rage (1941-1946), The Night (1941–1946), The Scream (1997) all point laconically or literally to something represented in the painting. Holocaust and Crucifixion are particularly heavy handed, because in the case of the former the concept exceeds the impact of the picture, and in the latter the picture speaks for itself.

But the clumsiness of Fain’s single-word titles is maybe just a matter of a translation of taste. What seems clumsy to our ear is in fact a common tone in Yiddish literature, which skews kitsch. Many canonical Yiddish language authors like Abraham Sutzkever, Peretz Markish, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are done a disservice by today’s literary conventions. Singer’s work was considered pulp in the Anglophone world for most of his career. Sutzkever and Markish did not heed Adorno’s declaration that there is no poetry after Auschwitz. Their excesses—like Sutzkever’s description of writing a poem on a naked corpse while hiding in an attic in My Life and Lyric, or the scene of endless rotting death Markish described in his poem “The Heap”—reflect a desire to reach the bottom of an existential problem by way of evoking drama even in the darkest circumstances. Fain was no exception to his contemporaries, deeply concerned with representations of violence and dehumanization. It is easy to frame his work in terms of displacement of the pleytim (refugees). But I think the frightening quality of his paintings also reveals an obsession with tragedy.

I was drawn specifically to Untitled (Dying Horse) (no date), a small, simple painting at the back of the gallery. It shows a horse on its back against a blue and green background. Tragedy in this painting comes to a sharp point through not only its precision, but the use of the horse as symbol. Though it lacks the whip and carriage, I am reminded of the story of the Turin Horse in Crime and Punishment. Prior to deciding to commit murder, Raskolnikov has a dream where he encounters the relentless beating of a horse by carriage driver trapped in the mud. He is a child with his father, and after falling on the horse to protect it, he is pulled away by his father. Friedrich Nietzsche is supposed to have been driven mad by a similar encounter in Italy in 1889. The horse as representative of the vulnerability of the oppressed, its epistomological state is untitled. Only in brackets can its proper name be spoken. That is, it doesn’t matter, one has carte blanche with the whip to ignore the outcome.