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s h y a b a d y My hannah Arendt Project During my German-language studies at the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv in 2003, I came across Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, the only one of her books that had been translated into Hebrew at the time. There it was, standing behind a window in the institute’s foyer. On its jacket, Adolf Eichmann wore a white shirt, looking like the most typical and ordinary person in the world. Soon the book was in my hand; the reading experience was thrilling . Sharp, direct, cynical—and yet sensitive and convincing—the book offered a wide perspective on a new form of evil. Hannah Arendt entered the life of my mind. A short time later, during a flight back to Tel Aviv from a visit in Berlin, I had a chat with the woman sitting beside me. I soon found out that she was an art curator working on a big project planned for Tel Aviv’s ninety-fifth anniversary . Her vision was to cover the front wall of the Tel Aviv municipality building with 240 portraits made by more than two hundred Israeli artists. The portraits would depict people whom the city decided to honor by naming streets after them. Each portrait would then be enlarged to the size of three by four square meters, large enough to cover together the entire building. I thought it would be good to participate in such an exhibition, and I already had an idea in mind, but I said nothing to the curator. Instead, I set an appointment with her in my studio to discuss my participation in the exhibit. In preparation for the meeting, I started sketching Hannah’s image, hoping I could convince the curator to include a portrait of Arendt in the exhibit. But the meeting was disappointing. She responded to my proposal with a definite no. “No street in Tel Aviv [or for that matter, in Israel] is named after Arendt,” she said. The forty-year boycott was more successful than I had imagined. It was hard to forgive the woman who portrayed one of the main perpetrators of the final solution as a simple-minded bureaucrat rather than as the architect of the Nazi extermination machine. In addition, Arendt had not been afraid to touch the open wounds of the cooperation between the Nazi regime and the Jewish councils during the Holocaust, and she did not hide her criticism of the way the Eichmann trial was designed to serve Zionist ideology. The fact that this sober and harsh account came from a Jewish woman that was perFacing : Shy Abady, Dark Times, 2004, mixed media on paper. 20 My Hannah Arendt Project sonally affected by the events—she fled Germany in 1933 and was for several years active in Zionist organizations—made her book even more unbearable for many Jewish-Israeli readers. And her close relation before and after the war with her teacher, the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who became known as a Nazi supporter, made things even more complicated for her in the eyes of many Jewish readers. No one in Israel, except for a small segment of the academy, wished to commemorate Arendt’s name, legacy, or writings. It even took nearly forty years to translate Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil into Hebrew. But the curator’s refusal came too late. I was already captivated by the intriguing and elusive face and image of Hannah Arendt—as well as by her life story. The artistic process always poses its challenges, but it is especially demanding when it concerns the presentation of a specific figure. How does one translate a life story into artistic form without making the work overly illustrative ? How can the subjective impression that the image has on the artist be communicated to an audience for which this image already has its own significance ? How can I express my thoughts and words in silent colors? In the past, I had confronted similar questions working on the portraits of the legendary Polish-Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. His talent, sensuality, and tragic life—Nijinsky spent his last thirty years in a mental institute—captivated me, and led me to dedicate two exhibitions to his image , movement, and body. I continue to face similar challenges in my present work, a tribute to the life and work of an Israeli-Romanian poet and writer, Radu Klapper. With...

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