They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (review)

In the 1930s, Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, forming 10% of that nation's total population, with an almost 1000-year history reaching back to the beginnings of Poland itself. A substantial number of Jews inhabited bigger urban areas, primarily working in trade, manufacturing, and craft cottage industries. Most, however, resided in smaller towns and villages where over the centuries they created a unique kind of community, the shtetl (Yiddish diminutive for shtot, or town), living alongside the largely Catholic population, many of them peasants. "Morally and spiritually, the two societies remained resolutely separate, by choice on both sides. Yet they lived in close physical proximity and…familiarity. In the shtetl, pluralism was experienced not as ideology, but as ordinary life" (Hoffman 1997:12).

Reading They Called Me Mayer July, one gets a sense of what such a life was like in interwar Poyln, as Poland was known to Yiddish-speaking Jews. Through his recollections and stories, illustrated with over 200 paintings and drawings, full of remarkable details of daily communal life, Mayer Kirshenblatt offers us a unique window onto a world that no longer exists. And it is this latter fact that also makes this book an important contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and the degree to which it succeeded in erasing a life-way, a culture, a history, a community.

At the very start of the book, Kirshenblatt explains how he was drawn to this project, when he taught himself to paint at the age of 73. He would get together " in the steam room at the gym or in a corner of the health club" with his buddies, most of whom were Holocaust survivors.

Within five or ten minutes of any conversation, whether the topic was politics, women, this or that, we would be back in the concentration camps, on the march, in the railroad cars, in the bush with the partisans. It was as if there were no life before the war, so overshadowed had their memories become by the pain they suffered. I lost many members of my family in the Holocaust, but God spared me from living through that horror myself. He also blessed me with a wonderful memory

(p. 2).

With the help and encouragement of his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett, anthropologist, folklorist, and co-author of this volume, he set out to recapture that prewar life, creating a visual and textual memoir of his childhood growing up in the rabbinic town of Apt (its Yiddish name, Opatów in Polish), which in 1931 had 5,436 Jews out of a population of 9,512.

For many postwar Jews, the shtetl has become the site of Jewish authenticity and a metaphor for loss, according to Eva Hoffman. For some it conjures up "poignant, warm images of people in quaint black garb, or Chagall-like crooked streets…For others, it means pogroms and peasant barbarism. Yet while it existed, the shtetl was neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but a coherent, curious, and surprisingly resilient social formation… closely interwoven, reassuringly familiar" (Hoffman 1998:11–12). Kirshenblatt manages to capture this latter image without diminishing either the nostalgic or tragic elements the characterized his own life, as well as that of his family and his neighbors.

Previous books have documented the diversity and vitality of pre Holocaust Jewish life in Poland and other East European regions, based on photographs, historical documents, family letters and diaries, and testimonies of those who survived the war (e.g., Eliach 1998, Kacyzne 1999, Vishniac 1983). In fact, one of these, a photographic history titled Image Before My Eyes, is coauthored by Mayer's daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett with Lucjan Dobroszycki (1977).

What makes Kirshenblatt's project unique is the combination of illustration and wide-ranging narrative—created out of forty years of interviews done by...