Materializing Memory and Sanctifying Place – Jewish Sephardic Heritage in Contemporary Spain
Threads of Identity – The Evolution of Israeli Fashion and the Attempt to Create a National Dress
The Written Silent, the Visible Absence, and the Text in the Written after 1945 – Materiality of Catastrophe, Exile and Belonging in Barbara Honigmann’s Writings
Processing Loss and Fostering Resilience – Jewish and Female Sculptural Strategies of Coping with the 20th Century
“Home was not Home anymore.” The Destruction of Private Jewish Living Spaces in the November Pogroms of 1938
Corresponding with history – Jewish Postage Stamp Collectors and Jewish Emancipation
Nation-Building and Cultural Heritage – The Making of the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem, 1892–1948
DVARIM POLANIM – Material Culture and the Changing Identity of Polish Jews in Israel across the 20th Century
Between Ruins and Revival – Jewish Identity and Material Heritage in Post-Communist Poland
Places of Jewish Knowledge – The Wissenschaft des Judentums and its Material Sites in Berlin’s Urban Landscape, 1871–1961
Traces of belonging(s) – on the materiality of the imprisonment experience of Jewish women in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp
Aufbau im Übergang – Curt Wormann and the Jewish National and University Library between Nation-building and Cultural Diplomacy
To Change, Question, and Criticize – Concepts of a ‘Werk’ and Concepts of Objects in Illustrated Magazines in Berlin and Vienna during the 1920s.
“Mes poumons comme les rouleaux de la Thora” – Towards a Poetics of the Trace: Jewishness, Exile, and Writing in the Work of Hélène Cixous
Soviet Jewish Objects – Mark Zhitnitskii’s Album ‘Voina 1941-1945’ (mid-1980s)
The Belarusian-Jewish artist Mark Zhitnitskii (1903-1993) was arrested in 1936 and sent to the Soviet labor camp of Ukhta where he stayed until 1946. Although he did not actively witness it, he produced a number of works depicting the Second World War and what we today call the Shoah – while being himself imprisoned in the Gulag. Zhitnitskii survived the Gulag and a second banishment to Siberia (1949-1955), whereupon he was rehabilitated and reinstated to the Soviet Artists’ Union. In the 1960s, he returned to producing drawings about the Shoah which he exhibited in various cities of the Soviet Union.
Zhitnitskii and his family emigrated to Israel in 1971. There he created the album titled Voina 1941-1945 (War 1941-1945) in the mid-1980s. In this album, he gathered sketches and reproductions of his artworks – some of which are precisely those pieces about the Holocaust and the Second World War that he created in the Gulag. Other works depicting the Shoah are those Zhitnitskii produced in the 1960s.
My analytic approach to this material focuses on the following central aspects: (1) Objecthood with respect to the medium of the album serving as an archive of Zhitnitskii’s artistic activities and its meaning as a “testimonial object” (Hirsch/Spitzer 2006) (2) objecthood regarding the role of his artworks in shaping and visualizing the memory about the Shoah in the Soviet Union, (3) these objects – the album itself and the artworks it contains – representing the entanglement of Stalinism and the Shoah, which Soviet Jews in particular had to suffer.
Some significant scientific research has been published in the last 15 years regarding Soviet literature about the Shoah. However, there are few scholarly works about Soviet Jewish objects and art about the Shoah produced in the USSR. Therefore, my main goal is to fill this gap and examine the specific Soviet context in which these artworks were created and received.
