Issachar Ber Ryback: Leben und Werk by Sigalit Meidler-Waks (review)

The study under review aims at introducing the reader to an artist who figured prominently in the art scene of his day, but who seems to have fallen into oblivion for various reasons afterwards. Compared to fellow contemporary Jewish artists such as Marc Chagall, Natan Altman, or El Lissitzky, rather little attention has been devoted hitherto to Issachar Ber Ryback (Rybak). Apart from article-length studies, the eye of the reviewer, a literary and cultural scholar, has not caught any substantial major book-length studies.

This monograph by Sigalit Meidler-Waks, an art historian, Jewish studies scholar, and freelance curator, who moreover headed the Jewish adult education center in Berlin from 2009 through to 2014, thus returns this remarkable artist, his struggles, artistic developments, and endeavors, to the attention of a scholarly public as much as to a broader public. Meidler-Waks’s study, which is based on her PhD thesis, focusses on the artist’s life and work, which led him from postrevolutionary Russia (to be more precise, from Kiev) to interwar Berlin and Paris, the very centers of cultural and in particular of Jewish cultural production in the interwar period. Following his geographical-creative path through time and space, Meidler-Waks traces meticulously the conceptions, receptions, and changes in his oeuvre, and the breadth of it, which reacted to his Jewish and non-Jewish artistic environment as much as it was embedded in it. His choice of topics, genres, and styles was informed, thus, by various factors. In this way, the book provides a path-breaking study that situates the artist Ryback in his manifold entanglements, and that moreover highlights his impact on the development of Jewish arts in general.

Issachar Ber Ryback was born in 1897 in Yelisavetgrad, what is today Kropyvnytskyi in central Ukraine, and died in 1935 in Paris. While attending the art school in Kiev, he joined the Kultur-Lige (Culture League), a cultural association that gathered the leading artists, writers, and intellectuals of its time. Among its members were, among others, the Yiddish poet Dovid Hofshteyn, the writers Dovid Bergelson and Peretz Markish, the sculptor Joseph Chaikov, the artist El Lissitzky, and the scenic designer Boris Aronson. Closely connected to the Bund, it was dedicated to a secular, socialist, Yiddish agenda that aimed to foster the arts as much as education. It pursued in other words a national idea, which was highlighted by its intention to develop a distinctively Jewish modernism combining elements of folk art (or culture) with abstract forms, and what is more – given the league’s societal interest – to disseminate it into popular culture. These ideas were rooted in the movement of the Jewish Renaissance, materializing at the same time. Taking root in Jewish difference, in contrast to the postulates of the Haskalah which sought, in nuce, to integrate Jewish lifeworlds into the surrounding European mainstream cultures, the Jewish Renaissance, whose agenda was shaped foremost by German Jewish intellectuals, promulgated a national idea. Given the different political and cultural settings of the European empires at that time – the German Reich, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire – it might have been worthwhile in this study to outline and compare explicitly the various intentions and outcomes of this movement.¹

In any case, Ryback spent his formative years in Kiev, and his experiences there were informed and shaped by the debates in and the intentions of the Kultur-Lige. This was furthered by the fact that he joined an expedition to the then still existing Pale of Settlement within the Russian Empire, which brought him into direct contact with its Jewish population, and above all with its creative folk-art potential.

Ryback, in short, as this study shows convincingly, was influenced and formed in his early oeuvre by three very different strands: the national Jewish intentions of the Kultur-Lige; Russian and European modernism (for example, one of his teachers in Kiev was the renowned...