Objects

One of the scenes from the artist’s life in Opatów. Self-portrait of Mayer Kirshenblatt as a teenager, at which point he still lived in the Apt (Opatów) shtetl. The author depicts himself in his characteristic school uniform. In her text published in the catalogue of the (post)JEWISH exhibition, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett – the artist’s daughter – writes: ‘The Mayer of the paintings is almost always of the same indeterminate age, rarely younger or older, always a schoolboy in blue’ (B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “The Shtetl as Memory Palace”, in: (post)JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt, Warsaw 2024). The boy in the painting is standing in a street, in front of three tenement houses. A shop assistant is sitting in front of one of the houses, and a greengrocer’s signboard is attached to the wall (the Polish sign is misspelt – it is hard to establish whether there actually was an error on the signboard or if it was made by the painter, not accustomed to writing in Polish). We can assume that the boy has just left the shop, as he is carrying a herring, still dripping salty water from the barrel it was in, wrapped in a piece of newspaper only at the point of contact with the hand.

The painting was one of the objects which inspired the visual identification of Kirshenblatt’s exhibition in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam.

Małgorzata Bogdańska-Krzyżanek