Keeping the Company of God: Bright Scenes of the Shtetl
RIEMER, JACK
BOOKS Keeping the Company of God: Bright Scenes of the Shtetl Life in the Shtetl: Scenes and Recollections by Ilex Beller Holmes and Meier, 1986.140 pp, $49 50 Reviewed by Jack Riemer First...
...Many are proud of their parties and clubs, of dining with millionaires, of entertaining movie stars...
...Next to each painting are a few lines of prose in which the artist tries to set forth who these people were and what they stood for...
...In this book it is caught and conveyed in pictures, pictures that capture the sense of the sacred and the capacity to celebrate life that was at the heart of Beller's world...
...let us adore the pioneers of prayer in an age of cruelty...
...They are all here, the Jews of his childhood shtetl: the water carrier, the melamed (children's religious teacher), the merchants, the beggars, the rich, the poor, the simple, the scholars, the klezmorim (musicians), the people with slender means and grandiose dreams, the Communists, the Zionists—all those whom the Nazis buried are somehow resurrected, at least for a while, in the pages of this book...
...Each person becomes a character in a sacred and yet familiar saga, a letter in a kind of Torah scroll...
...For these paintings capture the sense of freshness and purity of shtetl life as seen through the eyes of an unspoiled childhood...
...And, like theirs, his work has a simple innocence that is very powerful...
...Communing with the paintings in this book enables us to do what Heschel asks of us...
...Like the other two artists, Beller began painting late in life...
...In Life in the Shtetl: Scenes and Recollections, Beller brings together 80 paintings of the world of his childhood...
...Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote about the kind of people who are brought back to us in these paintings: "Many people admire generals and orators...
...These paintings are bright and vivid, full of greens, yellows, oranges and reds, for they describe a people who loved life, and who, in their dying, bequeathed to us a way in which to live...
...Like them, he is self-taught...
...Men like Simon the Carpenter, Avraham the Dairyman, Sholem the Blacksmith, Israel the Shoemaker and Yankel the Knife-grinder, who went to their deaths without a grave, without a yahrtzeit, without a tombstone, are all back again in this book...
...Historians, sociologists and ethnologists are now at work writing dissertations and technical studies of what life was like in the shtetl, for the benefit of the next generations...
...I would venture to say that this book should also be a reference work, perhaps a work more valuable, and more informative than the scholars...
...Every painting in the book makes such good use of color that we realize how much brightness there was in that world, despite the poverty, despite the pogroms, despite the precariousness of the life they lived...
...And between the paintings and the prose, he succeeds in bringing the Jews of his town of Grodzisko back to us once more...
...let us remember those who would never say a lie, those who would share their scanty meals with strangers...
...BOOKS Keeping the Company of God: Bright Scenes of the Shtetl Life in the Shtetl: Scenes and Recollections by Ilex Beller Holmes and Meier, 1986.140 pp, $49 50 Reviewed by Jack Riemer First there was Grandma Moses in America, then there was Shalom of Safed in Israel, and now, there is Ilex Beller in France...
...Many are proud of being mistaken for gentiles and of being ignorant of Yiddish...
...These paintings are not in dark colors, for they are not a kaddish, not a grim or morbid work...
...The spiritual cannot be caught and conveyed in statistics, dates and details...
...Jack Riemer is rabbi of Beth David Congregation in Miami, Florida, and the editor of New Prayers for the High Holidays {Media Judaica...
...On occasion, when he feels that his own words are not enough to do them justice, he draws on the poems of Abraham Sutzkever, Moishe Kulbak, Mordecai Gebirtig, Mani Leib, Itzik Manger or Kadia Molodowsky to supplement his own recollections...
...let us follow those who kept the company of God in a world of misery, who welcomed angels to their homes on Friday night...
Vol. 14 • August 1989 • No. 5
