Up until ten years ago, I knew almost nothing about my ancestors on one side of my family. I knew they came here with nothing from Russia, now Ukraine, a hundred years ago. I knew that there were pogroms and that I was a grandchild of one who escaped. But before that, it was completely dark. So I started painting an imagined past. I debuted a body of work called “I Notice People Disappear”. I wrote, collaged, gleaned, and listened into what has become my personal and strange spiritual historical epic spread across many canvases and centuries ever since.

I tried to imagine what a pogrom was exactly. I tried to imagine how it felt to be woken in the middle of the night at fifteen and told to leave the country and build a new life. This was the case of my grandfather, whose father gave him a note with the name of someone in America, a distant cousin perhaps, and a few rubles. Find this person. Don’t say goodbye to your mother, she’ll never let you leave my great-grandfather told him. He walked across Poland and after two years earned enough to make the passage to America at 17 and here I am, roughly one hundred years later.

In my research, I found a newly translated book by the Ukrainian poet Abraham Sutzkever, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony which documents the extraordinary testimony of what happened to those who stayed behind and the fate of what all my missing relatives surely endured. The book is so frightening that I could only read small sections at a time.

It turns out, Sutzkever became famous in 1936 - well before The Holocaust - at the age of 23 for a collection of poems he wrote in Yiddish about his childhood entitled Siberia. As usual, I went to eBay to see if I could locate a hardcopy and found a version illustrated and introduced by his neighbor, the young artist Marc Chagall. From Chagall’s preface:

Jews today are living in the shadow of the Massacre of October 7th in Israel. This was another pogrom, one that Jews have been experiencing for millennia, and every day the word pogrom, which sounds so round and innocuous, becomes more vivid as more pictures and testimonies emerge.

But the reaction to it has been a kind of mental pogrom. Jews around the world, especially those in college in the United States, are deeply affected by what is happening. Imagine a bird who has built a nest in a tree over many years, gathering sticks and raising chicks. A storm knocks down the tree. The nest, the bird and generations of life are on the ground, walking around, and looking at all the pieces strewn about. Every time I sat to write this newsletter, these birds kept walking on my keyboard.

I think of Chagall writing about Sutskever’s poetry and I know exactly what to do. Keep painting, keep writing, keep publishing. If you’re interested my w​ritings, art workshops or getting announcements for live events I host with other artists click on the respective words and you will receive those emails.

I appreciate you and thank you for sharing this space with me.

Warmest,

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Kimberly

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