Art and Life: The Story of Samuel Bak 1879985462, 9781879985469

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ART & LIFE THE STORY OF

SAMUEL BAK

BY UTE BEN YOSEF

ART & LIFE THE STORY OF

SAMUEL BAK © Pucker Art Publications, 2023

PUCKER ART

PUBLICATIONS

Published by: Pucker Art Publications Boston, MA 02116

Distributed by: Syracuse University Press Syracuse, NY 13244-5160 Design: Jeanne Koles Editing: Jeanne Koles and Beth Plakidas Photography: John Davenport, Briana Howard, and others ISBN: 978-1-879985-47-6

cover: ARTE POVERA 1980 Oil on linen 45 x 57 1/2 inches

THE ART OF UNDERPAINTING 2021 Oil on canvas 24 1/8 x 24 1/8 inches BK2695

CONTENTS FOREWORD BY BERNARD H. PUCKER 1 IN THE BEGINNING IMAGES

  

2 THE LANDSBERG DP CAMP IMAGES 3 ISRAEL 1948 TO 1956 IMAGES



 



  

4 PARIS 1956 TO 1959 IMAGES



   

5 ROME AND THE TRANSITION 1959 TO 1966 IMAGES   6 RETURN TO ISRAEL 1966 TO 1974 IMAGES



 

7 THE WANDERING JEW IMAGES



8 A NEW VOLUME IMAGES 9 THE MESSAGE IS UNIVERSAL IMAGES

  



 

NOTES PHOTOS BIBLIOGRAPHY    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  

EVIDENCE II 2002-2006 Oil on canvas 63 × 57 1/8 inches

THE GHETTO 1976 Oil on linen 64 x 48 inches

FOREWORD

As Sam Bak reaches his 90th year, we are grateful for the opportunity to share this very specific biography on him. Are not all biographies specific? In this case, we wanted to explore the artistic context of his decades-long journey as a painter of questions, as a creator of visual stories about our human condition. Not an easy task. The threads and connections of life brought us to Ute Ben Yosef in Cape Town, through Judith Maslin of Philadelphia and the Charles Back Family of South Africa via Vilnius. Not exactly a direct route but one of surprises and “events of the soul,” so beautifully expressed by Brother Thomas when he wrote: “The routine of life holds us in readiness for the events of the soul.” With the incredible support and intelligent guidance of Jeanne Koles, the vision has come together in Art & Life: The Story of Samuel Bak. What a privilege and gift our friendship with Sam and Josée, now approaching six decades, has been. Rarely do relationships, especially those in the art world, endure for such a time. Clearly mazel is a key ingredient, along with openness and respect based on kindness. All have been a part of this experience. Why have this biography? It is simply to invite you—with his mother’s permission, of course— into the life and world of an exceptional person and rare genius with the hope that the story as presented and the art that accompanies it will create an added perspective on our lives and world. Can any one of us presume to effect significant change in the world? By recording and sharing

BEHOLDER 2020 Oil on linen 32 x 25 1/2 inches BK2577

these experiences and images, we hope that you will begin to believe that everyone can and should engage with their community, country, and world to make them just a little more accepting, kind, and inclusive.

Bernard H. Pucker Spring 2023

1

IN THE BEGINNING

ROOTS To the rare survivors of the Jewish diaspora in Lithuania belongs Samuel Bak, an artist whose distinct metaphorical style expresses the horror, pain, and barbarity of the “civilized” human race which the middle of the 20th century so brutally exposed. In his own words, “My life, from age 1 until age 10 has determined who I became, and nourished all I have painted.”1 Bak, who while these lines are being written is nearing ninety, still retains an unusual memory dating back to age three. He easily revisits places, recalls events, and conjures thoughts and impressions beginning from early childhood. In 2001, he published a memoir in which many such remembrances— heart-wrenching, sad, tragicomical, whimsical, and often magical—were vividly described.2 Samuel Bak was born in Vilna, Poland on August 12, in the fateful year of 1933, to Jonas and Mitsia Bak.3 From his doting grandparents, Rachel and Chayim Bak on his father’s side and Shifra (née Nadel) and Khone Yochel on his mother’s, boundless love was lavished on the sensitive, delicate, impetuous, and brilliant child born with a synesthetic perceptivity, a weak stomach, sensitive bronchial passages, and a heart murmur. From an early age he knew how to twist each member of his exceptionally gifted, charismatic family around his little finger, at times assisted by his nervous cough.4 They lovingly called him Samek, the Polish diminutive of his name, to which various pet names were added. The ominous signs of the current political situation following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany by President von Hindenburg, the Nuremberg race laws of 1935 depriving German Jews of the rights of full citizenship, and the brutal expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany to Poland, were carefully kept away from the child. As his secular parents had absorbed the culture of the Polish majority surrounding them, he was initially sent to a Polish kindergarten. But when he was four years old an incident in the street changed this. Walking home with his mother, a thug spat in his face and shouted “zhid” (meaning “kike”)—an offense outside the range of his vocabulary. He did not grasp the situation, as his mother knelt to comfort him and wipe the spit off his face. But consequently, he was moved to a Yiddish

kindergarten to be brought up in his own culture. Initially he felt uprooted and unhappy to be separated from his Polish friends, but gradually he began to feel at home in his new surroundings and became fluent in Yiddish. His sheltered childhood, with its daily and weekly rituals such as the visits to his grandparents, continued as before and etched itself into his memory, consolidating an archetypal world from which he later drew his iconic images. By the age of three, Samek began to display an amazing gift for drawing. The family saw in him a future painter, which was an unusual attitude for members of the Jewish middle-class milieu at the time.5 When it came to literature and art, they spoke to him as to an equal, saturating his young mind with stories and pictures which he devoured with intensity.6

EARLY ARTISTIC IMPULSES Bak’s artistic talent was developed by his mother, who was an artist in her own right.7 After graduating from the gymnasium, she attended a private art school in Vilna, where she became an accomplished designer. She specialized in creating scarves and sold them with great success. Her mother, Shifra, was a very resourceful businesswoman and would have preferred Mitsia join her in her thriving fruit and vegetable business (she later worked with her mother as a bookkeeper), but it was a matter of pride for Mitsia to stand on her own feet financially. Art was a constant presence in their lives. Mitsia commissioned a large fresco for Sam’s room from a fellow student, which he vividly remembers to this day as “a landscape with clouds, birds, and some jolly figures.”8 Another aesthetic impulse came from a vase in his parents’ living room, filled with cubistic flowers forged in Bakelite. The visual experience of this three-dimensional design helped lead the boy to the realization that an object can be a symbol of another reality. At the age of four, he began to be conscious of perspective. Mitsia owned a color reproduction of a painting of Saint George Slaying the Dragon by Paolo Uccello, a Florentine painter who had stood on the threshold between the medieval concepts of Good and Evil and the newly discovered Renaissance perspective that man is the measure of all things. As the picture was important to her, it had been hauled along to the family’s dacha during holidays. Frightened of it and exhilarated by it at the same time, Sam absorbed the figure of the valiant saint on his rearing horse, piercing the fearsome dragon with his long lance, the helpless lady in distress standing by in Gothic female powerlessness. At night the picture had a habit of coming to life to haunt the impressionable young Samek and had

to be carefully covered. In the osmotic process from reality to creativity, the picture became an indelible part of Bak’s earliest visual stimulants. Another prototype of his visual memory was an engraving in the home of his grandparents, Chayim and Rachel, which remained so vivid in his mind’s eye that he could describe it many years later as if standing in front of it: A whole battle scene is contained in a gilded frame of considerable thickness and is hanging over the bed. The soldiers, their uniforms and the stains of their blood are as grey as the sky over their heads. Bulging grey clouds, which look more like a heavy smoke that has escaped from invisible stacks, float above a darkening horizon. The scene is made out of a myriad of tiny black lines. The beautiful horses, the dying men’s faces, their uniforms as well as all the other details of the picture, are made of fine, tiny stripes. They are engravings, though I do not yet understand the process.9 Fragments of this picture appear in Bak’s later paintings, as do the brick walls of the light brown, peeling façade of the building where Chayim and Rachel lived. One of the hobbies of his weekly visits with Khone and Shifra was paging through a book of portraits of the Russian czars. He was most impressed by the figure of Catherine the Great, who later reincarnated into the haughty, murderous queen in Bak’s chess paintings. The book also contained a reproduction of the painting by Ilya Repin of Ivan The Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November (1581), in which the crazed czar has just murdered his son and holds him in his arms, his face a mask of horror, his eyes the epitome of despair. Years earlier, Khone had taken a detour on his return trip home as a soldier in World War I to view the original painting in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. He later conveyed to Sam his emotional experience of the original and spoke to him about the mysterious chemistry transmitted from a work of art to the soul of the viewer. He said to his grandson, “Samounia, you will have to study these secrets when you grow up.”10 Bak would fulfil this mandate; indeed, his paintings have a pulsating life of their own and an inexplicable way of representing a living counterpart to the viewer.

VILNA: “JERUSALEM OF THE NORTH” Poland and Lithuania both claimed Vilna after World War I, then Polish forces officially occupied the city in 1920. It was known as the “Jerusalem of the North,” and with nearly 100,000 Jewish residents (about 45% of the city’s total population), it was a hub of Jewish life and home to a plethora of social, religious, cultural, and scientific organizations. There were vastly diverse

affiliations which ranged from a strict Orthodox community with its famous Yeshivot (Talmud academies) to ultra-secular movements, in which the salvation of Jews was envisioned by their assimilation with the Christian culture. Sam’s uncles, Shifra’s sons, attended Hebrew school in the mornings and partook in meetings of the Hashomer Hatzair (the secular Zionist socialist youth movement) in the afternoons. The Bundists constituted another socialist movement, to which Sam’s grandfather Chayim passionately belonged and to which his grandmother Rachel equally passionately and most resolutely did not.11 Vilna also had a Yiddish speaking worker’s movement with a socialist, secularist, anti-Zionist orientation. The intellectual climate was filled with sizzling debate. The Yiddish sector was largely non-religious, its members belonging to the working class.12 Vilna was also known for its prominent literati, among them the poets Shmerke Kaczerginski (1908-1954) and Avraham Sutzkever (1913-2010) who founded the Yung-Vilne (Young Vilna) literary society. Later, in the Vilna Ghetto, they would become Bak’s “gurus” and have a fateful impact on his life and art. The city was endowed with outstanding Jewish educational institutions such as Jewish, Hebrew, and Yiddish practical gymnasiums. Central to its vital cultural ferment was the Strashun Library, founded in 1902 by Mattityahu Strashun. With its vast literary treasures, it became Bak’s spiritual home as soon as he was able to read. He absorbed the literature of western culture from the Greeks to the present, from The Iliad and The Odyssey to writings by the great child educationist Janusz Korczak (pseudonym for Henryk Goldszmit). Bak marveled at the illustrations in Korczak’s children’s books King Matt the First, Kaytek the Wizard, and Little King Matty and the Desert Island, which Korczak wrote in addition to his ground-breaking works on child psychology.

VILNA: CENTER OF FINE ART During the 19th century, a throbbing creative impulse erupted among the Jews of Eastern Europe against the current of two almost insurmountable impediments. One was the dictate of the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make for yourself a graven image,”13 and the second was the fact that Jews were barred from attending art schools and art academies in the notoriously antisemitic Russian Empire. Despite this situation, Vilna had produced one of the greatest sculptors of the Russian Empire, Mark (Mordechai) Antokolsky. Although he was Jewish, he was allowed to study at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg after the wife of Vilna’s Governor General, who was impressed by his work, introduced him to a Russian baroness she knew. His sculptures were so impressive that

he was elected to the Russian Council of the Academy of Arts. Like the painter Ilya Repin, Antokolsky executed portraits of the czars with profound humanism and perception. The czars admired his work and promoted him, causing jealousy among his Russian fellow artists, especially after the horrors of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903.14 As a result of hostility towards him on the part of Christians—and fellow Jews (for whom his sculptures were not deemed “Jewish enough”)—Antokolsky went to Paris where he worked and taught until the end of his life. His sculpture Ecce Homo (Behold the Man; 1878) is a statue of Jesus represented as a Jew with payot (sidelocks) and wearing a yarmulke (skull cap). Antokolsky meant to convey with this figure that the persecution of his people was a perversion of Christ’s teachings. The subject of Jesus as a Jew suffering with his people was later taken up by artists such as Marc Chagall and Samuel Bak.15 One of the few institutions under the time of Russian rule which accepted Jewish art students at the turn of the 20th century was the Vilna School of Drawing, under the directorship of Pyotr Trutnev. Here the students received a thorough art training and were familiarized with both Old Masters and contemporary European art movements. One of its students was Boris Schatz, who later became the founder of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, where Bak would one day study.16 The death of Pyotr Trutnev brought the end of the Vilna School of Drawing, which shut its doors in 1916. The next generation of art students attended the very traditional Vilna Academy of Art, but many, including Bak’s mother, opted for private art education. Bak belongs to the third generation of modern artists from Vilna, but as his formative years fell into a time of cataclysmic upheaval, his development as an artist followed a path of its own. When her young son, aged four, showed a precocious talent for drawing, Mitsia saw it as her obligation to devote all her creative energy to cultivating his art. She was doubly reassured when his talent was recognized by Shifra’s brother, Arno Nadel, after Shifra sent him some of Bak’s earliest watercolors and pencil drawings. Nadel was a prominent artist and part of the circle of the Berlin Expressionists. He was a playwright, a poet, a musicologist of very high standing, and a composer of sublime synagogue music. Today his compositions are performed in Berlin, specifically in the Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue. His paintings echo the style of Arnold Schoenberg’s haunting portraits,17 some of which embellished Shifra’s walls and echoes of which can be seen in Bak’s early pencil drawings. He replied to Shifra in a handwritten letter: “Do not bother the child with trivia. Leave him alone. For little Samek, it is only KUNST, KUNST und KUNST [ART, ART and ART]. Allow the child to become what he already is.”18 This decree from the great professor shaped the attitude of the family towards the child and

Arno Nadel’s advice was followed with rigorous single-mindedness.

DESCENT INTO THE ABYSS Meanwhile the political situation in Vilna became alarming. In September 1939, Germany launched an unprovoked attack on Poland. Within weeks, victims of a strategy of massive and concentrated surprise attacks termed blitzkrieg (lightning war), the Polish army was defeated and Nazi Germany officially occupied a portion of Poland.19 Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jews of Eastern Europe, whom he regarded as untermenschen (racially or socially inferior), was formulated later, in 1941. Bak’s home at No. 10 Wilenska Street was inundated with people in need of his father’s dental treatment, telling tales of horror that were verified by broadcasts from the family’s hidden radio. Most of them were on their way to or from Kovno (Kaunas), where the Japanese vice-consul Chiune Sugihara, in disobedience to his official mandate, saved Jewish lives by issuing visas to enable them to flee Europe. On September 19, 1939, Vilna was occupied by the Red Army. A month later, on October 29, in a baffling political twist, Russia returned Vilna to Lithuania, declaring it as the capital and changing its name from Vilna to Vilnius. Just a few months later, in August 1940, Stalin retracted this move and Lithuania was once again integrated into the USSR. The erection of his giant cast stone statue, with his outstretched hand heroically pointing to a magnificent future, was avidly watched by Sam, who had no inkling of what was actually happening. He had to attend a Russian-run public school in which students were saturated with communist propaganda, but after only one day of this educational brainwashing his mother removed him, claiming his weak bronchial condition as a certifiable excuse. The citizens of what was now Vilnius endured these political somersaults as best they could and entered survival mode. After a Russian army general confiscated Shifra and Khone’s apartment, the couple came to live with Chayim and Rachel. Their daughter Yetta, who together with her husband and baby Tamara had been living with them, went to the family’s dacha in the countryside. There, they were joined for a while by Sam, who enjoyed this life in nature and got up to his fair share of mischief. At one point, a Soviet colonel moved into a room in the Bak family home. There were benefits, such as his gifts of rare culinary delicacies in a time of dire food shortages. But he also had an unwelcome eye on Mitsia, which unsettled Jonas and elicited fits of nervous coughing from Sam to interrupt delicate situations. The colonel pulled strings to secure work for Jonas, less

as an act of kindness than to get him out of the house. Jonas was appointed head of the Red Army state railway company’s dental services, which meant a decent income and an exquisite uniform, deftly tailored in Chayim’s shop. The Russian colonel was soon transferred, to his great disappointment but everyone else’s relief. On June 22, 1941, Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression and launched Operation Barbarossa, invading the Soviet Union in pursuit of Lebensraum (a territory sought by a state or nation for its natural development) and with the resolve to render the whole of Eastern Europe Judenrein (cleansed of Jews). The first chords of the “Death Fugue” were struck and from then on Death, “the master from Deutschland,”20 was on the march. In the wake of the army, the SS Einsatzgruppen death squads rounded up Jews in towns and villages, conducting mass shootings and burials in mass graves in forests close to the towns. On June 24, 1941, the Germans occupied Lithuania. From then on, the Jews of Vilna became statesanctioned fair game. In the process of driving them from their homes into ghettoes and robbing them of their belongings (the servants looting what remained), the Nazis tested the waters, gauging how far they could go in the eyes of the world. When after each atrocity the world showed no reaction, Hitler proceeded to his next move. Bak’s family lived in helpless fear. He was eight years old, still shielded from reality, delighted to be moved to his parents’ bedroom to make room for Jewish refugees. He heard hushed conversations without understanding what was said, still feeling sheltered and secure. Then suddenly Jonas was imprisoned in a labor camp where he had to cut turf. Soon, real hunger came. At home, facilitated by the family’s Russian housekeeper Xenia, Jonas’ tuxedo was traded for a burlap sack filled with potatoes, an untold luxury by now. A few months remained before the next phase confronted Bak with naked reality, and he explains that “…dark clouds were entering my soul, to emerge one day as metaphors in my art. The resulting paintings became a way of blending my personal need for elegy with the eternally difficult question: Why?”21

THE CATACLYSM The months leading to the end of 1941 passed in such turmoil that the chronological sequence of events became blurred in hindsight. Horror first unfolded in the month of September 1941. Khone and Chayim were queuing in the street for bread when they were captured by a Lithuanian thug who received 10 rubles for each person he identified as a Jew and delivered to the Nazis to be murdered. Khone, the wonderful, mischievous, imaginative precision mechanic and inventor

of original devices, the lover of bird song and music, and Chayim, the socialist intellectual who wanted to make the world a better place, were transported to the edge of a mass grave at the Ponary forest and shot. At some point Shifra and Rachel were driven to a ghetto in Vilna, known as Ghetto #2, to which mainly elderly Jews were deported. Nothing is known about their circumstances inside the ghetto until October 1, the day of Yom Kippur 1941 (10 Tishrei 5702), when in a conspicuously cynical act by the Nazis, Shifra and Rachel were transferred from Ghetto #2 to the Ponary forest to the edge of one of the several open mass graves and told to undress. There they were shot dead, joining their husbands and tens of thousands of other Jews. Throughout his life, Bak has wondered: Were they together at the end? Did they give each other comfort? Did they die immediately or did they suffer? In his painted memorials to them, he captures the artifacts of his childhood memories connected with each of them. Utter pandemonium had unfolded in Vilna. Mitsia and Sam had no contact with Jonas, nor with either set of grandparents, and they were unaware of any of their fates. Jews were forced to wear armbands and a yellow star, patched to their clothes. They were forbidden to use the sidewalks. Days were defined by terrible fear, mother and son peering apprehensively through the edge of their curtains. Then it happened: Lithuanian policemen knocked at their door. Sam tucked his beloved teddy bear carefully under a blanket and said goodbye. He never saw the teddy bear again, but it appeared many years later in his art as a metaphor for the children whose lives had been so cruelly interrupted. The teddy bears in his paintings are shrouded and blindfolded to prevent them from seeing the horrific reality around them. Mitsia hurried to his room to pick up his pillow before they were forced outside. It was pouring rain. With thousands of other Jews, they were marched to Vilna Ghetto #1. On the way Sam’s pillow got soaked and became too heavy to carry. Mitsia allowed him to discard it and it was trampled underfoot in the street by the crowd inching forward. In his memory, the pillow became a living shroud, a metaphor for the throng moving towards their destiny within a “landscape of indifference.”22 In the ghetto, they were confronted with unimaginable scenes. Crowds of people staggered around, uprooted and bewildered. A wife yelled at her husband because he had forgotten their house keys, as others laughed at this with bitter cynicism. A man hanged himself from a banister in the stairwell. Disruption and chaos filled the overcrowded, narrow walls. Finding a little space on the floor, Mitsia and Sam sank down in their exhaustion and slept.

FLIGHT TO JANINA’S After a few hours of sleep, Mitsia got up. Mitsia’s survival instinct took over and with Sam in tow she found her way out of the ghetto, walking surreptitiously on the side streets in the direction of the home of Khone’s sister, Aunt Janina. As a teenager, and under unfortunate circumstances, Janina had fled the home of her Jewish employers and been adopted by a pious Roman Catholic couple who had her baptized as a Christian and given her a Catholic upbringing in the Benedictine convent of St. Catherine. She grew up under the loving care of the nuns, and though she later married a prominent Catholic man (a nephew of the Bishop of Warsaw), she resumed contact with her Jewish family.23 When the refugees arrived at Janina’s house, she immediately took them in. However, the presence of her Jewish family endangered her own life and that of her two sons, so Mitsia and Sam could not stay. Janina took them to her alma mater, the convent of St. Catherine, imploring the Mother Superior to shelter them. The abbess, the righteous Sister Maria Mikulska, and a very small number of nuns “in the know” put their own lives at risk to protect them. This incredible act of bravery not only went against the decrees of the Nazi occupiers but defied an unwritten ordinance of the Catholic church, reaching up all the way to the taciturn Pope Pius XII, who as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (when Nuncio to Bavaria) had been an ardent admirer of the Führer.

HIDING IN THE BENEDICTINE CONVENT OF ST. CATHERINE In their hiding place Mitsia and Sam were soon joined by Mitsia’s younger sister, Yetta, her husband Yasha, and finally by Jonas when he managed to escape the labor camp. The nuns shared their sparse food rations and daily life assumed a routine. Sam’s name was changed to Zygmunt, with the diminutive Zygmus, which sounded less “Jewish” and more Nordic than “Samuel” and was thus safer. Aunt Janina performed an emergency baptism under this name—anything to save his life—and Zygmunt was instructed in the Catholic religion by Sister Maria. These lessons remain imprinted in Bak’s memories. (“The nuns taught me how to be a good Catholic.”)24 They also contributed to his visual enrichment. He was shown a copy of the New Testament illustrated with engravings, which he wrote “abounded with images of God, Jesus, the holy virgin, and many saints and martyrs, created by a genius of a Frenchman called Gustave Doré. His wild imaginings, packed with detail and realism, passion and love for the macabre, nourished my impregnable imagination.”25 The gruesome detail of a full-figured Jesus after his flagellation, painted on wood and morbidly embellishing the corridor to their hiding place, made a lasting impression on him. He found

great solace in the stories about angels, who felt very real to the traumatized child with his recent experiences of deathly fear, violence, and his own powerlessness. They consoled him and he was sure that they would save him. The saints re-emerged much later in Bak’s iconography, such as the figure of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows. Eight months after they arrived, the Nazis occupied the convent. The family spent three days without food hiding in the ceiling, which they had reached by a trapdoor that Jonas and Yasha had had the foresight to construct. They then made the perilous flight in the freezing cold back to the Vilna Ghetto #1, while the nuns and the priest were taken to a labor camp to endure untold hardships.

RETURN TO THE GHETTO When asked how he could bear all these horrific experiences, Bak replied that for him, the time was not one uninterrupted sequence of horrors. In fact, his memories of his second stay in the Vilna Ghetto contain some positive interludes. He had a wonderful private teacher, Rokhele Sarovsky, who opened his mind to the world of learning. She introduced him to, and shared his drawings with, the two famous Yiddish poets, Avraham Sutzkever26 and Shmerke Kaczerginski. Initially they could not believe that these drawings could have been made by an 8-year-old boy, but soon they took him under their wings. Kaczerginski, under the administration of an Einsatzleiter (Operations Manager) of Alfred Rosenberg’s, had been assigned to work in the sorting of looted books of Jewish culture. Rosenberg’s operation, named the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg), was established by Hitler to seize Jewish cultural properties in the occupied territories.27 Everything of Jewish cultural value was pillaged—art works, books, musical instruments, stamp collections, historical manuscripts, Torah scrolls and their covers, breast plates and crowns. The most precious objects were intended for a museum in Linz, Austria, envisioned by the Führer in his genocidal mania to chronicle the magnitude of his success in extinguishing the whole of the Jewish race. In his role at the ERR, Kaczerginski had found and furtively stolen the Pinkas, a precious leather-bound register of entries of the Jewish community of Vilna which dated back to the middle of the 19th century. Kaczerginski’s priceless find had some blank pages at the back. As paper was scarce in the ghetto, the two poets solemnly presented the Pinkas to Sam and asked him to fill the blank pages with his drawings of whatever came to his mind.28 And he did. Bak covered these pages with sketches, practicing his draftsmanship, doing visual exercises to acquire the means to express himself artistically, copying illustrations from books he found in the ghetto library, and developing his own craftsmanship.

Under the tutorship of the two poets, Bak became introduced to some of the art world’s riches. Kaczerginski and Sutzkever gave him two illustrated monographs which would form the basis of his images, one a collection of early works by Marc Chagall and the other on the painter Leonid Pasternak.29 Sam, who for many days was constrained to sleeping on the floor of a muchcrowded room, remarked, sticking out from under a tattered carpet, the corner of an abandoned postcard which someone among the now murdered inhabitants of the flat had received from Italy. It depicted Michelangelo’s Moses (1513-1515) in the Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli. He furtively tucked it into his pocket next to a holy card of Jesus pointing to his bleeding heart. Looking at the Moses on the postcard he decided to channel Michelangelo and shape his own Moses in bits of clay smuggled in for him from outside the ghetto by friends of his parents. While the biblical Moses led the Israelites from slavery to freedom, Bak’s Moses would lead the Jewish people out of the ghetto. Already at this early age, Bak saw his works as living entities, a notion that remains to the present day. To shape his Moses was an arduous task. His material did not behave in the steadfast manner of Michelangelo’s Carrara marble. It became riddled with cracks in the shaping process and had to be repeatedly moistened and repaired. When the seated, horned statue was completed at last, it was presented to Jacob Gens, the unfortunate head of the ghetto’s Jewish government who was shot dead by the Gestapo on September 14, 1943. The sculpture of Moses disappeared but was later resurrected in works of art such as a pencil drawing from 1944. During this time, Bak was given a collection of 50 postcards depicting art treasures of the Louvre, works by Leonardo (the Mona Lisa), Rembrandt, Vermeer (The Lacemaker), Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, and Gericault (The Raft of the Medusa). They had belonged to Jews who had visited France and, as Bak cynically put it, “…were now, alas, at rest in the wood of Ponary.”30 The images on the postcards were reproduced in browns and ochres and constituted his basic material on the Old Masters. He was told “…that these postcards were TRUE ART, and that one day I would surely join the ranks of these remarkable gentlemen.”31 In the distant future he would see the original paintings in the Louvre and be stunned by the differences in scale and color between the postcards and the originals.

AN OFFICIAL LAUNCH INTO THE ART WORLD In 1943, encouraged by Sutzkever, Kaczerginski, and Sarovsky—who arranged for him to participate in his first group exhibition with approximately 20 drawings—he was officially launched into the world of art. The works were hung in the foyer of a small theater that happened to be within the zone of the ghetto, where Jewish cultural life continued as a spiritual

bulwark against the desperate reality of existence. It was opened in the presence of both his parents, his teacher, and the two poets. Some of these drawings are today in the collection of the Samuel Bak Museum in Vilnius. With this exhibition the boy, aged only 9, displayed an amazing artistic maturity. His portrait and figure drawings and an interior of a claustrophobic ghetto cell with bunk beds reveal an acute sense of perspective. The drawing entitled Reading Chekhov depicts a man with a top hat wearing a monocle, who himself could be a character of the great Russian writer whose story he absorbs with intense concentration. He is standing before a table, deeply immersed in his perusal. A quiet desperation is expressed in the figure drawing of himself in a semi-fetal position. Some of his portraits exude an astonishing vibrancy, such as the Pipe Smoker, rendered in half profile. The lines of his wrinkles echo the black hair strands above his strikingly alert and thoughtful eyes. A sketch brimming with wry humor is that of Avl Pikt, a man standing astride self-importantly, well pruned with moustache, posh suit, and cap, holding his walking stick behind his back, ready for the world. A landscape with a man, woman, and child standing under a tree on the top of a high cliff, with a straight road leading to the far distant horizon, is filled with the metaphoric intensity that would later become a hallmark of Bak’s oeuvre. The remarkable drawings of his first exhibition exude a sense of humor and absurdity, and a certain optimism which is specific to Bak’s nature. They are almost entirely devoid of the mood of desperation that permeated the life around him in the ghetto. Sarovsky wanted to introduce Bak to a relative of hers who was a young, established artist. She hoped that he would become Bak’s mentor. When they went to visit him in his room, however, he was not there. Instead, they found an unfinished drawing on an easel and his aged aunt, with whom he shared the room, standing and weeping as she showed it to them. He had been taken by the police while he was busy with the drawing. By the time they arrived he was probably already dead, but the abandoned drawing is etched into Bak’s memory: It was the drawing of a boy sitting at a table. He looked at the viewer with the old aunt’s eyes. His hand was trying to touch a crumb of bread or perhaps a little stone that had been deposited near a white cup. The cup was on a saucer. Emerging behind the cup’s rim was the erect handle of a teaspoon. The boy wore an oversized cap. It ballooned over his head as if it would have liked to fly away, possibly taking him along. Its visor cast a shadow that accentuated the white of his eyes. Their sad expression was perplexed and inquisitive. His little coat, a turmoil of black shapes, looked worn and

crumpled. The turbulence continued in the wall’s peelings and cracks, the only things visible behind the boy’s figure. It was a much distressed surface. Only the perfectly immaculate white cup comfortably centered on its saucer and the erect handle of the spoon radiated something of a serene assurance, as if they were the ghostly signs of an impossible dream.32 Bak absorbed the figure of the boy and the white cup and teaspoon, icons of domestic peace within a disintegrating world that reappear in his later metaphorical still lifes, sometimes with the cup broken, weeping, or bleeding, and the spoon curled up in desperate deformity. Though Bak has forgotten the artist’s name, his memory lives on in Bak’s paintings. The interrupted work of this nameless young artist was thus turned into “… an art that managed to save itself from oblivion by generating images in the mind and work of another artist.”33 In Bak’s work, this artist becomes fused with the Warsaw Ghetto boy and the memory of his best friend and namesake, Samek Epstein, whose fate was Bak’s first personal experience of death.

SAMEK EPSTEIN Samek was Sam’s closest childhood friend. They were the same age and shared the same name and its Polish diminutive. They played together, conjuring up imaginary games that vacillated between fantasy and reality, and they were tied to each other by a deep bond. Their mothers, Mitsia and Mania, were also close friends. During pre-war weekends, the families would socialize together at their different homes, both boys dressed in their “smart” going out clothes and playing while the adults had tea. As the grownups chatted, the two small Sameks would creep under the table and observe the world from ground level, sheltered by the tablecloth in their own secret universe, watching the adults’ feet and listening to lively and anxious conversations that they luckily did not understand. So absorbed were they that they often missed the housekeeper Xenia’s shoes shuffling towards them to convey to the table her masterpiece, a fancy cake whose secret recipe was never shared, her weapon of power in the hierarchical structure of the household. Their childhood idyll was abruptly ended by a time of terror for the Jews. The Epsteins endeavored to save their son’s life by entrusting him to their Polish maid, who found a hiding place for him. But the Nazis discovered it, pulled little Samek out of his shelter and shot him dead, leaving him lying in the pool of his blood as an example for anyone else foolish enough to

try to hide their children. At first Sam was sheltered from the truth and told that Samek could not come to play with him anymore. Slowly he began to suspect that Samek was dead and when he finally learned the truth, that Samek had been killed, shot dead like so many other Jewish people, he was assured that one does not feel anything when this happens, one just goes to sleep. The shock and mourning took hold of him in stages, and it was still some time before he became aware of the nature of the persecution of Jews. In his drawing Samek-7, Bak fuses Samek, the Vilna Ghetto artist, and the Warsaw Ghetto boy together with an iconic reference to Jesus and the stigmata as an homage to all the lost children.

1943: KARL PLAGGE AND THE HKP 562 Major Karl Plagge was a Nazi staff officer who surreptitiously worked the system to save as many Jews as he could. When he realized that the Vilna Ghetto would soon be “liquidated” (one of those beautiful sounding euphemisms for mass murder in the Nazi vocabulary), he set up the Heereskraftfahrpark (Army Motor Vehicle Repair Park; HKP) 562 Forced Labor Camp and issued official work permits to Jewish men of his choice, assuring his superiors that their skills were vital for the German war effort. He convinced them that the presence of their wives and children was advantageous for this important work and assured them that these men would be more efficient if they had their families close to them. Of the only 2,000 Jews that survived from the original 100,000 living in pre-war Vilna, over 200 were saved by Major Plagge, who was later recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations and whose name is engraved on the gates of many military institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the Vilna Ghetto, Plagge noticed Jonas’s skills and versatility. Jonas was trained as a dental technician, because as a Jew he was barred from earning his doctor’s degree and becoming a full-fledged dentist. Major Plagge selected him to work in the HKP 562 Forced Labor Camp in a technical unit of three hundred outstanding mechanics, welders, and automotive specialists, all tasked with transforming gasoline-powered engines into motors capable of running on energy elicited from burning wood. Not long after Jonas left on his new assignment, a huge truck covered in billowing exhaust fumes carried a dismal but grateful group of women and children in a memorable transport from the ghetto to the HKP 562 Camp. Mitsia and Sam were happily reunited with Jonas though they lived cooped up in a cell, sleeping in bunk beds in embarrassing physical proximity with another family. The allowance for his family to join him granted them a stay of their likely death sentence had they remained in the Vilna Ghetto. Life continued in the HKP 562 Camp under dire conditions, but the family at least was alive and

together. Sam chanced across a man whose job it was to print the signage that regulated camp life. This man won himself morsels of bread on the side by painting portraits of the families of his despised Nazi overseers. An aspiring artist himself, he had seen Bak’s works in the Vilna Ghetto exhibition and treated him with the respect of a fellow artist, presenting him with the extravagant gift of paper, cardboard, and pencils. Bak immediately began to draw from memory illustrations from the stories of Janusz Korczak, specifically King Matt the First, in which the title boy could render himself invisible. Bak did not know it at the time, but Korczak had been murdered a year earlier, on August 7, 1942, when he escorted the children of his Jewish orphanage from the Warsaw Ghetto to the umschlagplatz (collection point) and then to the extermination camp of Treblinka. He comforted and reassured them up to the last moment of their lives, perishing along with them. Mitsia was assigned to work in the women’s sewing section, mending and cleaning the bloodstained uniforms of dead soldiers to be recycled for the German army. For the inmates of the HKP 562 Forced Labor Camp this was proof that Germany was running out of means to sustain its crazy war. They just had to carry on with their effort to survive—hour by hour, day by day. During lunch, when the German overseers were having a break, Sam would visit his father in the workshop, where the welding and brazing of metal sheets was happening. Jonas, as was his nature, was taking very dangerous chances by engaging in little acts of sabotage, skillfully rendering certain parts of the mechanisms fragile, to compromise their durability. This had to be unnoticeable to the overseer. In the Vilna Ghetto, Bak knew about the disappearance of Jews because of the dwindling number of residents. But their murders (like that of his friend, Samek) were referred to in euphemisms, hints, and rumors. Terror and fear were constantly in the air. In the HKP 562 Forced Labor Camp, he became a witness himself to gruesome scenes of murder and death. He saw the hanging and shooting to death of an entire family—a father, mother, and their teenage son—who had tried to escape from the camp. Bak experienced the event from inside his cell, vainly clutching the Pinkas for comfort. His soul might have been damaged after witnessing such events, but daily life continued, the children playing clandestine games of Germans and Partisans, of hunters and hunted. Wounds had to be ignored. Life had to go on if one wanted to survive.

THE CHILDREN’S AKTION On March 27, 1944, trucks unexpectedly entered the camp. Whistles blew and the inmates were

given the order to bring all their children to an assembly for vaccination. Mitsia obediently took Sam’s hand to join the crowd in the camp yard. Suddenly her friend Slava Feigenberg, the wife of the camp doctor, stood before her. Holding Mitsia by the sleeve she pulled her into her corridor and together they ran and hid Sam in a storeroom filled with burlap sacks. They pushed him under a bed and covered him with tattered clothes. There were two other children in the hiding place, Slava’s daughter and a little boy. Then the sound of machine guns exploded, interspersed with pistol shots. All the assembled children were being mowed down. First came a deathly silence, then a frenzied wailing reverberated through the camp. The shock this unleashed in Bak, who had to keep silent, was unimaginable. How to find words to describe what he lived through during this time? Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer points out that there are no means to describe the horrors endured by those caught up in the catastrophe of the Shoah, who lived through it by accident rather than by their own doing. The constant fear of death happening all around, the gnawing hunger, the unimaginable scenes of unending terror, brutality, and human depravity—humans do not possess the tools to process such experiences.34

HIDING AND ESCAPE After the Aktion, Bak’s life was in danger from two sides: the Nazis on the one hand, and the bereaved mothers on the other, who in the madness of their grief might have torn him to pieces had they discovered that he was still alive. Now Jonas acted with brilliant forethought and precision. Since many women were murdered together with the children, it was advantageous for Mitsia to disappear. With a razor-sharp presence of mind, Jonas meticulously planned and carried out their escape. He gave Mitsia her white and red checkered headscarf and told her to flee to Janina then send someone to the camp with the scarf as a sign of recognition. Mitsia left in the middle of the night (miraculously undetected by the guards) while Jonas took Sam to a hiding place and left him alone, terribly frightened for his life and that of his parents. From early childhood, Bak found mechanisms to overcome dark moments and unbearable situations by re-channeling his thoughts and feelings. His family was endowed with a scathing sense of the macabre which could be cathartic in times of extreme stress and fear. Poet and writer Laima Vince defines this way of grappling with reality as the “irony of the absurd.”35 While crammed under a bed waiting for his rescue, he grappled with his bizarre and unimaginably terrifying circumstances by squeezing to death two bedbugs that were marching towards him on the cement floor. He felt a deep satisfaction from this ludicrous little act of resistance.

Simultaneously, he channeled an innate optimism, likely inherited from his father, and led his conscious mind to the feeling of relief that his father had wrapped a blanket around him and he did not have to feel the cold stone ground on which he lay. After many indescribable hours in his isolated hiding place, Jonas came to fetch him. Too cramped to be able to walk, Sam was carried to their cell by Jonas, who slid him under his bunk bed. There he remained in utter silence for another whole day, given only a bottle in which to relieve himself. Later he was slipped between his mattress and the wall, where he slept under the sound of the cries and sobs of the grieving mothers, which would not subside. The trauma of these days of anxiety, agony, and naked fear of death have never left him. Eventually, Janina’s housekeeper appeared outside the camp with the checkered scarf. Jonas came to the cell, his face drawn and black with stubble, carrying a patched-up burlap sack. He removed the yellow star from Sam’s jacket as Sam’s fingers were shaking too much to do this himself. Sam climbed into the sack and was hoisted on his father’s strong shoulders, and “bent in the form of a fetus I absorb the warmth that radiates from his back and with it a feeling of security.”36 Crouched in the burlap sack, as he was being smuggled out, Sam felt that life was being transmitted to him from his father. At this moment he was conscious of “a feeling of pregnancy.”37 The word “pear” in English is pronounced the same as the word père (father) in French, and indeed for Sam, “the pear does mean life.”38 With this memory the secret of the enigmatic pear, which first appears in Bak’s still lifes in 1967, may be partly revealed. With Sam hidden in the sack on his back, Jonas stood in line with other men carrying identical sacks filled with little blocks of wood. Then Jonas entered the barracks, put down the sack and waited. At a certain moment he carried the sack with Sam inside to a window, opened it and let him slide to the ground outside. Sam seems to remember hearing the word “run” or maybe he heard “do not run, walk slowly”—he is not sure. He stood up, started walking away towards the woman with the checkered scarf. Pretending to stroll leisurely side by side, they reached a waiting carriage and as the horses galloped towards Janina’s house the woman crossed herself repeatedly, entreating Jesus and Mary in frightened whispers. Bak realized that he had left the beloved Pinkas behind. It became in his mind a kapporeh, an expiatory offering to God, for being alive.39

LIVING AMONG THE BOOK STACKS

Because of the presence of her niece and her son, Janina and her family were again in grave danger. Their housekeeper regretted having carried out her task, although she had been well paid for it. Mitsia and Sam had to be hidden from her in Janina’s house and were under pressure to seek refuge elsewhere. Finding nothing, Mitsia made a decision. She would put an end to it all by drowning herself and her child. She ran from Janina’s house towards the bridge over the Vilya River, then stood there rigid, Sam next to her sensing a feeling of peril and desperation. Suddenly she grabbed his hand and ran on. She could kill herself but she could not kill her son, so just by existing he inadvertently and unknowingly saved her life. She momentarily remembered that Janina had uttered something about the nuns of St. Catherine having returned from the labor camp, so they crossed the bridge of the raging river, ran towards the convent, and knocked on the door. The door was opened (somehow temporarily unguarded) and there stood a nearly unrecognizable, haggard and emaciated Sister Maria Mikulska and Father Stakauskas, frantically signifying them to keep silent. Sam and Mitsia had to wait while the sister consulted the other families currently hiding, who after much hesitation agreed to allow the mother and son to join them. The convent, still occupied by Nazi soldiers, had meanwhile become the main depot for piles of manuscripts and rare books looted from Jewish families and institutions by the ERR.40 Within the enormous columns of books, piled along passages and rooms on the lower floor of the convent, three Jewish families who had survived the destruction of the Vilna Ghetto were hiding. They had made a tunnel through the piles and were tucked away behind the volumes, using them even as their bed stands. At night, Sister Maria brought them scraps of food and Father Stakauskas, together with additional rations in a time of extreme hunger, brought snippets of news from BBC broadcasts reporting that the Germans were losing the war. At night, they were permitted to use the toilet and take a shower. One night, Mitsia had a dream in which she saw Jonas with a huge black X covering his chest (the X in Bak’s works has since become a symbol of death). They lived like this for about two months, in almost total silence so as not to give themselves away to the German soldiers living above them. One day, the building was attacked by bombs and a fire broke out in the patio of the convent. The families emerged and were detected by the Lithuanian chief of the fire brigade who, while running to immediately report these “dirty kikes” to the Germans, himself came under fire and was killed in front of their eyes. They safely returned to their hiding place, remaining there until the liberation of Vilnius by the Red Army on July 13, 1944.

Even when the Germans knew that they were losing the war, the killing of Jews continued unabated. Just three days before Liberation, Jonas—the handsome, brilliant, elegant man who loved life and whose vitality, charisma, and athletic physique had been so admired by his son— was shot dead with his hands tied behind his back at the edge of the Ponary forest.

LIFE AFTER GENOCIDE There are no words to describe the trauma endured by the young Samek from the age of eight to the age of eleven. He experienced situations of extreme violence and stared into the cruel face of death many times over. He saw the tears and heard the wails of those left behind. He spent hours, days, and months in hiding. He witnessed murder. He lost his closest loved ones. His mother was on the verge of suicide and ready to take him along with her. He himself was targeted to be killed. In her doctoral thesis, Catharsis Through Memory, Laima Vince attempts to grasp the mental state of this highly gifted, extremely sensitive child after everything he had been through.41 In those times, there was neither psychiatric care, nor trauma counseling, nor any therapy available to him. Bak had seen humanity at its worst, and though he had managed to survive, his life had been utterly destroyed. Their home at No. 10 Wilenska Street had been looted to its bare walls and then confiscated by the Soviet military to be converted into an infirmary for the army. But stumbling along the streets of Vilna with his mother over the devastations of a war-littered city, past the corpses of German and Russian soldiers, he noticed people emerging alive from the rubble. And then, a miracle happened! Searching through an unofficial network of survivors, Mitsia located her beloved sister Yetta and her daughter Tamara (though after more searching for family members they found that Yasha had not survived). Their optimistic nature reviving, they were grateful to have found some sense of family and knew that life had to continue, survival had to continue, albeit under Communist rule. Mitsia, who would not succumb to grief or self-pity under any circumstances, found a job as a charwoman in a state-owned food store. She worked while Yetta cared for the children. They had enough to eat and lived in a room in a bombed-out flat in Vilna, organized for Mitsia by her Russian boss. Soon Mitsia was promoted from cleaning lady to part-time bookkeeper, and then to assistant manager of the food store. As a survivor she was aware that this situation was fraught with danger and she secretly filled out application forms to be able to leave the country. There was a scare when Bak was selected for a school for gifted children in Moscow on the prompting of

the well-intentioned Kaczerginski. He had survived (having fought as a partisan in the end) and found the Pinkas in the HKP 562 Camp. He lived in Vilna together with Sutzkever and was busy recording testimonies of the atrocities in the Vilna Ghetto and the Ponary forest, where the machine gunning of Jews (among them Sam’s grandparents and his father) had taken place. Mitsia had no intention of taking her son to Moscow, for she had decided like many survivors of the Shoah to emigrate to Palestine, which at that stage was still under British mandate. In her heart, she knew that it was her son’s destiny as an artist to give testimony. She focused on his art training, recognizing that the primary schools available to him were mediocre and he could receive formal schooling later, in Palestine. For the time being, she chose as Sam’s art teacher a theater designer who had impressed her deeply during her own art studies. Remembered by his surname, Makoynik was famous for making the most of a scene with the most limited of means. His art lessons were ill-suited for Sam, however, who was too young for Makoynik’s lectures on cultural history, prehistoric art, Greek drama, and stage design. Though he taught Sam little regarding painting technique, he did imprint on him the vital importance of the theater (a lesson recognized in hindsight that manifested later, in Tel Aviv, where he did stage designs for the Habima and Ohel Theaters). Only in retrospect would he value the lessons from Makoynik and the importance of the stage as an influence on his creative life. At the time he was terribly disappointed, writing how: The first lesson is about time and space. I sit on the edge of an uncomfortable chair. The walls are covered by photos of ancient ruins. Makoynik speaks of the Greek amphitheater, the use of masks. Euripides, Sophocles… he speaks and speaks and shows me pictures in a book or two.42 The teacher, too, was living in the aftermath of a terrible war and may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress, unable to show flexibility or empathize with a little boy wanting art lessons, paid for by his mother with food in a time of post-war hunger. Mitsia quickly moved him to a new teacher, Professor Zofia Serafinovicz. He adored her from the start and the feeling was mutual. He remembers every detail about her, her kind smile, the building in which she lived, partly damaged by bomb attacks, her large and well-lit room with two canvases from her final diploma at the Art Academy, the pell-mell of her furniture. He also loved her lessons, saying, “She was sweet, motherly and utterly devoted to my needs.”43 From the building façade of the art school where she taught she brought fragments of Greek and Roman statues destroyed by bombs, for him to draw. This taught him discipline in the basics

of the classical style but also marks a nascent understanding of the use of fragments in his art as a means of disruption.44 When he returned from his art classes, he found freedom again by painting watercolors. As little Tamara proved too fidgety a sitter, he did a brilliant portrait of Aunt Yetta in which he captured her lively features with amazing spontaneity. Professor Serafinovicz’ classical training led to portrait commissions in the style of the official Russian Realism, and she earned a decent living by being enlisted to serve the State with her art. Bak would help her fasten huge sheets on the floor on which she painted enormous outlines, parts of the colossal features of Soviet leaders such as Stalin, Lenin, and generals of the Russian army. The sheets were sewn together to form their complete countenances and to cover Vilna’s building façades (to which they were fastened by ropes originally meant as hangman’s nooses). One day Serafinovicz painted a portrait of Bak behind two branches of a flowering apple tree in a vase, as a gift to Mitsia. Bak noticed but did not understand his mother’s enigmatic smile upon receiving the gift, for in the painting she must have recognized the depth of the motherly feeling of the portraitist for her son. Little did they all know in that moment that their parting would be sudden and unexpected, and her loving portrait of him, together in a suitcase with some of Bak’s art, would be lost. She lingered in his memory, however, and later irrupted in Bak’s painting of the Warsaw Ghetto boy entangled in flowering branches, entitled David’s Shielding. While Mitsia worked, fully aware that they would never receive any communal support after their trauma (“parasites” were not tolerated in the Worker’s Paradise), Sam roamed around, uprooted, directionless, lonely, and isolated. He visited Sutzkever and Kaczerginski. When they wanted to show him the Pinkas, Bak refused to look at it, afraid that it would tear open his wounds beyond healing. He visited Slava Feigenberg, the woman who had saved his life during the Kinder Aktion, and Misha her husband, a doctor who would save his life again several times in the future. They too were filling in emigration forms and would soon leave Vilna to settle in Łódz, Poland. On the whole, Bak existed in a limbo and remembers that, “We survivors were badly equipped for loss and mourning.”45 Yetta, reluctantly given access by a sullen janitor to the storeroom of the ruined building of their former home, had found a set of candelabras with two winged angels that had originally belonged to Yasha’s mother Vera, then been brought down one floor to Shifra and Khone’s apartment after Yetta and Yasha had moved in with them.46 These angels stirred Bak’s memory of the convent and his lessons in Christianity, so he went to church, seeking solace in the Catholic religion. Before long, this religious inclination, not much supported by his mother, subsided. He

instead went to the cinema, where he absorbed idyllic propaganda films showing the Workers’ Paradise but also watched classic movies by the brilliant film producer Sergei Eisenstein.

A TRAINLOAD OF MIGRATORY BIRDS Without warning, life under Communism was interrupted. An order was put out for Mitsia’s arrest as a witness to a situation with her boss at the food shop. She decided that they had to leave Vilna clandestinely and in a great hurry. Sam packed his cardboard suitcase with his most treasured drawings and paintings, bringing some to Kaczerginski for safekeeping but not telling him why.47 Mitsia, who suffered from agonizing gall bladder attacks for which she was hospitalized twice, turned her illness into a means of escape. By forging a medical certificate on hospital stationary, she was able to miss work and buy the family the handful of hours they needed to reach the Polish border. The four family members left Vilna in a cattle car with their belongings: a small box spring, two suitcases, two pillows, a military blanket,and a baby bath of pots and pans. Together with others in the same plight, Bak describes that, “We were a trainload of migratory birds.”48 As the train began to move (to their utter relief), Mitsia whispered to Yetta that she had forgotten the precious candelabra in Vilna; tears running down her cheeks at the ridiculousness of the situation, Yetta broke into spasms of laughter so contagious the crowd of refugees squeezed into the cattle car began to smile. The train moved at a nerve-wrackingly slow pace through the countryside—the police on Mitsia’s tail—then suddenly stopped to make way for Red Army trains transporting military equipment. A five-hour trip to the border turned into four days of agony and fear—of intermittent moving and waiting, of Mitsia interminably smoking cigarettes. Russian soldiers appeared in search of strong men to help remove an obstacle from the railway lines, driving the passengers into a state of panic and fear. Russian policemen entered the car to check documents but were focused on army deserters. When they finally arrived at the border, their faces grimy with black smoke, they were met by Lithuanian policemen, an officer of the Red Army, and Polish border guards. In one of the most terrifying moments of their flight to the west, the Russian officer read out a list of names of people they were searching for. The family remained deadly quiet; their names were not on the list. The Polish guards rigorously examined their papers. With a stern glance at their scant belongings, they were allowed to pass and the train crossed into Poland. Their boundless relief could only be savored consciously much later, as the journey through Poland was also slow, punctuated by long delays during which they could thankfully buy grimy food from peasant peddlers.

To get to Łódz, the group had to change trains in Kutno in the middle of the night in the pouring rain with all their belongings, accompanied by Tamara’s wails. Their car was at the back of the very long train and they landed in a field, at a great distance to the train station. Drenched to the bones, puddles forming around them, Tamara and her teddy bear sopping wet, the baby bath and its contents filled with rainwater, Mitsia resolutely commanded, “take along the children, the suitcases, and the bundle. Forget the rest.”49 Sam bore all this with detached tranquility.

STOPOVER IN ŁÓDZ In Łódz, they sought out the Feigenbergs, who had left Vilna ahead of them and who welcomed them warmly, sharing with them their three-room flat. These were days of unimaginable luxury for Bak, complete with a porcelain-tiled bathroom and hot water. He wrote how “again we belonged to the human race.”50 Misha had found a position in the Polish health administration and was working as a surgeon in the local hospital. Afraid of becoming a burden to her gracious hosts, Mitsia accepted only five days of their generous hospitality then rented a flat in a run-down building which doubled as a multi-storied chicken run for the animals that fed the residents. It was all she could afford. Now it was Mitsia’s turn to care for the children while Yetta earned an income in the black-market clothing trade. A fashionable wardrobe for the two sisters soon materialized, and some of these fine pieces of clothing appear years later in Bak’s paintings of the women. Bak was sent to a school where his excellent Polish was both a benefit (he performed brilliantly) and a detriment. Soon the designation kike resounded jealously from fellow pupils. Poland had by no means shed its rabid antisemitism. Mitsia took him out of the school and assigned him to the studio of Professor Adam Richtarski for painting classes. Richtarski initiated their lessons with a swift dressing down of Bak’s beloved teacher, Serafinovicz, saying “when I see these samples of his great talent, I can immediately tell you that this poor child fell into the hands of an academic moron. Of course, the provinciality of Vilno comes through, it doesn’t surprise me…”51 Mitsia swallowed the insult diplomatically and Sam found Richtarski’s atelier “a true paradise.”52 For the first time in his life, Bak worked in an artist’s studio together with other art students. He felt at home with them, picked up color and graphic techniques, and was introduced to modern movements from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Abstract Art. Richtarski made him practice still life composition and instructed him in gouache

and watercolor. Richtarski strove to teach his pupils to trust their intuition, which they lived out while smoking in front of their canvases. Bak’s paintings from this period would be lost but his paintings and drawings in the DP camp in Landsberg reflect the thorough tutorship of Richtarski, to whom he feels greatly indebted. Unfortunately, his stopover in this relative paradise only lasted for three months, during the summer of 1945. Yetta’s dealership on the black market was becoming dangerous and again they had to move on quickly. Mitsia applied for papers from the Brichah, an underground Jewish organization established in January 1945 by Abba Kovner which expedited the smuggling of Jews out of Soviet-occupied Poland. She hoped to get to Berlin, where they might find her uncle, Arno Nadel. The period of waiting seemed to Mitsia and Yetta to last an eternity. It was incredibly difficult to secure these papers and train tickets, and just as they were at last prepared to leave, Tamara came down with mumps. Sam and Mitsia were talked into leaving anyway by an admirer of Yetta, who would later become her husband and Tamara’s devoted second father. The Brichah requested they take an orphaned girl with them to her family in Berlin. Leaving Yetta and Tamara behind, Mitsia, Sam, and the girl boarded the train and experienced the luxury of traveling in a passenger carriage instead of a cattle car. An unforeseen peril awaited them at the Polish-German border, as the papers issued by the Brichah had meanwhile been declared illegal and an order to stop all passengers had been wired to the border police. Still today, there is no explanation why the Russians tried to hinder the flow of Jewish refugees to the West. The train came to a halt and both the Russian and Polish police opened the doors and shouted: “Everybody out!”53 Mitsia knew instinctively that this meant trouble and her survival skills kicked in once again. She took the two children, exited on the other side of the train, and ran forward with them and the suitcases, towards the engine. She poured a torrent of Polish words over the bewildered engine driver and handed him her watch, glittering in the night. He led them to a wagon, pushed them into its pitch-dark interior, and closed the door. They were assaulted with a stench of vodka and vomit and could discern the sound of giggling. Asked by a booming male voice what they were doing there, Mitsia explained in fluent Russian that they were put into this car by mistake. The train started to roll, and though they were out of danger, they were in a very messy situation which she tried to hide from the children. At the next stop, they walked back to their former wagon, emptied of their previous fellow passengers. Mitsia’s quick thinking, multilingualism, and resourcefulness had once again saved them.

BERLIN INTERLUDE In the ruins of the bombed-out city of Berlin, Mitsia found the girl’s family with great difficulty then searched for Arno Nadel and his wife, wondering whether they had survived but soon learning that they had not. In 1938, Nadel was incarcerated by the Nazis in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in the north of Berlin, a camp of unimaginable brutality imprisoning Jews and German intellectuals who at the beginning of the Third Reich were critics of the Nazi regime. They were forced to assemble in the snow for hours, served as human experiments, or were tortured to death for pleasure then burned by incendiaries. Hell knew no fury than the madness that reigned in this camp. After his release from Sachsenhausen, Arno Nadel did not have the emotional or physical strength to leave Germany, even when he was given the opportunity to do so. Instead, in 1943 (two years after his sister, Shifra, her husband Khone, and Sam’s other two grandparents Chayim and Rachel, were shot dead in the Ponary forest), Arno—the great composer of synagogue and cantorial music, the poet, artist, and philosopher—and his wife Beate Anna, were rounded up from their Berlin home and marched to a train heading for Auschwitz. There they were both murdered. Mitsia was shattered by the news. But she had to carry on. She wanted to reach the American zone at Berlin-Tempelhof, then find their way to the south to Bavaria, where Jewish survivors were gathering in DP camps. They were interviewed by a military rabbi to prove that they were Jewish, as German imposters were claiming Judaism to escape capture. This well-intentioned questioning greatly upset Mitsia, who lost her cool and showered words of anger in Russian upon the man in an American officer’s uniform. Sam sat by quietly hoping the rabbi did not understand at least the Russian part of her verbal torrent. At last, they were admitted to the American zone, welcomed by a dousing with DDT powder. Officials in the camp feared typhus, which was spread by lice and endemic in the overcrowded displaced persons camps of Eastern Europe. No exception was made for Mitsia and Sam, even though neither had had been in any of these camps. An adventurous journey to South Germany’s American zone followed. First, they boarded a filthy truck driven by two Americans who, when they weren’t speeding over the war-ravaged road, lay underneath the decrepit vehicle, fixing it. For the first time in his life, Sam saw bubble gum. In Hannover they were talked into changing their mode of transport by what turned out to be money smugglers who padded Sam with bank notes. On arrival in Kassel, they were abandoned by the smugglers but rewarded by getting to keep a few notes. They waited three days in a huge crowd trying to board a train to Munich and then

were swindled into boarding a carriage which was unhooked just outside the city. After much panic, a truck picked them up, together with other refugees, and took them to Munich. In the chaos of this exchange just outside Kassel, they lost their luggage, including the cardboard suitcase which contained the cherished portrait of Sam painted by Professor Serafinowicz and a selection of his best art works completed in post-liberation Vilna. The works he had entrusted to Shmerke Kaczerginski before their hasty departure to Poland, now housed in the Samuel Bak Museum in Vilnius, had mercifully been saved. The works he had completed in Professor Richtarski’s art school in Łódz, which were to form the basis of his future work, were lost forever. In retrospect, Bak wonders whether the loss of this suitcase may perhaps have been a good thing and that it may have freed him from a certain psychological burden. As it happened, it was the tabula rasa of his early art that left him nothing to base his future work on except the images he carried in his memory. He would have to start all over again.

INTERRUPTED 2017 Oil on canvas 12 x 12 inches BK2319 Bak’s early encounters in his grandparents’ books with portraits of the imperious Catherine the Great later manifest in his chess pieces.

FOR THE EARLY MORNING 2017 Oil on canvas 12 x 12 inches BK2328 Bak’s early encounters in his grandparents’ books with portraits of the imperious Catherine the Great later manifest in his chess pieces.

PERSISTENCE II 2002-2006 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 63 inches Literary treasures from Vilna’s Strashun Library, which for the young Bak were a source of pleasure, become physical foundations for ravaged buildings in his later work.

WELL INFORMED 2017 Oil on canvas 15 x 30 inches BK2246 In this ironically titled painting, being “well informed” does not protect these hybrid chesspiece/books from injustice and destruction.

AGAINST THE WALL 2007 Oil on canvas 11 x 14 inches BK1164 Bak merges iconic figures such as Jesus on the Cross and the Warsaw Ghetto Boy to honor all the children of the Holocaust.

PHOTO OF ARNO NADEL 1943 PROPHET 1942 Colored pencil on paper 11 1/8 x 9 inches Bak’s great-uncle Arno Nadel’s decree of “KUNST, KUNST, KUNST“ was treated by the family as a prophecy of the young Bak’s future.

VILNA GIFT #2 2017 Colored pencil on paper 5 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches DARK LIGHT 2001 Oil on canvas 16 x 12 inches BK819 As Hitler advanced, the treasured places and rituals of Bak’s secure childhood became suffused with fear .

HAYIM’S MEMENTO 2001 Oil on canvas 40 x 30 inches BK859 These paintings, tributes to each of Bak’s murdered grandparents, contain among many elements the Hebrew letters of their names carved out of stone, the sliced trunks of a family tree destroyed, and tokens to Bak’s memories of them.

SHIFRA’S MEMENTO 2001 Oil on canvas 40 x 30 inches BK863 These paintings, tributes to each of Bak’s murdered grandparents, contain among many elements the Hebrew letters of their names carved out of stone, the sliced trunks of a family tree destroyed, and tokens to Bak’s memories of them.

KHONE’S MEMENTO 2001 Oil on canvas 40 x 30 inches BK864 These paintings, tributes to each of Bak’s murdered grandparents, contain among many elements the Hebrew letters of their names carved out of stone, the sliced trunks of a family tree destroyed, and tokens to Bak’s memories of them.

RACHEL’S MEMENTO 2001 Oil on canvas 40 x 30 inches BK862 These paintings, tributes to each of Bak’s murdered grandparents, contain among many elements the Hebrew letters of their names carved out of stone, the sliced trunks of a family tree destroyed, and tokens to Bak’s memories of them.

DAMAGE 2001 Oil on canvas 36 x 36 inches BK851 Shrouded, dismembered, and blindfolded teddy bears reference not only the stuffed animal Bak left behind when he was taken to the Vilna Ghetto but the shattered innocence of childhood.

TO THE GHETTO 2001 Mixed media on paper 25 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches BK1113 EXPULSION I 1998 Oil on tinted paper 25 1/2 x 19 3/4 inches BK1118 Bak was forced to discard his sodden pillow in the streets of Vilna.

REMNANTS 2001 Oil on canvas 36 x 36 inches BK850 Abandoned keys litter the compact streets of old Vilna, stand-ins for people who will never return home.

ANGEL OF VILNA 2001 Gouache and black pencil on paper 24 1/2 x 19 inches ANGEL 1999 Oil on canvas 16 x 12 inches BK702 Catholic symbols and stories emerge from Bak’s time hiding in the Benedictine convent of St. Catherine.

RUMOURS 1946 Black ink on paper 24 1/8 x 32 5/8 inches Inconceivable rumors spread about Nazi objectives, causing the worried expressions on these displaced men, women, and children.

BAK AND AVRAHAM SUTZKEVER IN THE VILNA GHETTO 1944 The famous Yiddish poet Sutzkever took Bak under his wing to encourage his artistic talent, even in the austerity and danger of the ghetto.

THE PINKAS 1942 Bak made dozens of sketches in the pages of the Pinkas, which had been furtively stolen by Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginski as part of his work for the ERR.

MOSES 1942 From the Pinkas MOSES 1944 Pencil on paper 16 3/4 × 13 1/4 inches In the ghetto, Bak unearthed a postcard of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses, which inspired his own sculptural work along with several drawings.

INTERIOR 1942 Charcoal on paper 11 1/8 x 8 1/8 inches Many of the works from Bak’s 1943 exhibition in the ghetto are now at the Samuel Bak Museum in Vilnius.

SELF PORTRAIT 1942 Pencil on paper 10 3/8 x 8 inches Many of the works from Bak’s 1943 exhibition in the ghetto are now at the Samuel Bak Museum in Vilnius.

AVL PIKT 1943 Colored pencil on paper 12 1/8 x 7 5/8 inches Many of the works from Bak’s 1943 exhibition in the ghetto are now at the Samuel Bak Museum in Vilnius.

READING CHEKHOV 1942 Watercolor and india ink on paper 11 3/4 x 8 1/8 inches Many of the works from Bak’s 1943 exhibition in the ghetto are now at the Samuel Bak Museum in Vilnius.

PIPE SMOKER 1942-1943 Watercolor on paper 11 3/4 x 7 5/8 inches Many of the works from Bak’s 1943 exhibition in the ghetto are now at the Samuel Bak Museum in Vilnius.

TREE AND FIGURES ON A CLIFF 1943 Watercolor on paper 11 x 7 1/8 inches Many of the works from Bak’s 1943 exhibition in the ghetto are now at the Samuel Bak Museum in Vilnius.

THE PERSISTING TEASPOON 1989 Oil on linen 13 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches The white cups in these still lifes—disintegrating icons of domesticity—recall a painting Bak saw by a young ghetto artist who had been taken and killed.

STILL LIFE WITH ABSTRACTION 1974 Oil on canvas 15 x 18 1/8 inches The white cups in these still lifes—disintegrating icons of domesticity—recall a painting Bak saw by a young ghetto artist who had been taken and killed.

SAMEK-7 1999 Gouache on paper 9 x 9 inches BK668 Bak fuses his childhood friend, Samek, with the Warsaw Ghetto Boy and Jesus’ stigmata to commemorate all the lost children.

FROM THE VALLEY OF TEARS 1963 Oil on linen 45 5/8 x 37 7/8 inches Shapes reminiscent of bodies pack a dark and claustrophobic canvas, hearkening to the frightening aftermath of the Kinder Aktion.

KINDERAKZIE 1947 India ink on paper 8 3/4 x 11 3/8 inches CHILDREN IN FIRE 1949 Oil on paper 26 x 20 1/8 inches Bak escaped death in March of 1944, during the heinous Kinder Aktion, when most of the 250 children living in the HKP 562 Forced Labor Camp were gunned down.

EIGHT ALLEGORIES ON A CONTEMPORARY THEME (7) 1967 Oil on canvas 32 x 24 1/8 inches The pear in Bak’s paintings means life, extending back to the moment his father (père in French) facilitated his escape from the labor camp and likely saved his life.

SELF-PORTRAIT 1995-1996 Oil on linen 63 x 79 inches Among many references in this self-portrait is the burlap sack in which Bak’s father secreted him out of the forced labor camp.

ESCAPING 1946 Ink on cardboard 17 1/8 x 24 1/8 inches CAUGHT IN THE STORM (MOTHER AND DAUGHTER) (TEMPEST) 1947 Watercolor on paper 19 1/2 x 14 inches Early works capture the angst and panic of families escaping.

SUSPENDED BRIDGE 1959 Oil on linen 32 x 29 3/8 inches Feeling she had no place to go, Mitsia considered jumping with her son off a bridge over the Vilya River, until she remembered the possibility of hiding again in the Benedictine convent of St. Catherine

FOR JONAS II 2002-2006 Oil on canvas 63 x 63 inches Bak paints a grave for his father in the Ponary forest, with a dove (yonah in Hebrew) and a small potted plant in which life continues.

THE WAR IS OVER 2019 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches BK2628 Emerging from hiding at the end of the war, Mitsia and Sam perservered through devastation and loss.

IN SEARCH OF A SAFE PLACE 2019 Oil on linen 16 x 20 1/8 inches People emerged from the rubble of their shattered lives, seeking where they could a sense of security.

AUNT YETTA 1945 Pastel and pencil on paper 19 5/8 x 14 5/8 inches DRAWING OF A SCULPTURE, GREEK HEAD 1945 Watercolor on paper 23 x 17 3/8 inches Work made during Bak’s tutelage under Zofia Serafinovicz shows the young artist practicing both expressive and classical styles.

DAVID’S SHIELDING 2006 Oil on canvas 18 x 15 inches BK1209 A portrait of Bak made by Serafinovicz, with the boy behind branches of a flowering apple tree, was lost in the post-war fray.

MIGRATION 2019 Oil on linen 12 1/8 x 16 inches Bak refers to his family and fellow passengers en route from Vilna to Łødz as “a trainload of migratory birds.”

LES ADIEUX 1973 Oil on linen 32 x 23 5/8 inches The fashionable woman in this painting recalls Sam’s mother and aunt, who wore items obtained from Yetta’s role in the black market clothing trade.

2

THE LANDSBERG DP CAMP

THE AFTERMATH AND THE INTERIM On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. Right to the end, it was more important to him to have murdered the Jews of Europe than to win the war. Even in his last testament, having slaughtered powerless Jews in the millions, he blamed the war on the international Jewry and called for the “struggle” to continue. Countless concentration camps filled with thousands of starving and dying inmates were liberated by the Allies. 13,000 people from Bergen-Belsen alone died shortly after, many hundreds more died in other camps, and the long-term loss of life resulting from years of deprivation and torture remains untold. Survivors searched desperately for family members, not realizing at first the immensity of the destruction. Some who returned to their homes found, instead of a welcome, hostile strangers living there. Antisemitism had not died with the liberation of the camps and in a few cases survivors were murdered on their return by villagers unwilling to relinquish their hijacked homes and looted possessions. In the post-war chaos, the Allies divided post-war Germany under their different jurisdictions and the 250,000 survivors of the genocide of the Jews of Eastern Europe were mostly ignored. With nowhere to go, they sought refuge in Displaced Persons (DP) camps—along with the flotsam and jetsam of other uprooted people, including fleeing Nazis and Nazi collaborators, Poles, Lithuanians, and Latvians, many of whom still were virulently antisemitic. Sam and Mitsia had experienced Vilna’s liberation by the Red Army and the ensuing life under Communism, spent three months in Łódz, Poland, escaped to Berlin-Tempelhof, and made their way further south to an American DP camp in Bavaria under the responsibility of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Initially, America’s attention was focused on hunting down Nazi war criminals in preparation for the Nuremberg Trials, not on the DP camps under the control of their army. In this, they had been wasting their time. Only 22 members of the upper echelons of the Nazi party, the chief

perpetrators of violence, stood trial in Nuremberg.1 9,000 Nazis, among them Adolf Eichmann, who was a Catholic, and Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” slipped through their nets with the help of members of the Catholic church, escaping to Argentina with passports issued by the Red Cross via what is known as The Ratline.2 In time, the Americans and British took interest in using former Nazi perpetrators in intelligence work against the Soviets, as the Cold War was beginning to take its course. The conditions in the American-run DP camps, with their unsympathetic, often antisemitic administrators, were shocking. The survivors had food and beds but were treated with little sympathy or respect. After receiving complaints, an inter-governmental committee on refugees was established in America. Two months after Roosevelt’s death, on June 22, 1945, President Truman appointed Earl G. Harrison, who will forever be remembered with deep gratitude, to conduct a personal inspection of the American DP camps in Western Europe. He was accompanied by two members of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Joseph Schwartz and Herbert Katzki. Harrison reported back to Truman that Jews were living under appalling conditions, guarded behind barbed wire fences, and thrown together with antisemitic internees from various European countries in buildings that were unfit for the European winter. Additionally, there was no attempt to unite families of Jewish survivors torn apart. He made the bold statement that the Americans were treating the Jews in the same way the Nazis had done, sarcastically adding that the only difference was that they were not exterminating them. President Truman forwarded the report to General Eisenhower, who was the commander of the U.S. forces in Europe. Eisenhower promptly took steps to rectify the situation.

JOINING THE RANKS OF THE DISPLACED By the time Mitsia and Sam reached the DP camp in Landsberg am Lech, near Munich (ironically the town in whose prison Hitler had written Mein Kampf), lodging was offered in the barracks and warehouses of the former German army (later this was extended to surrounding houses). The living conditions had improved, the food rations increased, and the hostile inmates had been relocated to different camps and separated from the Jews. The camp, however, was filled to capacity with Jewish refugees flooding in from Eastern Europe, especially after news of pogroms in which the returning Jews had been killed. When Mitsia and Sam arrived at the entrance of the camp, utterly exhausted from their harrowing journey in a rickety truck that they had hired along with fellow refugees, they were all turned away. A member of the Jewish administration explained to the bedraggled and distressed

refugees that the camp was full. He told them that they simply could not be accommodated, that they had to find shelter in the DP camp in nearby Feldafing. Then he caught sight of Mitsia and the boy. He stopped short for a moment, told her to wait, and disappeared. He returned to tell them that he had managed to negotiate an exception for them and was permitted take them in. His name was Nathan Markovsky. Markovsky, who came from Kovno (Kaunas), was a survivor of the concentration camp of Dachau, near Munich.3 He had lost his wife and two daughters, one of whom had perished under the terrible circumstances of the Kovno Ghetto. At first, he found Mitsia and Sam a space in a large dormitory and later located a small room in a building that was incorporated into the camp after Earl G. Harrison’s report. They shared a kitchen and a bathroom with about a dozen others but felt relatively happy, comfortable, and sheltered, no longer in fear for their lives. Here began a new, positive phase in Sam’s life. He wrote that, “On my nomad’s road as Wandering Jew the Landsberg sojourn was all-important. It first gave me the physical and mental space to build my worlds.”4 There was in the DP camp a sudden climate of repair, an urge towards renewal and normalcy. Soon, Markovsky became Sam’s stepfather, lovingly called Markusha by him and Mitsia. As a family unit, Mitsia, Sam, and Nathan were able to move to a more comfortable home. Among the residents of the camp were many orphaned children, uprooted survivors of concentration camps and death marches whose families had been wiped out. Bak drew and painted them in a spontaneous, direct manner that embraced their human dignity. He saw himself as part of them and so similarly painted his self-portrait at the time: with an immobile stillness, eyes wide with the child’s premature experience of man’s inhumanity to man. These images are the work of an artist mature beyond his age, who expresses himself in the visual language of the 20th century. He began to place an emphasis on the narrative element, saying, “I was hardly thirteen when I first saw that my art is a fusion of painting and storytelling.”5

LIFE IN LANDSBERG The resilience of the camp’s residents was vibrant and it soon assumed the atmosphere of a pulsating Eastern European shtetl. Only at night was sleep interrupted by the screams of people reliving their nightmares, screams that also sometimes emanated from Sam’s parents’ room. Mitsia involved herself in social issues, while Nathan worked in tasks of upgrading the

living conditions of the camp. Sam found the classes in the school, offered by well-meaning but untrained volunteer teachers, a bit tedious and far removed from the lessons of life the pupils had experienced. He plunged himself into the creative relief that art brought him. The chief officer of UNRRA, Dr. Leo Srole, noticed the young boy’s talent and befriended him. His wife, Esther, provided painting and drawing materials to him via the American military post. The camp developed a thriving cultural life. A theater group was established and lectures, plays, and concerts were held. One concert was conducted and partly performed by Leonard Bernstein, who established the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra. In Bak’s depiction of this wonderful experience, which reveals a leaning towards theater design, he captures the ambiance of the concert with a synesthetic color composition. In 1947, Yehudi Menuhin visited the camp and gave a wonderful performance but was firmly censured for having given a prior performance to a German audience. Bak quickly became known in the DP camp as a child prodigy. One day he was personally introduced to David Ben-Gurion, who had come from Palestine to deliver a speech in the nearby town of Bad Reichenhall. The venue was adorned with Bak’s art works and the boy stood before the great man, pierced by his penetrating eyes. But the celebrated Jewish leader had no antenna for art and did not even glance at Bak’s wonderful drawings.

PROFESSOR KARL BLOCHERER Mitsia, always keeping Bak’s art front of mind, searched once again for an art teacher but was careful to make sure that he did not land in the pedagogic clutches of a former Nazi. Finally, she found Professor Karl Blocherer, who had been a master pupil of the late 19th century “Prince of Arts,” Franz von Stuck.6 After Blocherer completed his master class under von Stuck, he broke away from the style of his teacher and came under the influence of the Bauhaus movement, which had been passionately detested by the Nazis. A school of design bearing his name was established in 1915 on Munich’s Gabelsbergerstrasse according to the Bauhaus ideal that “form follows function” and offering classes in painting, advertising, and textile design.7 Blocherer was an outstanding teacher, allowing his pupils space to develop. In 1931, he interrupted his teachings in Munich to assume a professorship at Wells College in New York, from which he returned to Germany after a short while to resume teaching at his school. In 1944, the building that housed the Blocherer Art School was destroyed in a bomb attack, so he continued with his art lessons in surrogate classrooms in the Prinzenstrasse. The school was rebuilt in 1946 under the auspices of the City of Munich, only one hour’s

train ride from Landsberg. That is where Bak attended his art classes once a week. He had a special style of teaching, described by Bak: …Professor Blocherer’s system was different and simple. There was no painting in place, no guiding hand, but a lot of talk. The students were given well formulated themes or special subjects on which they had to work at home. Then they brought their products for evaluation and discussion. Blocherer would review the results and speak of them in length for a couple of hours.8 Bak enjoyed this because he was allowed freedom of expression. At home he would create according to his whim and produce it for discussion at the art school. The interaction between the teacher and the fellow students imbued Bak with much-needed self-confidence. He wrote that, “…Blocherer taught me that art can exist in many different forms, each one of them adding something to the understanding of the unfathomable mystery of great art,”9 but overall Bak remembered Karl Blocherer and his classes as “pretty dull.”10

THE ALTE PINAKOTHEK AND THE IMPACT OF ALBRECHT DÜRER After his classes at Blocherer’s art school, Bak and his mother would often visit the great art museums of Munich, opening a world to him that had an enormous impact on his artistic development. The most important one for him was the Alte Pinakothek, which had just reopened after World War II. Its collection encompasses significant works by the Old Masters from the Middle Ages to the Rococo period. He saw paintings by Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, El Greco, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Boucher. Most significantly, he came face to face with the work of Albrecht Dürer, the master of the German Renaissance.11 He was intuitively drawn to this artist in a way that seems as mysterious as the work of the great artist himself, attesting that, “Dürer became for me an inexhaustible inspiration, a vibrant stimulus for my technical and expressive research.”12 In 1514, three years before Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the portal of the Wittenberg Schlosskirche and thereby changed Christianity forever, Dürer created the enigmatic copper engraving entitled Melencolia I. This engraving had a lasting influence on Bak, revealing a common seedbed regarding composition, subject matter, and mood. Bak’s introduction to the Melencolia I is itself quite a remarkable story. One day in the DP camp, Mitsia came into his room and found him absorbed in a novel by Alexandre Dumas. She reprimanded him for his reading of nothing better than mere belletristik (shallow fiction)

and presented him with a book of short stories written in German by the great Stefan Zweig.13 Sam’s relationship with his mother was one of absolute trust. She had saved his life, saw to his physical well-being, and acted as a constant captain of his artistic path, so when she asked him to do something he obeyed without protest. In this case it was no easy task. He had to learn German, which he found himself unexpectedly able to grasp, perhaps because of its similarity to Yiddish (over a third of Yiddish words are rooted in the Hebrew and Slavic languages, while the rest is old German). But Yiddish is written in Hebrew letters, German in Latin script. That he could familiarize himself with such ease with German just from this basis is a proof of his mental adroitness. One of the private teachers that Mitsia found for him in the town of Landsberg taught him German grammar, which compared with Yiddish is complicated but resembles the Latin structure of his mother tongue, Polish. Soon enough, Bak could understand Stefan Zweig’s sophisticated German. One of the short stories in Zweig’s book that had a particular impact on Bak was entitled, “The Invisible Collection.” Zweig relates the tale of a collector of prints and engravings—one of which is a print of Dürer’s Melencolia I—who becomes blind but who can still picture his art with his inner vision and imagination. When his family falls on hard times, his wife and daughter are forced to sell his collection piece by piece. To prevent him from noticing this, they replace each print with a blank sheet of the same size. Zweig’s tale deals with questions around truthfulness and imagination, but it had a completely different implication for Bak, who only needed to read the title Melencolia and the name Albrecht Dürer to be drawn to the story like an overpowering magnet. Bak found a book on Dürer in a small bookshop in Landsberg’s old town which not only contained a reproduction of Melencolia I but illustrated Dürer’s enigmatic drawings of pillows. Why did Dürer draw these pillows, wondered Bak, who suddenly remembered his own pillow, discarded in the rain on his fateful march from his home to the Vilna Ghetto when his childhood had so abruptly ended?14 He felt an immediate affinity with Dürer, a powerfully resonant connection between his individual experience and an archetypal force that addressed itself to collective humanity through metaphor. The angel in Melencolia I is a messenger of the Divine and a metaphor for the artist. With his dark visage, he is trapped in his workshop amidst tools of geometry and mathematics (such as a seven-rung ladder, a rhombohedrum, and a magic square of numbers that all add up to 34), surrounded by objects of man’s endeavors in both science and art. All of this, set against a river landscape in the background and a sky filled with enigmatic symbols, imprinted itself into Bak’s very being. Back in the Alte Pinakothek, he once again went to view the early self-portrait of Dürer (1500) in which the artist presented himself with the traditional features of Jesus as the

“Man of Sorrows,” the Redeemer—in other words, as the medium for creative transformation. Bak then returned to view Dürer’s painting The Four Apostles. He was fascinated with these panels and a seed was planted in this early period of his life as an artist which gestated in his subconscious creative mind for the next few decades. In 1989, it materialized in his diptych based on Albrecht Dürer’s prototype, which he exhibited in the Dürer Haus Museum in Nuremberg, in an exhibition entitled Bak und Dürer.15 But prior to that he would have to overcome deep emotional impediments on his life’s journey. In the late 1940s, he was still in his fledgling artistic stage. Years of creative transformation had to follow these early impressions, years which first would sink below the surface of his conscious mind, to be resurrected later as visual archetypes.

THE NEUE PINAKOTHEK AND ITS IMPACT ON SAMUEL BAK Sam and his mother, who acted as a sounding board in the discussion of these art treasures, also visited the Neue Pinakothek, where they immersed themselves in many of the works. At one point, an exhibition was brought to the museum by Paris’ Musée d’Art Moderne, and although Bak does not remember the exact works he saw here, the experience reminded him of the instruction of his grandfather Chayim that one day he would have to go to Paris. For now, in the Neue Pinakothek collection, he especially loved Max Liebermann’s Woman and Her Goats in the Dunes (1890). It was painted in Holland in the style of German Impressionism and depicts a Dutch peasant woman struggling up a dune accompanied by an obedient goat, while arduously dragging behind her another goat which obstinately heads in the opposite direction. The entire picture plane vibrates with life and tension in the interaction of the landscape and the powerful shapes. Lovis Corinth, the German painter and graphic artist of the Northern Impressionist style, also made a lasting impression on Bak. As an art teacher Corinth had written a book entitled Das Erlernen der Malerei (Learning to Paint), which Bak found in Landsberg’s old bookshop and read multiple times, absorbing many lessons in painting technique.16

SAM AND MARKUSHA Life as a family with his stepfather continued, but their relationship was precarious. In the portrait sketch of Markovsky, Bak captured the depth of his sadness and the refinement of his features. Nathan took pains not to replace Sam’s father and Sam tried not to step into the emotional space that belonged to his daughters. He began to sign his paintings as “Samuel Bak-Markovsky” but after a while resumed his signature with his surname, Bak—an issue of such

intense delicacy that it was never discussed. Nathan tried to teach him the game of chess. Sam tried to learn it, perhaps to please him, but felt completely useless in his attempts. As it transpired, he would forge his own path regarding chess, as Markusha’s effort to bond with his stepson bore fruit much later (and enriched the world of art) when Bak took up the subject as a recurring theme. Nathan’s attempt to teach the game to his stepson also influenced the flow of the artist’s creative process, about which he has written, “I structure the process of my work in a way that makes great use of my old, trusted and mysterious associate called the subconscious. I paint and I discover what I am doing.”17 Markovsky clung to rationality and for him the game of chess, of which he had been a master in his previous life in Kovno (Kaunas), was a means to achieve this. Chess knows no pity, no altruism. It is a game of war, a game of rules. The only kind of empathy is the recognition of the intention of the partner to beat the opponent, a cruel kind of identification with “the other.” In Bak’s later paintings on this theme, a forceful inner debate would emerge, with the theme of chess as a battleground of his personal experiences. The chess figures play their iconic roles— the king and the queen in their regal absurdity, the burning or drowning rooks, the haughty, fragmented bishops, and the eternal pawns at the bottom of the hierarchical game of life—all take their place on the chessboard. The board is sometimes placed horizontally, sometimes vertically, at times cracked and at other times broken, carrying fragments of his early memories as a child and the aftermath of a world in upheaval.

“DISTANCE YOURSELF FROM EMOTIONS THAT HURT” Initially, Bak tried to “find himself.” He was a boy of twelve years old, mature for his age in both artistic skill and life experiences. He needed to become rooted again, to find a balance. In his art he captured, without self-pity, the world which was lost. His mother, who remained his principal art counselor, had imprinted in him, “Distance yourself from emotions that hurt. Do not succumb to self-pity; and above all: keep your pride intact.”18 This dictum pervades his art, where murder and mass death are not rendered directly but echoed through memory. He keeps his “pride intact” through what he depicts, namely his world of the Jewish people after their most terrible catastrophe. This is what renders the images of Samuel Bak so extraordinarily powerful: they express the intangible. They capture something infinitely spiritual and intrinsically Jewish.

LUCY DAWIDOWICZ

Meanwhile, under the supervision of the historian Lucy Dawidowicz, the books that had been looted by Alfred Rosenberg from the Strashun Library, other Jewish institutions, private book collections, and innumerable Russian archives were gathered, sorted, and transported to the YIVO Institute in New York under the auspices of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Dawidowicz retained some Yiddish fiction books to be distributed to the Jewish DP camps, to help build up their libraries and educational institutions. One consignment of these books arrived in the Landsberg DP camp in 1947. Immediately, Dr. Srole gave Bak a selection of the books, including an entire 12-volume collection of the works of Sholem Aleichem. This was immensely precious to him. In the tales of Sholem Aleichem and the illustrations of old shtetl life, Bak re-discovered the cultural background of his own family. He had read some portions of these books before the war in the Strashun Library and now immersed himself once again in tales from the realms of his childhood, his forbears, and above all in Aleichem’s unique and tragicomical humor. In re-reading these tales, Bak recovered his roots and with the images that emerged from his drawing pen, he captured a world that was lost, restoring it with astonishing directness and artistic skill. From the humorous scenes of Sholem Aleichem emerged the biting sense of comedy that exists in the undercurrent of Bak’s art and personality, which he had inherited from his family.

NEWSPAPERS, CAFÉS, AND NEW FACES A Yiddish newspaper, the Landsberg Jidisze Caitung, was established in the camp by the cultured circle of Markovksy’s friends from Kovno (Kaunas) to track what was going on in the world outside. The Americans and British seemed to shift their stance towards their former enemy, using Germany as a bulwark against Russia. Would the atrocities that were committed be forgotten and swept under the carpet? How long would the inmates of the Landsberg DP camp have to remain there? Would a Jewish state ever be established in Palestine? The twisting and turning of events affecting policies and individuals playing a role under the British mandate were almost too complicated to follow. David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Shertok (later the prime minister Moshe Sharett) agitated for a Jewish state. The newspapermen asked Bak to make drawings for them, and he created amusing and sometimes sardonic comics based on the style of the 19th century German humorist, poet, and illustrator Wilhelm Busch. He translated the style of the German satirist into Jewish humor, an ironic twist in that the German master, in some of his illustrated tales, could be scathingly antisemitic. Some of Bak’s comic drawings were freely reproduced (ignoring the laws of copyright) in the New York daily Forverts (The Forward) and

some appeared on the inside pages of the Palestine weekly D’var Hashavua, one cover of which depicted Sharett delivering a lecture that demanded the establishment of an independent state for the Jewish people. A café in the camp with the biblical name of Bamidbar (In the Desert) was decorated with Bak’s large wall paintings, suggesting silhouettes of nomads. There was a cinema, frequented by Bak with the same visual hunger for movies he had felt in Vilna after Liberation. Hollywood of the 1940s presented him with a heavenly paradise. He forged friendships with other children whose very beings resonated with him, such as a boy named Alex who was his closest companion and a peer named Peter, whose pained features and posture Bak captured with masterful strokes. The sadness of their eyes was a part of himself. In 1947, a family of Hassidic Jews arrived at the Landsberg DP camp.19 Bak had never seen these Jews before and their appearance, with their side-curls and strange costumes, fascinated him. He forged a friendship with two young brothers of the family and asked them to sit for him. The orthodox religious prohibition “Do not make unto thee a graven image” did not permit this, but they consented and Bak painted them, capturing the utter sadness and despair in their features. These children had witnessed unimaginable horror, as had Sam. One can picture the two children—the young artist and the young sitter—facing each other, both knowingly engaged in some taboo, but both aware that it was important.

SAM TAKES A STAND At the age of 13, for the first time in his life, Sam took a stand against his beloved mother. He refused to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah. Mitsia had found a rabbi who tried to teach him the Hebrew sounds and intonations of the prayers and to pronounce his Torah portion. He did not understand what he was learning to speak. He would have preferred to discuss with the rabbi how there could be a God who would allow all that had happened. Heated arguments with his mother ensued. He remembers that he “told her that if God would come to me and apologize for the deaths of my father, my grandparents, and millions of my people, I would celebrate a Bar Mitzvah.”20 Eventually Markusha intervened on his behalf, persuading Mitsia not to force the boy to take this crucial step but to allow him to wait until he was older and mature enough to make his own decision. The wrestling of the artist with his absent God would later become a central theme in his art. Meanwhile they had lived in the DP camp for three years and still had nowhere to go. Like so

many other Jews who survived the Holocaust, Mitsia wanted to leave behind the blood-soaked soil of Europe where Jews were still not wanted. She was determined to immigrate to the Jewish homeland in Palestine (which was still under British mandate), but Britain had reneged on its commitment to establish such a homeland and was blockading the seas. Jews were not permitted to enter Palestine and Britain refused to antagonize the Middle East, whose oil they needed. Illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine was taking place from some DP camps, but British authorities were stopping the ships carrying the refugees and interning them in yet more camps on the island of Cyprus. Apart from her Zionist dream, Mitsia wanted to be united with other survivors from her family, such as her brother Yerachmiel, who was already in Palestine. Aunt Yetta, who together with Tamara and her second husband, Zygmunt, had joined them in Landsberg in 1946, also planned to go. Their youngest brother Izia, who was in Italy recovering from war injuries, also hoped to join them. For the Jews who had experienced utter powerlessness and the destruction of their people in lands in which they had been living for over a thousand years, the only acceptable alternative was a homeland of their own where they would suffer no more persecution and antisemitism. And then the miracle they hoped for happened. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly approved Resolution 181, which called for the partition of the British-ruled mandate of Palestine. At long last, after 2,000 years, the Jewish people were granted their homeland.21 Almost at the same time, Bak’s most fervent wish came true. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee offered him a scholarship to study art in Paris. The name which his grandfather Chayim could only utter with a yearning sigh (he had lived there for a few years as an escaping revolutionary from the czar’s cruel police and remembered that turbulent time with magnified nostalgia). At last, Sam would go to Paris to study art! But then his mother stepped in. No. He would not go to Paris yet. He could do this later. First, they would go to the newly established Jewish state. She told him, “We will live in a Jewish state where you shall get, for the first time in your life, proper schooling. Certainly you will serve in the army and carry a rifle and no non-Jew will dare to tell you what you can or cannot do.”22 Sam was shattered but he had to obey her. Paris would have to wait. Later he admitted that his mother had been right, saying that, “The years I spent in Israel enriched my life and gave me the knowledge of a language that is indispensable to the immense culture of which I am part.”23

MARKUSHA, MITSIA, AND SAM 1947 Soon after arriving in the Landsberg DP camp, Bak gained a new stepfather named Nathan Markovsky,

SELF PORTRAIT 1946 Watercolor on paper 15 x 12 1/8 inches Bak in this self-portrait is wise beyond his years, with penetrating eyes and the direct gaze of someone who has seen man’s inhumanity to man.

REFUGEES (WORLD WAR II) 1946 Black gouache on paper 12 5/8 x 19 inches World War II refugees gathered in DP camps throughout Germany, carrying both the dark marks of their experience and a hope for repair.

CONCERT 1947 Watercolor on paper 12 3/8 x 9 5/8 inches MUSICIAN 1947 Watercolor and gouache on paper 14 x 9 1/4 inches Concerts were part of the thriving cultural life of the Landsberg DP camp, where Leonard Bernstein established the Ex-Concentration Camp Orchestra.

MY FIRST 1946 Oil on linen 23 5/8 x 27 1/8 inches After noting Bak’s artistic abilities, the chief of the UNRRA, Dr. Leo Srole, had painting materials sent to him from America.

MY COUSIN TAMAR 1947 Watercolor on paper 14 1/8 x 10 5/8 inches LANDSBERG AM LECH FROM MY WINDOW 1946 Watercolor on paper 15 x 15 inches Bright and free watercolors paint a picture of daily life far from the anguish of the recent past.

FEAR/ANGST 1946 Gouache on paper 27 1/2 x 39 3/8 inches Memories of existential fears lived just below the surface, sometimes revealing themselves in Bak’s work.

MOTHER AND SON 1947 Gouache on paper 21 1/8 x 13 1/4 inches MOTHER IS NO MORE 1946 Gouache on paper 13 3/4 x 10 inches Bak’s relationship with his mother, who was deeply committed to him and his art education, informed his work in Landsberg and beyond.

ROAD TO THE VILLAGE (A WINTER’S DAY) 1947 Watercolor on paper 10 5/8 x 13 3/4 inches Bak wrote in his memoir that “On my nomad’s road as Wandering Jew the Landsberg sojourn was all-important. It first gave me the physical and mental space to build my worlds.”

RED APPLE (STILL LIFE 47) 1947 Watercolor on paper 10 5/8 x 14 1/8 inches Bak wrote in his memoir that “On my nomad’s road as Wandering Jew the Landsberg sojourn was all-important. It first gave me the physical and mental space to build my worlds.”

A CHILD OF THE GHETTO 1946 Watercolor on paper 14 1/8 x 10 1/8 inches Bak wrote in his memoir that “On my nomad’s road as Wandering Jew the Landsberg sojourn was allimportant. It first gave me the physical and mental space to build my worlds.”

LEAVING THE STATION (TRAINS) 1946 Watercolor on paper 13 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches Bak wrote in his memoir that “On my nomad’s road as Wandering Jew the Landsberg sojourn was all-important. It first gave me the physical and mental space to build my worlds.”

REFUGEES (IN THE SHELTER) 1947 Watercolor and pencil on paper 18 1/2 x 24 5/8 inches At a young age, Bak possessed a remarkable pathos for his fellow humans.

IN THE MALINE 1947 Watercolor on paper 14 1/8 x 10 5/8 inches Hiding places in the Vilna Ghetto were colloquially called malines.

TREES (TREES IN STORM) 1946 Watercolor on paper 15 x 11 1/8 inches Trees are an important theme in Bak’s oeuvre, referencing the woods of Ponary and familial roots.

ON THE STREET (IN THE STREET) 1946 Watercolor on paper 19 5/8 x 28 3/8 inches This watercolor will resurface fifty years after its making when Bak visits the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and encounters a video of himself painting it.

STEP-FATHER (MY STEPFATHER MARKUSHA) 1946 Graphite on paper 7 1/2 x 10 1/4 inches Markusha survived the Dachau Concentration Camp, but lost his wife and children in the Kovno Ghetto.

EXPLANATION (JEWS TALKING; SHOLEM ALEICHEM) 1947 Ink on cardboard 8 1/4 x 11 5/8 inches In a 12-volume collection of works by Sholem Aleichem in the Landsberg DP camp library, Bak re-discovered the cultural background of his family.

FROM THE OLD WORLD II 1947 Ink on paper 9 x 12 1/8 inches In a 12-volume collection of works by Sholem Aleichem in the Landsberg DP camp library, Bak re-discovered the cultural background of his family.

LESSON (ERUDITION; SHOLEM ALEICHEM) 1947 Watercolor on cardboard 10 5/8 x 14 inches In a 12-volume collection of works by Sholem Aleichem in the Landsberg DP camp library, Bak re-discovered the cultural background of his family.

THE RICH MAN (FROM A STORY BY SHOLEM ALEICHEM) 1947 Ink on cardboard 8 1/4 x 11 5/8 inches In a 12-volume collection of works by Sholem Aleichem in the Landsberg DP camp library, Bak re-discovered the cultural background of his family.

BECAUSE YOU HAVE CHOSEN US FROM ALL THE PEOPLES 1947 Ink on paper 7 x 10 inches INTERNATIONAL ZIONIST ORGANIZATION (WIZO)—CLEANING THE CAMP 1947 Ink and gouache on paper 9 1/2 x 13 3/8 inches Bak drew a series of sardonic comics for Landsberg Jidisze Caitung, the camp’s Yiddish newspaper.

NEWS (READING THE NOTICE BOARD) 1947 Watercolor and ink on paper 10 5/8 x 14 1/8 inches IN A TAVERN 1947 Pastel and pencil on paper 12 1/4 x 18 inches At the camp’s café, decorated with large wall paintings by Bak, men discussed current events and camp life.

MY FRIEND PETER 1947 Graphite on paper 22 1/8 x 15 1/8 inches MY FRIEND PETER 1947 Watercolor on paper 19 5/8 x 12 5/8 inches For the first time in a long time, Bak had a group of peers and friends, among whom was a boy named Peter who became a frequent subject of his work.

A BOY OF THE HASSIDIM 1947 Watercolor on paper 14 1/8 x 10 5/8 inches A BOY FROM THE CAMP (HASSIDIC BOY) 1947 Watercolor on paper 22 1/8 x 15 3/8 inches Bak poignantly captures the melancholy of the Hassidic boys that moved to the camp in 1947.

ONE OF THE KIDS (CHILD REFUGEES) 1946 Ink on paper 8 1/4 x 11 3/8 inches CHILD REFUGEES 1947 Ink on paper 8 1/4 x 11 3/8 inches Bak forged friendships with other children whose very beings resonated with him.

3

ISRAEL 1948 TO 19561

MEETING THE PRICKLY PEARS Saying farewell to his friends in Landsberg filled Bak with the regret of a young person who, after so much turmoil and three years in the camp, had finally settled into a sense of safety and feeling of being at home, despite its very provisory premise. Once again, they were moving on. He departed with his parents on a train to Marseille, where they were prepared by shlichim (emissaries from Israel) for life in the Jewish homeland. After weeks of waiting in a small camp at the border of a town called Pelissanne, they embarked on the Jewish refugee ship Pan York, which has meanwhile become part of Israel’s history. This run-down Cuban cargo ship was designed for transporting bananas and converted to carry survivors of the Shoah to Israel. Before the Declaration of Independence, it had been one of the ships carrying thousands of illegal immigrants to Israel who were prevented from entering Palestine and imprisoned in British camps in Cyprus.2 Now it took the Bak/Markovsky family, together with 3,500 other survivors, directly to Haifa. Any eagerness about the destination (which, for Bak, was not particularly great to begin with) was undermined by the extreme discomfort and debilitating seasickness he experienced on the journey. On July 9, they landed in Haifa. There, they were met with overwhelming joy by Mitsia’s younger brother, Yerachmiel (fondly known to them as Rachmila), his wife Riva, and their two young children, proudly presented as sabras (the prickly pears of a cactus), the nickname for Jews born in Israel (or Palestine before 1948). Rachmila welcomed them to his house, where in the blinding sunlight of his garden and under the watchful eyes of a chameleon, he gently introduced Sam to the dangers of snakebites, the threat of poisonous insects, and the harshness of the land.

FIRST STOP: HAIFA “I came from that shameful world where Jews, unlike the local heroes, had let themselves be slaughtered.”3 It was the year 1948 and the War of Independence was raging. The family settled in Haifa, living

among other survivors who Bak said “…pretended not to be as broken as they really were.”4 He was 15—a bewildered, uprooted, and deeply disappointed teenager whose fate had brought him not to the sumptuous heart of the arts in Paris but to a warring and bereft Israel. Nonetheless, his was an optimistic disposition buoyed by his mother’s positive expectations for the future of Israel. Subconsciously, there stirred a creative force within him, rooted in the loving shelter of his early childhood, transformed by the trauma of the Holocaust, and altered by the circumscribed life in limbo in Landsberg. In Haifa, little Samek metamorphosed into Shmuel, a name inherited from his great-grandfather (in Hebrew it means “His name is God”). To his friends, he was simply Sami.5 Almost immediately, Mitsia retook up the mantle of his life’s priority, his artistic development. Her search for an art teacher brought her to Shlomo Narinsky Naroni, who lived nearby on the slopes of Mount Carmel.6 The relationship between Bak and Naroni (with whom he communicated in Yiddish) was strained. The elder artist, then over 60 years old, underestimated his 15-yearold pupil’s artistic level and allowed him little liberty. Bak was perplexed by “the rigidity of his method. No more spontaneity, no freedom, utter control.”7 He taught Bak charcoal drawing and concentrated on still lifes in the tradition of Art Deco’s misinterpretation of Cézanne. In his inflexible teaching method, he “asked me to synthesize and stylize what I saw, invent what I didn’t see, and represent it in large forms, and only in black and white.”8 Naroni was an authoritarian who “must have been trying to turn me into a devoted acolyte, and almost succeeded.”9 A still life by Bak preserved from this period is a well-executed artistic exercise but it lacks any trace of his youthful exuberance and no hint of the existential world view of his later still life paintings.10 Despite this, Bak has since written “I believe that Shlomo Naroni played well his part in the shaping of my sense of evaluation, critique, acceptance of art forms that differ from mine, and sharpened my own professional ability.”11

ON TO TEL AVIV Towards the end of 1948, the family joined a friend in Tel Aviv who had roots in Kovno (Kaunas). Nathan took a humble position at the Bank of Industry and Commerce whose small salary enabled him to apply for a loan to rent a subsidized, one-and-a-half room flat in a row of lowrent buildings hastily erected in the newly established neighborhood of Yad Eliyahu, east of Tel Aviv.12 Sam was given the half room, a tiny space furnished with a folding bed, a small easel, a bookshelf, a desk and chair, and the luxury of privacy he had not known in many years. He was also presented with an old bicycle to ride to his new school. Their neighborhood consisted largely of survivors, some of whom were friends from an earlier stage of life. None of them had much

money. Extravagances such as telephones and cars were scarce, and they regularly queued in long lines under the billowing stench of exhaust fumes just to catch an overflowing bus. The ordeal of the unreliable postage system was an ongoing topic of discussion. Naturally, Mitsia made the best of it and established what she called her “Open House,” with regular social gatherings in their home on Saturday evenings. Guests would cram their little flat, sharing chairs, sitting on beds, squatting on the floor. Here they restored the familiar ambiance of social interaction, with witty, nostalgic, humorous, politically insightful, and intellectually sophisticated conversation. Mitsia’s gracious hospitality helped consolidate their new identity as the Olim Hadashim (New Immigrants).13 They dared not speak of the raw and terrible catastrophe of their recent pasts with people who had not shared this tragedy, but among themselves it was often the core of their conversation. Sam felt at home among them (“I was their kibitzer”14), more so than he ever felt among his classmates or teachers at school. Tea was served, though sugar was a rarity as the economic crisis of the new state led to acute food rationing. Mitsia magically conjured up her eagerly anticipated babkas, sweet with the taste of good old times. Sometimes she managed to serve traditional chopped herring; other times she served chatzilim, a dish of grated eggs with fried eggplants acquired from Middle Eastern cuisine that replaced the traditional chopped chicken liver. Across the street lived Mania, the mother of Sam’s childhood friend, Samek Epstein, with whom he had played under the table at the home of the Epsteins or at No. 10 Wilenska Street in Vilna while the parents drank coffee, and who had been shot dead by the Nazis when they discovered his hiding place. Mania and Mitsia remained best friends, bound by the history they shared. Mania had also remarried, to a man named Sholem who had at one time been a colleague of Jonas Bak and who had lost his wife and children in the Shoah. Even after Mania gave birth to a yearned-for child, a girl, the dark clouds of the past never lifted from her soul. Her tear-filled eyes often rested on Sam, a terrible burden on his young shoulders. Despite his maturity, he was still only a teenager and often too much was expected from him. Those expectations, which might have crushed a less resilient boy, were managed through creative pursuits as he molded in himself that which Erich Neumann regards as “the compensatory action of the psyche with its tendency towards wholeness.”15

ALEPH MUNICIPAL HIGH SCHOOL The opportunity finally arose for Sam to fill the abysmal gap in his primary education, at Aleph Municipal High School.16 The work was hard, but he was driven as much by an innate certainty

in his abilities as he was by a deeply rooted need to fulfill the expectations of his loved ones who had perished, on whose behalf he felt compelled to succeed. At fifteen, he had never experienced the proper discipline of school and having so much to catch up on put him under a new kind of stress, day in and day out. He was accepted to the competitive school because of his artistic accomplishments but it was for him “a pressurized cauldron of ambitions.”17 For his impecunious parents, the most appealing aspect of Aleph was that the tuition was free. But his lack of any real educational foundation was so apparent they had to hire private teachers anyway to bring him up to the standard. For the first time, he was formally introduced to mathematics, sciences, general and Jewish history, and English language and culture. He worked day and night, with his characteristic iron self-discipline and ever-present compulsion to compensate for the miracle of his survival by not wasting the life he was given. The multi-lingual Bak, who already spoke Yiddish, Polish, German, and Russian, finally began to learn Hebrew. As much as the school demanded from its pupils, it also gave to them. Bak’s most gratifying times at school were when he was interacting with his teachers. He was an avid learner who progressed quickly and began to forge friendships with his schoolmates, all of whom were also considered gifted in their own ways. His closest friend was Adam Federgrin, who like Sam originally hailed from Poland, wore glasses, lived in a tiny flat, and was an only child in search of a friend. The two looked alike, except that Adam was often sad and withdrawn. From the start, they communicated in Hebrew, a feat which in their eyes made them true Israelis set apart from their families. Adam’s father was a physician, an Ole Hadash who although speaking a very classy Polish had trouble with his newly acquired Hebrew. Each morning, Bak navigated the arduous road from his home in Yad Eliyahu to the school on Balfour Street, in the center of Tel Aviv. He maneuvered his heavy, antediluvian bicycle past the debris of building sites along unpaved streets lined with monotonous rows of Bauhaus-inspired homes. In the winter, the streets were muddy and wet. Markusha soon came to his rescue as one of his friends worked as a driver for the Maariv evening newspaper, chauffeuring its senior journalists and brilliant co-founders, Shalom Rosenfeld and Shmuel Schnitzer, to work. They made space for Sam in the rickety vehicle, and he sat quietly beside them and became all ears to their sophisticated discussions of daily matters, shaping his political tendencies toward the left from early on.18

STUDYING THE TANAKH The study of the Hebrew Bible—the Tanakh, the “Fort Knox, the indestructible vault of our

culture”19—played a vitally important part in the school curriculum. In the Israeli educational system, parents were given the choice between religious or secular schools. In the secular Aleph Municipal High School, the Tanakh was studied as a work of Hebrew literature and poetry, with emphasis on its diverse interpretations of long centuries of Jewish history. This approach to the text differed vastly from his early childhood, when Bible tales were coaxingly spooned to him by his mother or Xenia, his Christian nanny, along with bites of food. After Bak’s own experience of the human condition in its rawest brutality, he discovered in this ancient cultural source an immense fountain of wisdom that “spoke of all that man was capable. Slaughter of innocents, greed, injustice, perversions, murder, exile, and loss, but also social order, military strategies, discipline, social care, ecstasy, love etc., etc...”20 Decades later in his art, he reconstructs The Tablets of the Law, an edifice of Jewish tradition, which in one example from 1977 states in Hebrew on an otherwise empty stone tablet: “I am God” (a concept the artist has wrestled with but does not, at least artistically, negate). He loved studying the Talmud (the central text of Rabbinic Judaism), the Mishnah (the first major written collection of the Jewish oral traditions), and the Midrash (a biblical exegesis by ancient Judaic authorities using a mode of interpretation of the Biblical text prominent in the Talmud). He was “particularly taken by the interpretations of the biblical texts that were created over many centuries, representing changing attitudes of philosophy and research.”21

ANGLISTICS WITH ARONSON; ART WITH ALLWEIL, JANCO, AND BERGNER In addition to the bevy of other challenges, Bak had to rapidly acquire a working knowledge of English, which because the language is not phonetic, he found mercilessly difficult. He tackled this by reading copiously and watching Hollywood films, which he gradually began to understand. His English teacher was the revered Dr. Alex Aronson,22 who even outwardly cut a distinguished figure—tall and blond, with clear blue eyes, he was impeccably dressed and spoke in what Bak considered a cozy German accent. He enlightened the young and eager Israelis in the great English culture. Of Aronson, Bak wrote: I guess he never realized how much I admired him. A certain shyness of a young person stood in my way. I knew that many of my classmates were in awe of him. There was something very moving in the way he treated us with respect and generosity, and it touched all of us. He might have been the first important father-figure-of-choice that in my heart I secretly adopted.23

Bak loved his lessons in Romantic poetry and novels, but Shakespeare towered over them all. Aronson worked through Macbeth, which to this day Bak evokes with characteristic enthusiasm, unmarred by the passing of time, writing: Wow, what a play, and what a slaughterhouse, and how could one forget these lines? Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.24 When read through the lens of the Holocaust, the stanza took on a particular resonance with Bak, at a time when he was supposed to feel happy, positive, and full of hope for the future. At times, Aronson eschewed the tedious learning of the intricacies of English grammar and instead shared with his favorite students his penchant for music, playing Beethoven sonatas on his piano (which Bak absorbed with total wonder) and encouraging them to attend symphony rehearsals, then under the baton of Leonard Bernstein. He told them about living in India, about the monkeys with their cheeky attitudes of entitlement, about the faithful dog of the mystic Rabindranath Tagore who followed his master in death by refusing any nourishment. Another standout among the excellent educators at Aleph was Bak’s art teacher Arieh Allweil,25 who immediately recognized Bak’s talent, treated him as an equal, and engaged in lively conversations with him about the meaning of art. The influence of Allweil’s compact style is evident in Bak’s street scene in Jaffa, with its translucent water jug, glass, and lemon painted in skewed perspective sitting on a table in the foreground and looking over a compressed row of buildings. In the same year, Bak painted a figure of a boy selling sabra, or prickly pears, holding one as totem of identification that he is a Jew born in Israel. In his monumental sturdiness he exudes a raw vigor so unlike the emaciated, reflective boys in Bak’s drawings and paintings from

the Landsberg DP camp. Allweil helped Bak become acquainted with the land and raised money for him to travel to the Galilee and paint during school holidays. This gave him the chance to see Israel the beautiful country and Israel the ugly country, with its incomplete building structures and chaotic road work.26 Outside of his schoolwork, which absorbed him throughout the day, Bak attended evening classes under the prominent painter, architect, and art theorist Marcel Janco,27 though his experience of Janco as an art teacher was rather deflating. The great teacher struggled to articulate his ideas to his students and seemed out of touch with their needs. Bak remembers how: He tried to engage us, his pupils of drawing, to search for Matisse-like simplifications, which I found rather shallow. This kind of virtuosity convinces when it is a result of careful observation and deep knowledge. As a point of departure, it leads to mere mannerism. Obviously, his heart wasn’t with us.28 Janco was preoccupied with other problems. He was preparing for the huge event of Israel’s first participation in the Venice Biennale, in 1952. At the same time, he was managing Ofakim Hadashim (New Horizons, also known as the Group of 8), a group of abstract and semiabstract artists in search of a Zionist idiom that he had founded in 1942. The group was fraught with internal strife which Janco endeavored to assuage. Having experienced trauma in Europe, its members were collectively uprooted and insecure in Israel, which often led to disputes amongst them. Janco held fast to the ideals that had brought them together, the shared experience of arriving in Palestine before the Holocaust (some barely with their lives), and their collective struggle against a hostile British mandate that regarded them as pariahs. Being a student in this climate of creative confusion made it difficult for Bak to find his feet. Janco’s paintings clearly made some impression on him, silently evoking the suppressed memories of his past which though latent had not disappeared. A gouache from 1951 entitled Shtetl appears as from nowhere in the contemporary Israeli landscape but is rather conjured from a dream, a stylized Eastern European Jewish village rising from the depth of the artist’s being, possibly inspired by Janco’s mysticism. For a time, Bak devoted his attention to the iconography of construction inspired by the rebuilding of the new homeland by the dedicated hands of Jewish labor. In his striking painting Workers, builders are patterned in geometric harmony, rising rhythmically with the structure’s

construction. Their features are indistinct; they came from all walks of life. Among them were even found university professors who wanted to share in the Zionist ideal of communal labor.29 His construction paintings are rendered in large spaces of optimism and confidence, where the darkness of his childhood trauma rarely materializes. In some cases, as in Splash of Memory from 1949, nebulous figures and shadows creep into the city streets. Bak also recognized the painful discord with the regional population that marred the birth of the Jewish state. He was not insensitive to their fate, painting works like the semi-abstract Bombed House in an Arab Village in colors that cry out in acute existential anguish. In 1951, the artist Yosl Bergner,30 who had just settled in Israel with his wife Audrey, requested that some family friends introduce him to a 17-year-old Bak. He had something mysterious to show him. At their first meeting, Bergner fished from his purse a yellowed scrap of paper which he solemnly unfolded and presented to Bak, his eyes sparkling. It was the center spread of the Palestinian (pre-Israeli) weekly D’var Hashavua featuring Moshe Sharett’s historic speech to the United Nations in which he demanded the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was illustrated with reproductions of some of Bak’s artwork created in the Landsberg DP camp. Bergner announced ceremoniously, “I brought it with me from Australia, hoping one day to meet you in person.”31 In the newly established Jewish state, the two artists, one from Vienna via Australia, the other from Vilna via Landsberg, stood in front of each other in wonder. A deep friendship developed between them that lasted until the end of Bergner’s 97 years. Whenever Bak could he visited the couple, taking three overcrowded buses (interminably pumping their wretched exhaust) to arrive in the scenic town of Safed. There, they had memorable conversations, often accompanied by kidding and laughs, Sam in his Lithuanianinfluenced Yiddish and Yosl in the Yiddish that to Sam sounded like the vernacular of some Warsaw gangsters.32 Bak has written that, “Yosl was a great storyteller, and the art of painting was only a fraction of what we discussed, argued about, agreed, and agreed to disagree.”33 He was also an artist of very high caliber whose work did not fit with the Israeli idiom of his time, and who was therefore often conveniently but heedlessly characterized as a Surrealist.34

MEETING THE GREAT MASTER In 1951, when Bak was barely 17 and still living in Israel, a prominent art collector asked Chagall, then on a visit to the country, to meet the young and promising artist, see his art, and advise him. Bak describes their meeting:

Something like 2:20 or 2:25pm, a very precise time had been set up. Chagall, his companion Virginia (Haggard), and their son, David, were staying in Tel Aviv’s Dan Hotel, in one of its most luxurious suites. Mother and I mounted the elevator to the last floor in total silence, trying to keep our excitement under control. Mother was all dressed up and I, in the notoriously short khaki pants (the symbol of Israel’s humble spirit) was carrying a large portfolio packed with my best works. Landsberg and Haifa, Tel Aviv, and the Galilee, memories, and modest experiments… We were graciously welcomed by Virginia, who wore a fashionably small gray hat and spoke to us in English. She apologized: Chagall was very busy, we had to wait. We waited. I felt I was melting, sweating, bursting with anticipation, my legs shivered. Was it the imminence of meeting the world-famous artist, or was it my unfamiliarity with air conditioning? Virginia, an impressive and good-looking lady, sent us apologetic smiles. Finally, the great master entered the ample living room of their suite, but he hardly remarked our presence. His famous face was glued to a phone receiver connected to a long, long cable. He was very busy. A quick glance to acknowledge our presence spoke volumes. How could he, attending to his many commitments, press interviews, juggling between international calls from New York or Paris or Whatever, pay attention to the young, shy, and bespectacled youngster whose legs seemed to tremble? Virginia suggested that I spread out my artwork on the impeccably made-up bed of the suite’s bedroom, which I did. Finally, the Master arrived and looked at the bed. Yes, he said, yes, yes. He then came close to me, once or twice patted on my shoulder, and said: GO ON, MY BOY, GO ON. And he was gone.35 In Bak’s mind, he added Chagall’s “GO ON” to Arno Nadel’s “KUNST, KUNST, und KUNST.” And still to this day, he goes on.

THE DRAMA’S FAMILIAR CAST EFFECTS A NARROW ESCAPE One evening in 1951, Yosl and Audrey Bergner were expected for dinner at Sam’s home— their first meeting since their emotional introduction. Sam had been complaining of a severe stomachache which just seemed to get worse and worse. Mitsia brought him to a kind, elderly doctor who took one look at the high-strung kid and his worried mother and declared that she rather needed to be tranquilized herself. It was only nerves, he diagnosed. It would go away

soon. There was no way to phone or send a message to Safed to cancel the invitation, and so the Bergners arrived (themselves having endured the miserable three-hour bus journey) with a beautiful bouquet of flowers. One look at the deathly pale boy lying limply on his bed, having vomited not long before, and they politely made their excuses and left filled with worry. As the night progressed and Sam became increasingly ill with violent pains, Mitsia’s survival instinct fired up. Calling an ambulance at that time of austerity would have been futile, but she knew that one of their neighbors was in possession of a telephone so she rushed over and frantically woke them. Apologizing profusely, she called their old doctor friend Misha Feigenberg, whose wife Slava had already once saved Sam’s life in 1943 in the HKP 562 Labor Camp by protecting him from the Kinder Aktion. Misha had a car, immediately came to Yad Eliyahu, took one look at Sam, heaved him on his back, and rushed down the three floors of their building to his car with Mitsia at his heels. They sped to a private residence, from which Misha extracted a bewildered man in pajamas with ruffled hair who turned out to be a highly skilled surgeon. They hastened to the emergency entrance of the nearest hospital. It was a burst appendix. Then, a mask was on his face and he counted down from 10, 9, 8… .

The doctors worked on him for more than two hours to clean up the damage. He woke to see his mother’s exhausted but triumphant face; she had once again saved his life. Misha, meanwhile, was busy combing the city of Tel Aviv in search of a newly discovered medication called an antibiotic, which Mitsia explained “kills bacteria even more efficiently than Nazis kill Jews.”36 Misha, through his network of connections, managed to obtain the penicillin via the Israeli army, quipping that saving Sam was becoming a habit. In fact, this would not be the last time. In 1969, as a urologist, he prevented Sam from losing a kidney and dying of a generalized septicemia.

THE TEACHERS OF BEZALEL Despite it all, Bak did well in school. His artistic accomplishments were noticed and in 1952, at the age of 18, he was awarded a scholarship from the America-Israeli Foundation to study at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.37 Even as a young person, Bak recognized a perhaps unnamed but deep-seated certainty that a creative force dwelled within him, that there was beyond himself something universal that was waiting to find form. He felt with equal certainty that the key to unlocking this creative realm lay in Paris, where he was still determined to train one day. In the meantime, he accepted the honor to study at Bezalel with great enthusiasm, eager as he was to learn new techniques and cognizant that Bezalel would be an invaluable steppingstone in his creative development. In the end, he only stayed one of the four prescribed years offered as the course of study at Bezalel. Of this brief stint, he wrote:

…I had a wonderful time. The city, divided between Jordanians and Israelis, was very often peaceful, rarely not so. It was, among other things, like many Jews in black Kapotas, abundantly packed with the Yekes (German Jews) who had escaped Nazism. German Jews who elegantly—ladies in small hats, and men wearing bowties—practiced Kaffee mit Schlag und Strudel.38 BEZALEL gave me a lot of time to indulge in my passion for painting. I clearly made progress. Side jobs that asked for artistic talent, made me, as expected, earn money for my plans to follow.39 The director of Bezalel at the time was Mordecai Ardon, born in Galicia as Max Bronstein. He had studied art at the Bauhaus Design School in Weimar in Germany under its founder, Martin Gropius.40 Early in their rise to power, the Nazis took aim at the Bauhaus movement and its “cosmopolitan rubbish” and so by 1933 Bronstein left Germany and immigrated to Palestine, where he changed his name to Ardon.41 There remained in him, from Bak’s perspective, a secret yearning for the days of the Weimar Republic. His lectures at the school centered on art history and technique, orations Bak described as “strange exercises of theatrical showmanship. We called them ‘the missing centimeters’.”42 He saw in Ardon a man trying perhaps too hard to emulate his mentor, Johannes Itten. Although Bak admired his art, as a teacher he regarded Ardon as “quite full of himself and his importance.”43 He had a complex about his small stature, often remarking to his students that had he not been so short, he would have been a great actor, an idea allegedly imparted to him by theater and film director Max Reinhardt (who himself had left Germany for America in 1933).44 In 1953, during Bak’s tenure at the school, Jacob Steinhardt45 succeeded Ardon as director. Bak remembers Steinhardt as the kindest among his teachers at the institution, a man he respected both as a human being and as an artist. Steinhardt, in turn, had a high regard for Bak, supporting him in his resolve to study at the school for only one year. His influence on his art is evident in drawings such as Light and Shadow, with its dramatic interaction of bright and dark and its incommensurably dwarfed figures in a vast, empty building. As a student of Rudy Deutsch (Dayan), known for his color-blocked advertising posters, Bak learned the basics of graphic design. Other teachers at Bezalel included the Hungarian Holocaust survivor Yossi Stern, ten years Bak’s senior and known for his humorous, quirky demeanor, German-born Isidor Ascheim, and Romanian Jakob Eisenscher, always sensitive to the needs of their students. Many of the artists

who taught at Bezalel had left Europe under traumatic circumstances, forced to create new roots in the Jewish state, and were later recognized as outstanding representatives of Israeli art. They all recognized Bak’s gift, contributing to his technical and creative growth; he in turn was filled with gratitude to them for guiding him on his artistic journey. But despite their tutelage, “they did not determine the nature of the art that I would create. It was Life with a capital L that shaped me as an artist.”46 For that, he needed to look beyond his training and instruction, deeper than the lectures and the assignments. He wrote that: My past achievements and my losses, my wanderings and wonderings, my existential needs, and my forever willing adaptability, as well as my search for answers to innumerable questions (…) all these experiences made me go beyond the mere pleasure of producing art for its own sake, for its mere beauty, for showing off my skills.47 Bak had already witnessed man’s susceptibility to and capacity for destruction, seen and experienced the cruel lurking of the most basic instincts. But he had also observed man’s sense of right and wrong, indeed owed his survival to those who had saved his life despite great peril to their own. But what was then merely personal knowledge had yet to crystallize in a pictorial language. He still sought a creative realm that could reach into the sphere of universal significance to send its message to humanity as a whole. Many years would pass before he began to truly transform his personal images into a collective canon, a new route to understanding in the form of questions conveyed through his very specific mode of symbolic abstraction. At this point of his formative years, he consciously reached out to the sources of his inner being that had shaped him in his childhood years. And he clung to the voice of his grandfather Chayim who had decreed that he go to Paris to realize his artistic goal.

MILITARY SERVICE Despite his desire for it to be so, the line from Bezalel to Paris was not straight. Like many of his contemporaries, he was bogged down by the obligations of daily existence that often felt insurmountable. He had to earn an income and overcome the baffling bureaucracies of Israel, which he describes as “labyrinthine.”48 He was often frustrated by and yearned for freedom from the onerous and overwhelming burdens that stole precious time from his artistic pursuits. Beyond the exigencies of everyday were deeper existential concerns not uncommon to a man coming of age. He did not know who he really was, the shape of his unpronounced and hidden desires, his potentials, his capacity for consistent choices, the nature of his looming limitations, and

ultimately—his goals. Meanwhile, he had to complete his compulsory thirty months of military service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Keen to put this requirement behind him, he enlisted in 1953, at the age of 20 at a time when mercifully there was a tentative peace. Bak has played down the training, which in the IDF is notoriously tough, and after the first few months of harsh drills the army employed him as an artist to carry out graphic work for its medical corps, educational sector, and general headquarters. He was tasked with drawing diagrams, composing layouts, and producing instructional manuals. He summed up his army experience with this sardonic report: “My service was appreciated. As one of the 100 best soldiers of the year 1954 I was invited on Yom Ha’atzmaut, the day of independence, to shake the hand of Israel’s president Itzhak Ben Zvi, poor man, then in a state of total dementia.”49 On the side, he found opportunities to earn money with art-related tasks, his mind resolutely directed to his future studies in Paris. When time permitted, in the well-equipped library of the American Cultural Center in Tel Aviv, he immersed himself in a rich supply of books on the magical art metropolis of his dreams.

AN ASIDE ABOUT ADAM Adam Federgrin, Bak’s best friend from high school, had meanwhile delayed his obligatory army service to study medicine in Jerusalem. After his studies, in the early sixties, he was enrolled as a certified army physician, and having completed his officers’ course became the doctor of the army’s unit of paratroopers. Years later, on one of Bak’s visits to Israel when he no longer lived in that country, they met at Adam’s mother’s home. Adam looked well, and exuded self-confidence in his olive uniform. He spoke of his girlfriend and his hope of starting a family. His parents had moved to a flat on Nahalat Benyamin Street, then a poor area between Tel Aviv and Jaffa where the elder Dr. Federgrin selflessly tended to many patients without pay. Sometime after Bak’s visit with Adam he received the news that Adam had been killed while driving his Jeep during a military exercise. The shock of this news was overwhelming, instantly bringing to the surface dreadful comparisons with the loss of his young friend, Samek, during the Holocaust. He wrote, “I thought of my friend Samek at 8, and of Adam at 28, and the Biblical Isaac at an age I do not know, the perpetual testing to which we are exposed, and the loss that makes no sense…”50 A year later, Bak came to Israel to visit Adam’s broken parents, remembering that:

I hardly recognized the mother, now gray and aged before her time. She spoke with a whisper, told me that her husband was in the synagogue, and made me follow her to her son’s room. His uniform hung on a chair, as if he would come out from one of the dark doors at any moment and put it on. The shoes were next to the chair and seemed overly polished. His parachuter’s beret with its known insignia of wings were under a small cube of glass. I felt that I was in a strange mausoleum, and the tongue stuck to my palate. I tried to hug the bereaved mother, but my intention made her feel uncomfortable.51 Not long after this visit Adam’s father succumbed to a stroke in the neighborhood synagogue. In his bitter pain Bak reports that, “mutual friends said that he died of a broken heart. I do not remember Dr. Federgrin’s name. Shouldn’t it have been Abraham?”52 Bak feels a duty to memorialize those close to him who have died, icons of the untold others who similarly perished. It would be another thirty years before a nod to Adam Federgrin appeared in his work, in a painting cynically titled Creation of Wartime in which Bak references Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.53

TAKING UP THE THEATER IN ISRAEL When Bak first came to Israel, Yiddish was still spoken by immigrants and survivors from Europe. They learned Hebrew, but their mame-loshn (mother tongue) assured them a sense of identity, and the endurance of their old culture. This gave birth to a theater that was performed in Yiddish and accommodated a steadfast though aging and ever-shrinking public. They staged plays of both Jewish and classical repertory and Bak attended performances in Yiddish of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, performances that touched his soul. His first stage design was created for a performance of three short plays in the theater he frequented. One of the preparatory drawings for the décor captures the contrast between light and dark within a cavernous space connected by the jagged trunks and branches of a barren tree in an atmosphere of heightened drama and a detached distance in which the tiny figures act out their roles. This early sketch encapsulates the essence of his later theater work and its impact on his future oeuvre. Israel at the time had three main theaters: the Habima,54 the Cameri (its national theater), and the Ohel,55 the official theater of the Histadrut (the General Organization of Workers, the Labor Union), all known for celebrating the pride of Jewish identity, the heroism of war,

and the ideological sacrifice of the Kibbutz movement. In the late 1950s, the Ohel was at a crossroads. The great actors were aging, their Hebrew suffused with a heavy Russian accent born of a different era. A new generation of actors, with Hebrew as their mother tongue, had arrived. Audiences wanted to see performances by international playwrights in contemporary jargon and new theaters such as the Cameri (founded in 1944), with its lighter and more jocular productions, offered an enticing alternative. Ohel divorced from its parent body, motivated by a decline in the theater’s quality and its lagging ability to draw an audience, and its stage was in desperate need of renewal. In 1954, Canadian-born producer and artistic director Peter Frye56 stepped in, working for the Habima, the Cameri, and the Ohel (temporarily bringing notoriety back to it until it finally shuttered in 1969). Frye was looking for a young artist to design his stage sets and costumes and was introduced to Bak by Betty Segal, one of the stars of the Yiddish theater. Bak has written, “When I met Peter, he was about forty, handsome, boisterous, reassuring, and charismatic… and then something special clicked in that encounter.”57 Frye became Bak’s mentor in all things connected to the theater and he “crammed me to the brim”58 with information on stage design, lighting, the shaping of costumes, and the enhancement of characters. Coming as he did from a completely different world, Frye introduced Bak to contemporary American literature and science-fiction, which had an immediate impact on his stage design. He was the essence of a provocateur. Like Alex Aronson before him, Frye listened to Beethoven’s sonatas and encouraged Bak to listen to all of Beethoven’s quartets on his record player. “I had to learn seeing what I hear, and hearing what I see,”59 he has said. To the great joy of Mitsia, who had boundless admiration for him, Frye took on the role of father figure as well, guiding Bak in habits of healthy eating and drinking (to which, at the age of 22, he had yet to give more thought). Bak explains that: For the young and rather shy man I was, inertly self-assured and overly self-questioning, full of contradictions and very proud, my friendship with Peter became a life changing experience. In fact, I hungered for an inspiring and challenging mentor…I became his assistant, and later an acknowledged designer of several of his productions. Our deep friendship lasted until the last day of his life.60

THE PERFORMING ARTS COME BACK INTO PLAY In conversations61 and unpublished notes,62 as well as his memoir Painted in Words,63 Bak recalls

the steady presence of the performing arts in his youth. These experiences—some amusing, some dramatic, some banal—all brought him to this professional moment in Israel and contributed significantly to his artistic development. His memories reach back to his early childhood, beginning with a failed attempt at acting in his Yiddish kindergarten when little Samek, dressed in a coat and a cotton wool wig, played Old Man Winter in the school play. In that early role, he was supposed to sprinkle confetti snow before being driven out by the sparkling wand of Spring (his secret crush), exquisitely attired in a bouncing tutu. The tension of the play was at its height, his big moment upon him, when Old Man Winter suddenly spotted his family in the front row of the audience. Overcome with stage fright he froze beyond repair and turned the eagerly anticipated show into a grandiose failure.64 It was a dubious start in the theater. Aunt Yetta, who as an aside believed that she possessed magical powers, took him to the movies to see Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which came out in 1937 when Sam was only 4. He was so convinced of the realness of the animation, transfixed by the evil stepmother’s ghastly show of witchcraft, that from out of nowhere he realized a primordial scream, unsure at first that it had emanated from his own throat.65 Aunt and nephew were rudely expelled mid-film. At home that night, he ran a high fever whose cause could not be diagnosed by the worried pediatrician, giving his mother and Shifra a thorough scare. Deep down, though, they knew that fear had caused the fever. The boy was consoled with assurances that all future movie experiences would feature only harmless films with real people and promises to see puppet shows in the Yiddish children’s theater. Aunt Yetta received a strict reprimand. Cinema advertisements posted along the weekly path to his grandparents regularly stimulated his imagination.66 He remembered his mother’s accounts of the Polish experimental theater Reduta and its director Makoynik, who became Bak’s first art teacher after the war.67 Later during life in the Landsberg DP camp he attended the Theater of Survivors in Munich (produced by the actor Alexander Barzini) and was tasked by his teachers to design a Purim play for which he shaped all the puppets (which were unfortunately “organizirt”—stolen— before the play could be staged).68 These experiences now stood Bak in good stead. In their ensuing collaborations, he soon became Frye’s equal, providing the visual complement to his contemporary theatrical productions and helping to tie the repertoire into current events in Europe and America. Together they broke boundaries. Bak’s costumes captured the essence of the characters with a throbbing vitality; his use of contrasting light and dark in the stage design was its own artistic contribution. After Frye’s death in 1991, Bak maintained his friendship with Thelma Ruby, Frye’s

second wife and widow, and as the years passed Bak came to realize how satisfying his work in the theater had been and how inextricably linked it was to his creativity. As a painter, he was entirely alone, without comrades, counterpoints, or compromise. To have been a part of a group, working collectively in a combined endeavor, was to him a deeply rewarding experience. In the cooperative effort of the performing arts, where a simple idea grew and came to life through the deeds of a collaborative company, he rediscovered Aunt Yetta’s magic. No doubt his future art, with its metaphorical content and the simultaneity of detached distance and emotional immediacy, are indebted to his time in the theater.

PARIS—OUI OU NON? By now, Bak had accumulated enough money to fulfil the wishes of his grandfather Chayim— wishes that had since become his own—to study in Paris. However, he was so fulfilled by his work in theater design that on the precipice of his dream he was having second thoughts. Should he remain in Israel and pursue this rewarding work, knowing that his income would be guaranteed and his career would advance to new heights? Should he simply visit Paris as a tourist? In the end, the lure of the long-held dream proved too great. He left Israel in 1956 to study in Paris, at the École des Beaux Arts: …with a clear sense of pride in my fresh (Israeli) identity and brand-new passport. Having completed all my obligations, including the military service, I was seemingly mature. And when I boarded the plane, wearing a jacket and tie, holding two small suitcases with my worldly belongings wisely packed by Mother’s loving hands, I surely looked contented. Yet I was full of contradictions and more open to future disenchantments than I dared to imagine.69 He was twenty-three years old. The Jewish state was merely eight, still struggling for political survival and to forge an identity. The 1956 war, the first of many ensuing Arab Israeli conflicts, began with the Suez Crisis and led to the Sinai Campaign in which thousands of young soldiers lost their lives. Bak left an Israel torn between numerous different and differing outlooks, a slice of the European world planted in the Middle East, in whose zeitgeist its European past was regarded as a mark of shame.70 Israel at the time was isolated from the rest of the world, insular and detached in its mentality. Bak was leaving behind a situation defined by uncertainty, but he was certain that he would find all the answers in Paris.

STILL LIFE 1948 Charcoal on paper 13 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches A still life from early in Bak’s Israeli period depicts the tools of the artist’s trade and uses skewed perspective to create tension.

SELLER OF PRICKLY PEARS (SABRAS) 1949 Egg tempera on paper 12 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches Sabras (the prickly pears of a cactus) was the nickname for Jews born in Israel (or Palestine before the creation of Israel in 1948).

A STREET IN JAFFA 1949 Oil on wood 11 1/4 x 9 1/8 inches Allweil helped Bak raise money to travel and paint during school holidays.

GALIL 1950 Oil on paper 17 3/8 x 11 3/4 inches TREES 1950 Oil on paper 19 x 11 3/4 inches The impact of Arieh Allweil, one of Bak’s teachers at Aleph Municipal High School, is evident in these tree paintings.

SHTETL 1951 Gouache on paper 13 x 19 5/8 inches Colorful, stylized shtetl houses reveal the influence of artist and theorist Marcel Janco, founder of the Ofakim Hadashim (New Horizons).

WORKERS 1950 Gouache on paper 19 5/8 x 25 3/8 inches Israel in the early 1950s experienced a construction boom at the hands of Jewish laborers from all walks of life.

SPLASH OF MEMORY 1949 Oil on canvas 13 3/4 x 18 1/8 inches Here and there, bleak visions of the past emerge, as in this painting of shadowy, dark-eyed figures crowding a street.

BOMBED HOUSE IN ARAB VILLAGE 1951 Gouache on paper 18 1/8 x 13 3/8 inches Bak was sensitive to the effects on Palestinians of tensions between them and Israelis.

SAFED 1951 Oil on linen 22 1/8 x 14 5/8 inches Artist Yosl Bergner often invited Bak to his seaside home in Safed to help in his studio and discuss art, among other topics.

DEEP SHADOW 1952 Ink on paper 7 x 5 inches PORTRAIT 1952 Gouache, ink, and watercolor on paper 13 3/4 x 10 inches LIGHT AND SHADOW 1952 Ink on paper 6 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches In 1952, the year of these works on paper, Bak was awarded a scholarship to the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, delaying his move to Paris but offering time to focus on painting.

ARMY CAMP 1953 Egg tempera on paper 12 5/8 x 19 1/2 inches During his mandatory service in the IDF, Bak was tasked with doing graphic work for various military sectors.

YIDDISH THEATRE TEL AVIV STAGE DESIGN I 1951 Ink on paper 6 x 8 1/4 inches STAGE DESIGN II 1951 Ink on paper 5 x 8 1/2 inches Bak frequented the Yiddish Theatre as an audience member before being hired to create stage designs.

ROMEO & JULIET (B) COSTUME DESIGN XX (ROMEO) AND XXI (JULIET) 1955 Gouache on paper 13 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches This production of Romeo & Juliet, to be directed by Peter Frye, was never realized.

MEDEA COSTUME DESIGN VIII, VII AND XVIII 1955 Gouache on paper 13 1/4 x 10 inches Peter Frye directed this production of Medea at the Habima.

THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED STAGE DESIGN IV ▶ 1955 Gouache on black paper 13 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches Written in 1924, this production was directed by Peter Frye for the OHEL .

LES CYCLONES STAGE DESIGN II 1956 Gouache on black paper 13 3/4 x 20 inches Les Cyclones was written in 1953 and performed at the Habima.

4

PARIS 1956 TO 1959

IN THE ART METROPOLIS For Bak as a child—and for his paternal grandfather who perished in the Shoah—Paris, the magical city of lights was the undeniable art metropolis of Europe, if not of the world. The maturing Bak never lost his imbedded desire to study there. On the contrary, he was driven to live up to the expectations of his lost loved ones. In Paris, he would absorb the zeitgeist. He would link his art to the canon of European modern art. He would spend the most liberating, the most fulfilling, and (so far) the most rewarding time of his life, putting aside his “uneasy beginning” and catching up on the loss of so many years. Armed with letters of introduction to friends and acquaintances of his parents, he strolled through the narrow streets of the Marais, once a hub of the Jewish population, trying to familiarize himself with a place where newcomers were rarely welcomed with open arms.1 The Marais was the ancient quarter where half a century before a young revolutionary Bundist named Chayim Bak arrived fleeing the Czarist police, followed later—reluctantly and dutifully— by his wife Rachel and their young son, David (Sam’s uncle and future victim of the Soviet Gulags whom he would never meet). It was the same Marais from where, in 1907, Chayim and Rachel, then heavily pregnant with Sam’s father, departed to resume their lives in their native Vilna. Rachel had longed for the warmth of her family, and a minimum of comfort that their underprivileged and grimy part of Paris did not afford. In the same quarter in the early 1940s, the Gestapo rounded up thousands of Jews and sent them to the Drancy transit camp before deporting them to their deaths in Eastern European extermination camps. Many East European Jewish artists, on their arrival from the towns and shtetls of the Russian Empire during the first decade of the 20th century, had settled in Montparnasse, on the left side of the Seine. There they rented live-in studios in a round building called La Ruche (The Beehive)2 and socialized in the Café de la Rotonde, chatting to each other in Yiddish. In the great museum collections, they studied the Old Masters, from whom the French avant-garde artists were distancing themselves in their efforts to become free

from the shackles of their ethnic traditions. Living and working on the cultural periphery, this Eastern European circle, loosely dubbed the École Juive,3 was soon a part of the École de Paris and gradually became bolder and more brazen in their newfound artistic freedom. Some were admired and befriended by Picasso and other artists of his circle.4 After June 1940, when the Germans occupied France, the members of the École Juive were decimated by the Holocaust. Among those who perished were sixty-four artists, including the great Chaïm Soutine who, suffering from a stomach ulcer, died in Paris after leaving his safe hiding place during the German occupation, too late for the emergency surgery that failed to save his life. Among those who survived were Chana Orloff,5 who managed to escape to Switzerland,6 Jacques Lipchitz, and Marc Chagall7, who were saved by the American Emergency Rescue Committee established by Varian Fry.8

A WORLD IN TURMOIL In 1956, when Bak moved to Paris, two generations had passed since the arrival of the many Jewish artists from Eastern Europe. This amazing, multifaceted city was still considered the capital of the international art scene, but post-war France was caught up in a political turmoil and the situation was fragile. Charles de Gaulle (who led the free French forces in the resistance until the capitulation of France to Germany, after which he fled to London), now acted as provisional president of France until his official election in 1958. In Algeria, the War of Independence from France had intensified9 and French students lived in constant fear of being enlisted. In 1956, the Soviet regime suppressed the short-lived Hungarian revolution10 and Paris was flooded with Hungarian refugees. Numerous establishments of higher learning were descended upon by groups of displaced individuals as only those with student status were granted temporary residence permits. Also in 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser annexed the Suez Canal. France and Britain (together with Israel) invaded Egypt, and then retreated on American order.11 Israeli students, including Bak, thronged their embassy to find out whether they had to return to Israel, but were instructed to stay in Paris. The Suez Crisis was short-lived but had significant repercussions for years to come. Picasso, Braque, Rouault, and the other titans of the École de Paris—their work marketed by influential art magazines with an abundance of cash12 and much sought after by wealthy collectors—still played dominant roles in the Parisian art scene. Picasso’s famous Guernica (1937) undisputedly stood as a symbol of modernism.13 It was doubtlessly a work of genius that had served as a political tool in the rift between the world-famous artist and the Fascist General

Franco, but that was a matter of history, politics, and the struggle for influence. Picasso was still a formidable figure in the official art world, exhibiting in the prominent galleries where he played the gallerists against each other. He had become a brilliant marketer of his work but the paintings of this revered giant had become, in the eyes of Bak, an ever growing “mannerism,” more and more distant from his earlier bold artistic breakthroughs.14 He was still a great magician, and the sleeves of his invisible robe contained many exciting surprises. Chagall, meanwhile, who exhibited in the famous Galerie Maeght, enjoyed the undisputed claim to what the Parisians defined as his “incroyable charme Slave,”15 while the power of his early paintings had waned under the influence of the ever more fashionable Tachism.16

AWAITING ENTRANCE TO THE ÉCOLE Meanwhile, the Paris of the mid-fifties offered a newly creative momentum, or so it then seemed to the aspiring young painter. Bak’s first lodging was in Hôtel Sainte Marie, one of the cheapest hotels on the rue Delambre near the Boulevard du Montparnasse, whose first three floors served as a bordello. He climbed with his two suitcases to the sixth floor and settled down in a small room that smelled of cigarette smoke and old dust, capturing its ambiance in an ink drawing entitled In My Room, rendered in the style of what he wryly called the “Israeli virginity of my art.”17 He also drew himself as he looked in the small shaving mirror, before he let his beard grow and assume its future variations of shape and color. While staying in this hotel he duly registered at the École des Beaux Arts and waited for the signature of Jean Souverbie, the professor he had chosen as his mentor, to confirm his enrollment. Meanwhile he strolled around the numerous art galleries in the quarter and made sketches in which he inadvertently expressed the darker parts of his mood at the time. An ink drawing entitled Deep in Thought (also called Mourner) reflects the sadness and desolation of an imaginary figure. This melancholy disposition might have been lingering in the deeper layers of Bak’s subconscious, but it did not wholly represent his frame of mind. Outwardly, he was energetic, curious, eager to learn, easily bemused by the unexpected, and avidly open to all that life had to offer.18 Bak intuited the throbbing heartbeat of the wounded city after the war and he picked up its countless reverberations, not unlike a highly sensitive radar. Visiting exhibition after exhibition, absorbing whatever each show proposed, pondering the newly attempted canons of artistic

expression, he found it all very confusing. In these early days of his perpetual meanderings through the great city, often hampered by his still poor command of French, he felt insecure, homesick and at the same time happy to be away from home, independent, detached, and free. During one of his walks on a side street adjacent to his lodgings, something stirred in him a specific memory of Israel, where donkeys were part of life at the countless construction sites across the young Jewish state. The little donkey he drew in 1956, with its unspeakably sad eyes, assumed a meaning for him of almost mythical dimensions.

THE LOUVRE AND THE QUESTION OF SCALE One of Bak’s first visits after his arrival in Paris was to the Louvre. Carrying in his memory the fifty postcards which he had saved from the Vilna Ghetto and were now tucked away in a dresser at his mother’s home in Israel, he came face to face with the original paintings of the Old Masters. Today we live in a time in which images reach us more and more on digital screens. The uniformity of their sizes on the iPhone, iPad, computer, or TV is never questioned. The image is often perceived as a disembodied vision not consistent with its physical presence. For Bak, postcards or illustrations in art books were akin to dematerialized visualizations, so in seeing the actual artwork in the Louvre they acquired a totally new dimension. The difference in scale between the postcards, first seen in the ghetto and living on in his memory, and the originals came to him as a real shock.19 When he discovered the diminutive Lacemaker by Vermeer, he was fascinated by its minuteness and the delicacy of each brushstroke, while the Raft of the Medusa by Gericault left him overwhelmed by its sheer size and drama. The brushstrokes of Delacroix had a life of their own, while the paintings of Ingres seemed as smooth as satin. He would utilize this startling aspect of physicality in size and substance in his future paintings. The unconventional scale of objects would become one of the hallmarks of his art, as in the painting Remembrance from 1979, in which he captures his passage from pictorial analogy to myth.20 But this came much later, after he made the daring move to swim against the prevailing current of contemporary art by embracing narrative and reviving the use of metaphor as an artistic device. The Louvre is a generous compendium of the history of art, displaying centuries of human creativity, from the earliest of times to the threshold of modernity. It demonstrates how generations of artists, following in the footsteps of those that preceded them, learned and evolved from each other. The Old Masters used to have assistants who produced legitimate copies of their work, prompting Bak to think deeply about the question of transmission from artist to pupil. He said that: Sometimes the assistants surpassed the masters and created works that

caused headaches for future Art historians. Copying without shame or apprehension, copying while hoping to surpass the master, in short: copying in order to learn all the tricks of the trade was for them the absolute key to greatness, comparative to toddlers learning to speak. After the children grow up that aptitude for imitation gradually wanes. But in artists it is a gift that seems to have a longer, and sometimes even very much longer life.21 It became clear to Bak that despite all the “isms” and the ever disappearing and reappearing tastes and fashions which assembled artists in groups of artistic identity, there were some masters that possessed marked signs of individuality and universality. He felt that Mantegna, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Chardin, and Delacroix, to mention but a few, just “had it.”22

SETTLING DOWN Bak introduced himself to the friends of his parents from Lithuania, some of whom were wellconnected.23 They helped him find his feet with the challenging procurement of study and residence permits. Tired of climbing up the six floors of the Hôtel Sainte Marie, he moved to a room in the apartment of a middle-aged woman, a survivor who had tragically lost her family in the Shoah. In Paris, she re-married and had a daughter, but misfortune struck again with the death of her second husband. When Bak moved into this new dwelling, her little blonde Renée was seven years old. Soon an affectionate bond developed between them; he helped her with designs and illustrations for her schoolwork and she enthusiastically taught him French. Here, he felt the need to get focused on his art. In the living room of the new apartment, he started a painting entitled Still Life with Apples while Renée watched his every move.24 It is a summary of the pre-war style of the École de Paris, ranging from its roots in Cézanne and following along the lines of analytic and synthetic Cubism in an austere composition with bright colors sparkling in facets picked up by the dominant white of the tablecloth. This beautiful painting became for Bak a focal point in the shaping of his art. Bak’s stay with mother and daughter was pleasant and friendly, but their lodging near the Place de la République was too many Metro stations away from the École des Beaux Arts, so he found a large room at 10 rue de Verneuil, conveniently close to the academy. It served him as studio, bedroom, and kitchenette, with a communal toilet outside above the landing of the staircase. One telephone, placed with the concierge Madame Moulin (a massive and severely coiffed gray-haired lady who lived on the ground floor), was shared by all the occupants of this old and

decrepit building. All were summoned to its valued service by the shrill sound of the concierge’s police-like whistle. Soon, Bak was officially enrolled at the venerable École des Beaux Arts, which dates to 1648 and has produced many leading French and international artists. For his generation of students, registration in the school meant more than an education in the arts. Firstly, meals were offered to the students at reduced rates at the restaurants universitaires and the public cafés and eateries. Just as vital for Bak was free access to cinemas, which for him meant unrestricted access to contemporary culture. Sitting on cracking chairs in the tiny movie theaters of the rue de la Harpe near the Sorbonne, Bak caught up on numerous films, sometimes ingesting two or three a day and absorbing them “like a sponge.”25 He also had free admittance to the art institutions and galleries on both sides of the Seine. As a student at the École des Beaux Arts, he could visit all the exhibitions, where the established artists showed their work. He relishes the memory of visits to the various Salons (the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon de Mai, the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, among others) at the Grand Palais, in which he gave free reign to his critical evaluation of the contemporary art scene. It was enough to cast a glance at the interior of an exhibition hall, that contained a large display of canvases and sculptures, and be instantly taken by the ones whose creators’ names had to be remembered. The most respected of these collective events, the Salon de Mai had been established in Paris in 1943 during the German occupation in opposition to the Nazi condemnation of modern art as “degenerate.” The annual exhibitions at the Salon des Peintres Témoignes de Leur Temps represented art works dedicated to specific contemporary social themes. They opened new and inspiring vistas by artists that were, as Bak caustically puts it, “sensitive to the prevailing Weltschmerz.”26 Because of issues related to the struggle for stylistic preponderance, namely that of the figurative versus the abstract, many fine artists snubbed the humanistic approach of this Salon.

PARALLELS AND DISCREPANCIES Like the older Jewish members of the École de Paris, the members of Bak’s generation were all immigrants to Paris. But this time, the influx of young Jewish art students did not come from Eastern Europe, which had been rendered judenrein, its ground filled with Jewish mass graves and its air choked with ashes from the crematoria. This time they came from Israel, equipped with historic hindsight. He wrote how:

I went to Paris, to the Academy of Art, and there I became a part of the colony of Israeli students. Like all foreigners in Paris, we had very little to do with the French and very little contact with any Jews living in Paris. It was problematic to establish relations with them. We didn’t give them full recognition—they were only tolerated by the French and ‘lived among goyim’ without this being their birthright.27 This was the new awareness gained from past events. It was not as though the established Jewish artists were exactly welcoming towards the young newcomers from Israel, as they were extremely competitive by the very Parisian nature they had absorbed.28 While half a century before, the members of the École Juive who met in La Rotonde on the Boulevard Montparnasse spoke and argued with each other in Yiddish, many young Israelis, who met at Les Deux Magots or Le Buonaparte near the church of St. Germaine, chatted in Hebrew. They were proud of their identity as Israelis.29 As fledglings from the new Jewish state, they looked down at their established fellow Jews from the pedestal of their youthful conceit. Despite these dissimilarities, both sides were silently aware of each other. As Bak explains, “Because of the Israeli passports we carried on us, we felt ‘superior’ and developed a certain arrogance. And yet, we knew that these Jews were the only people to whom we could turn, should anything happen.”30 Should anything happen! One never felt quite secure as a Jew anywhere in Europe, including Paris. Bak and his friends also met regularly at the Le Select Montparnasse, a café close to his hotel that like the Café de Flore, the Brasserie Lipp, and Les Deux Magots were frequented by celebrities like Max Ernst, the great Surrealist artist and ideologue, Victor Brauner, Francis Bacon, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Seeing these legendary individuals in the flesh brought the young Jewish artists closer to that part of the society, which represented the pinnacle of the intellectual world. These meetings inspired some of the drawings which Bak produced during that epoch. In one of them, entitled Café, he evokes a melancholy mood by depicting a group of people who are not particularly animated. Two brooding figures sit in isolated reverie across from each other, while another pair converse in a somewhat somber demeanor. Bak admits that he probably still felt a little forlorn at the time.31 One gets the feeling that the artist in the painting, a prematurely bald man seen from the back, is a lonely onlooker sharing the atmosphere of alienation hanging over the group. This drawing is rendered in crisscross lines, a style Bak brought from Israel. Gradually, however, his work grew in vigor and became bolder, as evident in the two female figure drawings.

JEAN SOUVERBIE Jean Souverbie, the head of Bak’s atelier at the École des Beaux Arts, was a very respected teacher and established artist who regularly exhibited at the Salons. He was a great admirer of Picasso, painting monumental female nudes with mythic seascapes and solemn still lifes close to the style of the venerated master. Highly acclaimed in the twenties and thirties, Souverbie continued riding the artistic crest of Picasso’s 20th century neo-classicism. In 1937, he was chosen to decorate the palace that housed the Paris World Fair, in which Picasso presented Guernica to the world. In 1946, he was appointed professor at the École des Beaux Arts. Souverbie had arrived. Not an innovator but always true to himself, and at the time regarded in Paris as an important figure of 20th century art, he was also loved for his amiable personality. Bak’s impression of him was rather nuanced, and he has said: …I must confess that the kind of painting that was expected from his students, a post-cubist rendering of nudes, male or female, or an arrangement of still life objects—bored me. But another matter were Souverbie’s prolonged conversations and lectures on art. I loved them. The entire atelier would listen to him enthralled, mostly while he stood in front of a wall covered by hundreds of postcards of the most heteroclite artworks, smoked his neverending cigarettes, and spoke of Art with a capital A. Art of all epochs and all geographies. Of how—in spite of the innumerable obstacles of centuries, of cultures and of styles—artworks interconnected, spoke to each other and inspired us. Of how they touched our souls…32 This followed a familiar pattern of Bak’s rapport with his art teachers who helped him to look into himself, dig deeper into what he wanted to achieve, and see how to connect with the paradoxes of the contemporary world. Bak understood that in order to learn and evolve, in order to integrate within himself the wealth of the Parisian art scene without succumbing to the temptation of superficiality, he had to recreate what gripped him most, with regard to composition, color arrangement, texture, loaded brushstrokes, and the use of the palette knife. Only much later in his life, from the perspective of hindsight, did he understand that his submission to artistic influences through imitation was indispensable.33 He strongly felt that as each person is unique, his own uniqueness would surely

allow him to emerge with something that only he himself could offer. All this took him many years to figure out, generating an eventual breakthrough that could not have happened without the musings of this time. Between attending Souverbie’s atelier, examining new museum shows and visiting art galleries, and regularly scrutinizing the Louvre’s poorly lit halls, Bak began to work at home more and more. Anticipating with curiosity what would transpire from his imagination to cover blank sheets of paper or stretched canvases placed on an old easel he had bought at une marché aux puces (a flea market), he painted for hours on end. The large variety of images produced in that period echoes the ambiance of the Parisian art world of the day.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE AND THE NEW AVANT-GARDE Bak’s knowledge of French made headway. Soon he was gripped by the intellectual momentum of the second generation of the École de Paris, most of whom had been traumatized by their war experiences. Some had seen combat. As a result, many of these poets, writers, playwrights, and artists were openly reacting to World War II and stood under the influence of the existentialist philosopher and political activist Jean-Paul Sartre. In his outspoken leaning towards the left, Sartre decried the collaborationist past of France and became famous for his assertion that had the Jews not existed, the antisemites would have invented them.34 Sartre gave direction to the post-war generation by holding up a mirror to France’s complicity in the deportations of Jews to their mass murder. He blamed this crime upon the collective need for human sacrifice within the French inner psyche. Sartre also had a leaning towards communism. Apart from a refreshing renewal of philosophical thought, he set in motion a popular and populist direction with pseudo-original world views, which in turn spawned fashionable concepts such as “bourgeois decadence” and “capitalistic imperialism.” These exercised a suffocating effect on the minor streams of the literary world and the arts. Bak had to negotiate his way through this leftist intellectual thicket, but at the same time he felt the vibrancy of complex and colliding impulses around him. To improve his French, he read the novels of Albert Camus, Roger Martin du Gard, Henri Troyat, and the Belgian Georges Simenon, all of whom had a commanding influence on his thinking. Bak also felt the pressure of the collective mandate to be “original,” to discard what was “passé,” writing how: …The essence of that time was Avant-Garde. Everything had to be reinvented.

The past belonged to the caves. ‘Go ahead, young man, you must progress and reveal your power! Throw out the baby with the water of the bath.’ Or so it seemed to me.35 In a world full of established ideologies and world views that in turn opposed them, of confused ideas and uncertain canons, Bak was not yet sure where his art was going to lead him. Individualism was the glorified catchword. This led to the upsurge of art “isms” that dictated art fashions, forever tied to money. Bak was careful not to connect himself to any art gallery; he did not hold any exhibitions in Paris at the time. He knew that he would then have to become “specialized” and this would have landed him in a groove, turned his art into a commodity packaged by the commercial art magazines. They dictated the levels of importance of an artist and created a superficiality akin to the output of a maison de haute couture, catering to well-to do ladies that aspired to the appearance of supreme elegance.36 This he regarded with healthy suspicion, recognizing the artists’ dilemma to stand by their creative urges and not compromise their earning capacity. He wanted to go beyond that, but to do so he needed to give himself more time. Modern art imposed the decree of originality. That was a problem for whoever attempted to become established within the very crowded, current art market. At first glance the possibilities seemed to be vast. Expressions like “liberty,” “inspiration,” and “daring” were structured in the daily jargon, and the materials an artist was free to use could be of all kinds and varieties. Artists were expected to invent what had never existed before. Bak asked himself, “Was this possible? King Solomon would have argued: ‘there is nothing new under the sun’” and he continued musing: “Picasso is quoted as having said that ‘good artists borrow, great artists steal.’ Most probably he stole this saying from someone before his time…”37 Although aware of all the pitfalls, Bak was internally torn and felt very much alone. He chose to temporarily continue as a “consumer” rather than a “producer.”38

ARTISTIC IMPULSES IN ZIGZAG MODE “I was not in Israel with all the weight. I felt really free to experiment, thinking ‘I don’t owe anything to anyone—let me try this— let me try that….”39 On the surface, Parisian art continued in the styles of Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and the flourishing of an ever more daring Abstractionism; the fashion was mirrored in the innumerable museums and public galleries. But Bak penetrated to the deeper levels of the essential zeitgeist

and with this underwent a process of inner growth in his search for certainty. Some days he spent absorbing everything around him; at other times he poured out his images under the influence of what he had seen. He lived and worked assiduously, meandering through a labyrinth of possibilities. The abstract movement of the 1950s had a resurgence triggered by war, trauma, distress, and the chill of death, as well as by the birth in a post-Hitler Europe of hope for sunnier days of renewed growth and energy. Its pictorial language was bound to resonate with Bak. The roots of this movement reached back to the decades of František Kupka, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Kazimir Malevich, and the Bauhaus. It was brought to Paris by many young artists, among them Hans Hartung, who left Germany when his art was decreed “degenerate” by the Nazis. He fought in the French Foreign Legion, where he had to undergo the trauma of having his leg amputated without anesthetics. When he moved to Paris, he became known as one of the leading exponents of Art Informel. After his war experience, Hartung sought to cleanse his art from the objective world and dissociate himself from any expression of human passions. He wanted to find the most elementary principles of pictorial representation, to capture the vibrant tension of untarnished energy by way of psychic improvisations. The pictorial image became a resonating body of agitation that registered the artist’s very own intricate nerve tremors and subjugated the sensation in something like a psychographic record. His quivering strokes led the eye into a maze of relentless energy, not without a menacing quality. Inner impulses are traced and captured as imprints of one moment of human existence. This resonated strongly with Bak and is revealed in a gouache entitled Rhythms. Bak was also gripped by the work of one of Hartung’s follower, Georges Mathieu, who took up his stimulus of immediacy by working rapidly on his canvases with sweeping and impulsive gestures based on intuitive spontaneity, enjoying having an audience in the act. Everything was about war. The titles of Mathieu’s work are gleaned from French historical battles. He “attacked” the canvas with intense violence, as though it were his enemy, with lines and scribbles inspired by Chinese calligraphy. The essence of war, in its rhythmical, devouring aggression, is similarly rendered in Bak’s Battle Scene. The French artist Pierre Soulages, who had also fought in World War II, became a leading exponent of what became known as Tachism (from the word tache, meaning “stain”). His large constructions of dark, heavy beams on canvas bind the tempestuous impulses of life (and death) into the assertion of an archaic power. Bak’s painting entitled Abstract demonstrates a direct impetus from Soulage’s black forms laden with heavy energy. He was then led to a further

breakthrough and a deeper take on Tachism, as evident in his Colour Composition 4, in which the image is purely a painterly object in its own right, taking the vision to the outer limits of what is possible in abstract painting. It is an advanced stage of abstraction, in which the artist controls the shapes of colors and their interdependencies, all of which are devoid of any recall of the reality that surrounds us. Paul Klee was yet another source of inspiration for Bak. After a visit to a selected show of this great teacher and artist, an incomparable magician of color and form, and following a keen observation of his complex technique, Bak produced a series of watercolors inspired by Klee. He tried to reach the enchanted spaces of this great artist and pay a humble tribute to him. Another abstract painter who impressed Bak by his quality and sheer courage to swim against the tide was Jean Hélion, who in a time that celebrated abstraction moved to a figurative representation. That allowed him to describe and comment on the diverse idiosyncrasies of the people and objects which populated his daily life. Bak himself proceeded under the impetus of the fault line between the abstract and the figurative, with works such as the gouache paintings entitled Cathedral de Chartres I and II. Despite their titles, this gothic structure could also be the Saint-Germain-des-Prés as it is not a rendering of a specific church but an idea of a church. Bak calls it “a realistic rendering of an impression”40 which brought him closer to the semi-abstract style he developed further during his period in Rome. Since the beginning of the century, when Braque and Picasso discovered African masks in junk shops and felt the electric effect of their rhythmicality, the art market was flooded with objects from the African continent’s French colonies. The interest in these “artifacts” was keen but purely visual, as artists rarely delved into the meaning of the African sculptures. Bak was fascinated with their form and their dynamism. For him, they exuded a throbbing life of their own that stood apart from any descriptive element. Bak’s paintings, Bird Idol and Ancient Figures (Composition) sear with the inner vitalism of African masks in their rhythmical pulsation between solids and voids. During this period, Bak also came under the spell of the art of Maryan S. Maryan (born Pinchas Burstein), a Holocaust survivor and fellow artist from Israel six years his senior. Inspired by Maryan’s powerful art from the fifties is Bak’s Totem series, which in some way pay homage to the older artist. Each facet of these compositions stands out on its own right, quivering with a life that has nothing in common with a human image. Bak’s search for the evocation of a fourth dimension, and the suggestion of a mysteriously cold light that streams from some unknown source, reveals an ominous reality connected to the painting. The figure swirls in space in a

life-and-death dance of vitality. In the totem series, Bak renounced the concept of flatness, the preferred characteristic of modern art, and hinted at an illusionistic fourth dimension. Some of his images are rendered in black and white, glimmering with his recall of the ancient Japanese suits of armor shown in much-admired movies by Akira Kurosawa. Others were in glowing colors of gouache.

THEATER’S RENEWED IMPACT In 1957, Bak was awarded the Moshe Sharett Prize in absentia for his collaborative work with Peter Frye in theater design in Israel. With this prize money he was able to extend the duration of his studies in Paris. Apart from the financial relief it brought, he was conferred an ITI (International Theatre Institute) card, which entitled him to free tickets to all the theaters and operas in Paris and in London. He attended the theaters in Paris almost nightly, continuing his journey of discovery, taking up as much time for other creative development as he did for painting. He saw riveting plays in the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt (later the Theater of Nations), which offered celebrated productions from the Habima in Israel, the powerful theater of Berthold Brecht, and Polish theater performed in Yiddish. He saw numerous opera productions and spent time exploring them backstage to better learn the makings of stagecraft. At the back of his mind still lurked a feeling that one day he would return to Israel and take up the profession of stage designer. He often invited friends and fellow students to accompany him, and after days spent painting, they would dress up to render themselves respectable for the shows. Annalisa Cantoni, a fellow student in the atelier of Jean Souverbie, began accompanying him more and more regularly. He admired her fluency in French, in which they discussed the plays. Gradually their friendship deepened. Figures in a Landscape dates from this era, perhaps a result of Bak’s new appreciation of womanhood. A powerful female figure sits on a rock, with which her contours merge, holding out her hand to a second hand (that might belongto a male) still encased in the womb of a rocky crevice. The touch of their hands is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. But here, God here is an invisible entity, a monumental and archaic presence. Annalisa descended from prominent Italian Sephardic Jews in Ferrara on her father’s side. When her parents, Angelo and Giulia Cantoni, came to Paris, Bak was formally introduced to them. Inevitably, Bak became interested in the history of Italian Jewry. There have been Jews in Italy for two millennia, and despite frequent expulsions and persecutions, they grew roots. The Roman Empire brought the advent of Christianity and filled Rome with Jewish slaves. The Jewish

expulsion from Spain in 1492 again brought Jews to Italy where they manifested a high level of culture and learning. Napoleon’s laws brought full civil rights to the Italian Jews, and while they accounted for less than one percent of the entire population, the famous Mille di Garibaldi (the Garibaldi Thousand) of volunteer soldiers that battled for Italian unity counted among them over 100 Jewish warriors.

MITSIA’S VISIT A highlight of Bak’s time in Paris was the visit of his mother. It was a happy and fulfilling encounter for both. Paris reminded them so powerfully of Vilna and Bak captured this sensation in his drawing Old City,41 rekindling the memory of post-war Vilna evoked by the streets of Paris. He examined this memory as a phenomenon, by taking it apart atom by atom and then reassembling it again. The building façades and cavernous streets arise before the mind’s eye like phantoms from the past. This remarkable drawing comes across as a summary and a return, hovering on the border between the past and the next stage of his art. Sam showed Mitsia the artistic and cultural treasure troves of Paris and made sure she experienced places and events of deep interest to her. They visited the Louvre, the fashion shows at the maisons de haute couture, sauntered through the charming shops of rue de Rivoli. Regarding his artistic development and output, he sensed on this visit that he had outgrown his mother, that the time in which her ideas carried special weight now belonged to the past. In the sense of the artist’s maturation, Mitsia’s stay felt like the last stage of cutting his umbilical cord.

MOVING ON Towards the end of his time in Paris, Bak had consolidated the style which became characteristic of his next artistic phase. In this abstract and semi-abstract period his paintings capture a spirit of enigma, awash with a life which remains veiled, tucked up by something unspeakable but palpably present. The painting Urban Landscape, with its interplay of light and shadow reminiscent of Rembrandt, is a semi-abstract rendering of a city of the imagination, evoking the image of a boat and a port. Harbors for Bak are metaphors for departure, for embarking on a fateful passage towards an unknown destination: the story of his life. The painting has an intense depth and concentration. In the three years Bak spent as a student in Paris, he came under the magnetic spell of numerous contemporary artists. Art, in all its various iterations, had vastly enriched his life. It gave him

insight into different cultures and a better understanding of the human struggles and resolutions which accompany man’s existence on this planet. His ongoing toil to give meaning to life saw him study a span of centuries and geographies represented by ancient idols, venerable and contemporary paintings, and an array of sculptures, from miniature to colossal, in bronze, stone, and ivory. Besides, there was a great array of mysterious artifacts that through the force of magic exuded beauty. All of them asked to be observed, studied, and understood. Contemporary exhibitions left in him profound deposits. The great masters of the past inhabited him. The book by Andre Malraux, The Voices of Silence, opened his eyes, as did the writings on art by Élie Faure and Marcel Brion. Bak realized that the visions of the artists he admired varied enormously. They all claimed to speak “the truth,” but was there such a thing as one universal truth? The many possible forms of “truth” in art could only be accepted by and coexist with each other within an open mind. He pondered the challenge of how to access an open mind when one’s place and date of birth, language, ethnicity, and education shaped them in a definitive and inescapable way. Many evenings were spent with friends in smoke-filled cafés, dedicated to endless debates on these subjects. It would take him years to re-examine and integrate all that he had so enthusiastically absorbed in Paris, but these musings led him to an insight that has remained with him to this day, that we must live with questions that have no answers.

IN MY ROOM (MY PARIS HOTEL ROOM) 1956 Ink on paper 14 5/8 x 10 3/8 inches STUDY FOR SELF 1956 Ink on paper 14 5/8 x 10 1/4 inches Soon after arriving in Paris, Bak energetically sketched his first lodging, and himself at age 23.

DEEP IN THOUGHT (MOURNER) 1956 Ink, highlighting, and watercolor on paper 19 5/8 x 13 3/8 inches DONKEY II 1956 Ink on paper 19 5/8 x 13 3/4 inches Though these two drawings convey a latent melancholy that hearkens back to Bak’s experience in the Holocaust and his time in Israel, he was generally quite happy in Paris.

REMEMBRANCE 1979 Oil on canvas 39 3/8 x 32 inches When Bak saw paintings in the Louvre which he had only known from postcards, it instilled in him a lifelong desire to question scale and put disproportionate objects together.

STILL LIFE WITH APPLES 1956 Oil on canvas 28 3/4 x 21 1/4 inches Painted in the living room of his second Paris apartment, this still life contains striking echoes of Cézanne’s postImpressionism.

CAFÉ 1956 Ink and black pencil on paper 10 3/8 x 14 5/8 inches Artists, writers, and intellectuals of the mid-20th century frequented Parisian cafés such as Les Deux Magots, Le Buonaparte, and Le Select Montparnasse.

DRAWING 1: FEMALE FIGURE 1957 Ink on paper 20 1/8 x 13 3/4 inches DRAWING 2: SEATED FIGURE (SITTING WOMAN) 1957 Ink on paper 20 1/8 x 13 3/4 inches Vigorous and bold strokes lend movement and expression to these two female figures.

CON FUOCO 1958 Oil on linen 25 5/8 x 31 1/2 inches Consistent with Hartung’s Art Informel, this improvisational painting uses gesture to convey the feeling of fuoco, or fire.

RHYTHMS 1957 Gouache and pastel on paper 14 3/4 x 18 1/4 inches The influence of Hans Hartung is apparent in the pulsating elements of this energetic painting.

BATTLE SCENE I 1958 Black gouache on paper 25 5/8 x 20 1/8 inches In the style of Georges Mathieu, this turbulent drawing expresses the violent casualties of war.

ABSTRACT 1958 Gouache on paper 20 1/8 x 25 5/8 inches Exemplary of Pierre Soulages’ Tachism, this paper is “stained” with heavy black forms laden with energy.

COLOUR COMPOSITION 4 1957 Gouache on paper 10 x 12 3/4 inches Bak further explores Tachism in this colorful abstract gouache.

SILENT STAR 1958 Watercolor on paper 9 x 11 1/8 inches This luminous watercolor riffs on Paul Klee’s famous Red Balloon series .

CATHEDRAL DE CHARTRES I 1958 Mixed media on paper 19 5/8 x 12 5/8 inches CATHEDRAL DE CHARTRES II 1958 Gouache on paper 19 5/8 x 12 3/4 inches Poised between abstract and realistic, these images offer an impression more than an exact rendering of the cathedral.

ANCIENT FIGURES (COMPOSITION) 1958 Gouache on paper 12 3/4 x 10 inches BIRD IDOL 1958 Gouache on paper 25 5/8 x 19 5/8 inches The fetishization of African artifacts was popularized by Braque and Picasso.

FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE 1957 Gouache on paper 10 x 12 3/4 inches The woman on a rocky throne has the bearing of a deity, passing life to the other hidden figure.

TOTEM 1957 Oil on canvas 25 5/8 x 21 1/4 inches PARIS ORIENTALISM 8 1958 Mixed media on paper 25 1/4 x 19 1/4 inches Bak absorbed many influences in Paris; evident in these two works is the post-Expressionism of Polish-born artist Maryan S. Maryan.

OLD CITY 1959 Ink on paper 13 3/8 x 17 3/8 inches The streets of Paris regularly evoked Bak’s memory of post-war VIlna, most acutely during his mother’s visit.

URBAN LANDSCAPE 1958 Oil on linen 31 1/2 x 47 1/8 inches The interplay of bright light and chiaroscuro shadows lends this abstract evocation of a city a Rembrandt-esque air.

5

ROME AND THE TRANSITION 1959 TO 19661

A STATE OF METAMORPHOSIS “Bak…recognizes in his Jewishness the fount of his salvation: it is the wellspring of his artistic life, feeding the river of communication whose tributaries of memory, both personal and collective, slake his thirst for a viable identity.”2 Though in Paris Bak achieved a lasting connectedness with the paradigms of modern art, in 1959 he relocated to Rome along with Annalisa Cantoni, to whom he had proposed marriage. He was filled with confidence and optimism but greeted by an entirely different artistic ambiance and cultural momentum from what he had known in France. First, he had to deal with a precarious situation within Annalisa’s family, whose current circumstances were, to say the least, “not simple.”3 Her parents were in the throes of a legal separation, with all the accompanying emotional implications. Bak’s future father-in-law, Angelo Cantoni, was related to numerous distinguished members of Italian society, including the illustrious Luzzatti family (in 1910, economist and statesman Luigi Luzzatti became the first Jew to become the Prime Minister of Italy). Luzzatti’s son and daughter-in-law perished in Auschwitz and the Cantonis raised their orphaned daughter, Marcella, alongside Annalisa. Cantoni’s cousin was the famous physicist Angelo Bassi, a very close friend of Albert Einstein since the days of their youth. Another important relation was the prominent Jewish Italian poet and publisher Angiolo Orvieto. Bak was deeply honored to meet Orvieto, aged around 90 at the time. Orvieto told him how Theodor Herzl had requested he write a libretto for an opera about Moses which he planned to have performed for the first opening of the Zionist Congress, just as Verdi had written the opera Aida in celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The plan never came to fruition, mainly due to lack of funds, but Herzl’s idea and choice of librettist is remarkable. Angelo was proud to introduce Sam to his relatives as his future son-in-law because of his strong Jewish identity and background; they all admired Bak as an Israeli. A significant obstacle stood in the way of a wedding between Annalisa and Sam. She was Italian, his passport was Israeli. The bride and groom wished to have their nuptials recognized by

the Israeli authorities but due to the intricate Israeli marriage laws in which civil marriages were not possible, their wedding had to be a religious one. What to do in such a situation? A Parisian rabbi suggested an Italian synagogue, perhaps the famous one in Venice. Venice, what a great idea! A bogus “elopement,” quiet ceremony, and honeymoon in the quintessentially romantic city felt very exciting. The date of March 4 felt auspicious, since it coincided with Mitsia’s birthday. The couple sent out announcements to friends and family about the fait accompli and embarked for Venice, enjoying the beautiful city and its riches of art. When they came to see the hoped-for rabbi of the famous synagogue of Venice, they discovered that the place functioned as a Jewish Museum. They were graciously received there and handed numerous letters of congratulations, addressed to the newlywed couple who had technically not yet been married. The wedding ceremony had to be transferred to Rome. Annalisa’s father, the only member of the family privy to the secret of the non-Kosher situation, was of great help. The couple arrived in Rome and presented itself as married, while secretly engaging in an interminable course against bureaucratic obstacles. Annalisa’s mother Giulia (unaware of the situation), with whom Sam enjoyed a reciprocal relationship of adoration, was not Jewish. Therefore, technically Annalisa was not Jewish either. Eventually the situation was overcome in a way that bordered, like many of Bak’s significant life moments, on the unbelievable. One of Angelo’s cousins, an elderly rabbi, declared, “Angelo, in my eyes your daughter is Jewish. I will conduct her marriage.”4 There was yet another obstacle, as a minyan (a quorum of ten Jewish men to stand as witnesses) was required. Where to find these ten men? After some brain wracking, the problem was solved when another relative of Angelo’s volunteered to find ten residents from a Jewish nursing home and bring them to the ceremony. Now the rabbi could conduct the wedding, “witnessed” by ten men in states of either dementia or progressive Alzheimer’s who had no idea what was going on but were happy to oblige and enjoy the platters of delectable food served after the ceremony. Sam and Annalisa had their religious wedding under the dictates of Jewish law and their marriage certificate was recognized by both the Italian and Israeli authorities. It seems that no auspicious event in Sam’s life can run its course without a significant dose of irony. The bride’s father graciously placed at their disposal an old farmhouse named Valdiano, which stood on a vast piece of agricultural land. It was beautiful, with Italian roof tiles atop sturdy walls covered with creeping wisteria. An alley of Roman pine trees framed the path to the main road, the Via Cassia Vecchia, leading to the ancient village of Monterosi, forty kilometers to the north of Rome. It was the ideal space for an artist, private on the one hand but close to the throbbing

Eternal City. Life was different and new. What struck Bak most was the Mediterranean light, so dissimilar to the somber atmosphere of Paris. He has said that, “In Italy, the drawings and paintings that I brought from Paris didn’t pair with my new state of mind. They belonged to a former chapter, and Italy was still a foreign land.”5 So where to begin? As he wrote, “I was happily married and welcomed by a family, whose complexity had to be discovered. I was surrounded by new friends. Yet all this was happening in an unfamiliar space and in a language that yet had to be acquired, together with its rich culture.”6 Bak remembered Jacob Burckhardt’s illustrated cultural history of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) which he had studied in the Landsberg DP camp. Now he needed to learn Italian, which he did by watching the current Italian neo-realist movies, listening to the radio, and reading books to build up his vocabulary and maintain his connectedness with the contemporary world. The couple soon had a circle of remarkable friends, among them the great American-Italian designer and illustrator of children’s books Leo Lionni. Another friend was the painter, theater designer, and film animator Lele (Emmanuele) Luzzati (no relation to the aforementioned Luzzatti family). Bak’s best friend was the cinematographer Giulio Gianini, whose wife Elena Gianini Belotti is the famous feminist writer and novelist known for her research on stereotyping women’s roles during infancy. They introduced him to Anna Maria Levi, the sister of Primo Levi,7 who told Bak about the resistance her brother had met in finding a publisher for his memoir If This is A Man, about his survival in Auschwitz.8 In Rome, Bak finally came face to face with the overpowering marble statue of Michelangelo’s Moses with horns protruding from his titanic head.9 During his dark days in the Vilna Ghetto, a postcard of this sculpture had inspired his first work in clay, a “masterpiece” that would, as Moses had done, liberate his fellow inmates from their oppression. Moses belonged to Bak’s past, while Michelangelo’s painting on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which Bak visited for the first time in the Vatican, became a seed for Bak’s future use of pictorial quotation. But first, he had to discover the element of irony in art.

THE PAST’S UNYIELDING GRIP Bak began to realize that the past would not let go of him, to the contrary, it was actually nourishing his art.10 In the midst of his beautiful surroundings, his happy married life, and the unspeakable joy of his impending fatherhood, he created an abstract painting with the

theme of a sacrificial altar that defines his Italian style, with the use of metaphor surreptitiously asserting itself.11 At first glance the painting is merely a compelling abstract work, carried out in the contemporary visual vernacular. Bak describes how he covered the canvas with oil colors, “densely applied, irregularly textured, with black and shiny rivulets of running and dripping paint.”12 But behind this engaging façade the painting evoked for him a refrain from Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”: Black milk of morning we drink you evenings we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night we drink and we drink…13 For Bak, the painting was “hinting at an apocalyptic vision: an ageless altar of brutalizing forces that might be practicing human sacrifice.”14 Bak’s abstract canvases of this period were loaded with complexity concealed under a compelling aesthetic beauty. Following two versions of Altar was Shelter, in which schematic crosses evoke the sensation of a modern-day Golgotha echoed by dark shadows, rendered in a rhythmic sequence, set off by a flaming red background. Bak links this painting with one of his darkest childhood experiences of the Holocaust. It is “a direct recall of hiding in one of Vilna’s ancient basements from bombs and incinerating fires”15 and for him represents “a Christian cross that is made of an upright beam that could be perceived as a smokestack, perhaps a crematorium.”16 He asks rhetorically: “Does it hint at the antisemitic contribution of the Church to the inexcusable crimes of the Nazis?”17 Without doubt it does, and by this, he states, it “…tries to turn into an archetypal icon.”18 The notion that a painting can “try” to do something proves how Bak anthropomorphizes his own work, seeing his art as more than just two-dimensional renderings. Painted in the visual language of abstract art, these canvases were featured in his first exhibition at the Galleria Schneider in 1959, where they were met with immediate critical success. He wrote that he “created subjects that hid themselves behind what looked like abstraction in the spirit of Berthold Brecht’s idea of the Verfremdungseffekt (impact of alienation). Abstraction enabled me visual distancing.”19 The gallerist Robert Schneider, an intellectual who had previously been a professor of Spanish language at an American university, did not want to dig up wounds from the past. He was satisfied with the mere aesthetic beauty of Bak’s paintings, though they conveyed a hidden power that, in Schneider’s view, did not need to be defined. Bak recognized that:

It was my chance that the bubbling Rome of its post war rebirth, and my Roman art gallery, Galleria Schneider, weren’t especially attuned to the Holocaust, and was hardly exposed to its evocation. Didn’t the shame of fascism suffice? Didn’t they have their own accounts to settle? Weren’t Mussolini and Hitler dead? Didn’t they pay for their crimes? Our new lives had to flourish. Basta! Let us show the world our Bella Figura.20 The success of his first solo exhibition at Galleria Scheidner in 1959 at the gallery was repeated throughout his Italian period. Annual gallery shows were assured and he participated in notable group shows such as the Carnegie International Contemporary Exhibition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to which he was invited by the prominent art museum director Gordon Washburn.21

HAUNTING PAST AND PEACEFUL PRESENT In 1960, Daniela Bak was born to Annalisa and Sam. For a survivor of the Shoah this was a deliriously happy event, pointing towards hope, life, and optimism for the future. His paintings from the time reveal an energetic vibrancy, brimming with vigor. He became enamored by the play of light, the brightness of color, and the atmospheric glimmer in the air. The painting Cyclists in the City does the seemingly impossible, portraying two dimensionally the three-dimensional movement of racing cyclists, fleetingly passing the viewer’s eye. It captures a dynamism which is palpably present under the silvery mist that envelops the scene in an iridescent vapor. Ports with floating ships never cease to fascinate Bak. Inspired by the Mediterranean hues, in the painting entitled From Above he captures the movement of the waves against the boats, the watery element beneath the surface quivering with energy. Water also brought to Bak’s mind both the collective memory of the biblical flood and the somber reality of recent natural disasters. In 1959, a catastrophe caused by the collapse of a dam in southern France covered the town of Fréjus in a deluge of water and mud, drowning 421 people. This elicited in Bak a sense of terror which straightaway linked him to his memories of the Holocaust. He wrote that, “symbolically, Paris, Rome, Berlin or Vilna, the post-war Europe I knew, were for me landscapes that faced a terrible flood. The waters receded, grounds emerged and told us that it was time to repair, reconstruct, and grow.”22 The painting entitled After the Flood (Receding), with its rhythmic cadence, tangible textures, and dark tones of churned up mud leads the eye to ever deeper layers of inner experience.

A vision of the past arose like an apparition in the painting entitled Vilna. The dark façades beneath the smoke-drenched sky appear like ghosts in the mist of recollection of the bombed city of his birth. In the empty streets two small figures scurry across the picture plane, whom Bak says “…might be mother and I.”23 Such specters from the past disappear again and the magnificent surroundings of the Italian landscape and its ever-changing hues reassert themselves. During this time, Bak developed a deep enchantment with Nature, which becomes apparent in In the Mountains. The burning heat of a cityscape beams its luminous hues at the close of a scorching summer’s day in the painting At the End of a Hot Day, and the profound presence of the canvas exudes a tangible sense of the here and now. He says that, “The main inspiration of my Italian period alternated between a haunting past and a peaceful present.”24

A GRADUAL CHANGE OF PERCEPTION By the year 1961, an as yet hardly noticeable metamorphosis occurred. Bak picked up impulses from his inner psyche which had been suppressed since his youth. A sense of self-doubt became apparent, as is evident in the painting entitled Night. Something dark and menacing was arising from the depths. Allowing it to take over might generate a dangerous element in his creative process. Bak wrestled with this new sensation. New figures emerged in this vein, often in a unit of three, “…claiming the right of their physical existence.”25 They are damaged but alive and, “…they strive to reintegrate the space for which they consider having a natural right and must struggle against a background that tries to swallow them up.”26 They seem to recall the naked bodies, consisting of just skin and bones, found in Bergen Belsen and other concentration camps after liberation. In the drawing In Pain, a trio of grieving women are shown in profile. Then something even more enigmatic began to happen, in tiny drawings which stood apart from the large canvases that graced Bak’s regular exhibitions. A remarkable sketch is quite ubiquitously entitled Pen Drawing, and perhaps the artist did not bother with a title because he did not realize at the time how much this work points in a direction that will later materialize in his paintings. Out of the structures of clouds and haze, faceless figures appear, lined up in an obscure fog, as if waiting to be identified. They seem to be forming a cloud ejected from a chimney outside the picture plane.

THE HUMAN FACE Bak states, “The human face is one of the most challenging subjects. In Hebrew panim (face) means inside, or interior, while the English meaning for face evokes a façade, the outside of a

person’s appearance. This strange dichotomy made me ponder and wonder.”27 This utterance is crucial in defining Bak’s distinctiveness as an artist. In the early 1960s, drawings of human features materialized which rank among his most striking, forceful, and terrifying works. They place him within the rare echelon of western art, among the portraits by Dürer, the terribilitá of Michelangelo, and Goya’s The Disasters of War. Yet they also stand apart in their expression of Bak’s Jewish essence. The drawing entitled Scream is an outburst so acute that no words can describe it. Its namesake, the iconic Scream (1893) by Edvard Munch, with its expression of existential angst reverberating throughout space and time, is intuited psychologically. Bak’s image, on the other hand, is based on raw experience. Around this time, Bak began to identify with the Jewish people, whose battered and bruised lives are revealed in their features, their panim. For many years, he had repressed any obligation towards his people, but he gradually began to realize “it was also a story about a trauma that had been silenced for too many years. There was a past that had been lying dormant inside me.”28 Furthermore, “a new feeling began to unfold in me, telling me that I had been functioning in a world of too much certitude and that my work until then had been only a preparation for something else to come.”29 SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE This insight initially revealed itself in his smaller works, such as series of gouaches titled Speaking About the Unspeakable. It is possible that the impetus for Bak’s need to “speak about the unspeakable” was inspired by the Eichmann trial, which opened in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961.30 Bak’s series under this title are not so much eruptions of what lay beneath the surface; rather they constitute a conscious break with the cultural taboo of his intellectual surroundings, the zeitgeist that championed the smokescreen of collective amnesia. Gripped by his burgeoning urge to give testimony, Bak began to engage in a revolt which initially he kept mainly to himself. The mixed media works of Speaking About the Unspeakable followed each other by way of a metamorphosis from non-figurative to semi-abstract, vaguely discernible images. In No. VI, the hidden contours of a skull and a bone are dimly outlined and yet concealed beneath a mist of darkness. In the ensuing paintings of the series, they gradually develop into more distinct forms and colors that point directly to the black abysses of the Shoah, becoming more and more defined in each image, as evident in the penultimate semi-abstract No. XXII. In this painting, the inside of a burning crematorium is made visible, with a figure of a Jewish man (bearing witness?) standing on the right.

The image of Head conjures up a scene of horror to which no person was ever able to give personal testimony because no one came out alive from that hell.

THE BIRTH OF ILANA AND THE SHADOW OF THE SHOAH In 1962, the second miracle occurred in Sam and Annalisa’s life when their daughter Ilana was born. She saw the light on one of those rare days of the city’s mild winter in which Rome was covered under a blanket of snow. Her older sister Daniela, brought by Sam to the clinic to get acquainted with her newborn sibling, was much more baffled by the world in white, saying, “Look Daddy, all this yogurt…” This intensely happy event ran parallel with images of utter darkness in Bak’s paintings. Were they triggered by the experience of the birth of a new life alongside an existential angst taking hold of him? Back in Israel, Mitsia was ecstatic with happiness at having once again become a grandmother. Forever practical, she embarked upon lessons in Italian to be able to communicate with her granddaughters. But Bak’s self-doubt and inner conflict now had an irrevocable grip on him. The painting entitled Dark Figures (Uncertain Rumours) emerged at the same time as his beguiling abstracts and semi-abstracts attracted the limelight in the art world. Quietly, he began to create collages with underlying sinister content. These were shown in 1963 in the Galleria Odyssia in Rome, its catalogue introduced by the prominent art historian Giovanni Carandente, who recognized the split that had occurred in Bak’s work. A collage painting entitled Identification (Unearthed), which shows stone structures with immensely deep, dark crevices covered by the broken outlines of a yellow star that flickers like a flame, is about atrocities committed in the Ponary forest after the mass murder of Jews. It is based on the testimony of his friend of Vilna Ghetto days, the Yiddish poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, and as Bak explains:31 In 1943 when the plans of the Nazi administration foresaw the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, hundreds of its slave laborers were sent to excavate layers upon layers of compressed cadavers (called ‘Figuren’ by the SS) that had been machine gunned into huge mass graves. The slave laborers were ordered to incinerate the dead and spread their ashes among the trees of the lovely forest. The plan was meant to cancel any trace of the German Reich’s criminality.32 He adds, “I heard that several of the prisoners that were forced to do this excruciating labor

sometimes unearthed their own children or members of their families. Many were recognizable and some still wore the Yellow Stars of David, the notorious sign of Jewish identity.”33 In abstract paintings such as Identification (Unearthed) and Under a Star, shadowy figures of human despair combine with ravaged landscapes of dissimulation. In Passing By, three figures peel off the rocky background, one in the shape of a Tablet of the Law. It is covered with the diagonal stripes of concentration camp uniforms, the stripes reverberating on the left. Bak wrote that: The humans of my paintings created in the early sixties appear as incomplete beings, as fragments or entities, that only partially subsist. They have just emerged from their hiding places, their socalled malines. To save themselves they had to pretend inexistence. By being concealed behind urgently piled up walls, under soil, in ancient basements, in dilapidated attics, they gradually and inevitably turned in my art into the material behind which they hid. This was their disguise. The drama of dehumanization rendered by my visual means.34

SUCCESS AND SELF-DOUBT Bak, recognized in Israel at the time as a prominent European contemporary artist, was invited in 1963 to hold two exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and one exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where his abstract paintings were very well received. But he regarded this positive event with some cynicism, acknowledging that these crowd-pleasing paintings were “partly a result of the fashion of those years.”35 This harsh self-criticism stemmed, perhaps, from a lack of self-understanding, an unawareness of the power of his work. He mocked his abstract paintings self-derisively, saying: I would cover the picture surface with thick impasto, pour over it liquid paint juices, let them drip, and later carve into the heavy paint’s fresh flesh. The resulting images suggested urban vistas, bridges, perspectives of a grey and foreboding universe. I tried to get out of these paintings more than I had put in…36 In truth, his paintings stand out above contemporary “fashion,” as he wryly calls it, with a

tremendous, repressed force and the underlying anguish of tumultuous conflicts expressed with a vigor that draws the viewer in like a magnet. Bak’s multi-layered color applications express a multifaceted form of existence, palpable in its complexity. They reach into realms of a primordial reality that—though hard to admit, even to himself—was essentially Jewish. His eruptive brushstrokes do not separate themselves from a background that penetrates the picture plane of previous layers. They follow the tradition of the explosive canvases of Chaïm Soutine and radiate a concentrated energy comparable to that of a nuclear reactor. Bak concedes,“Today, sixty years after I produced these works, I realize that nothing of their qualities or achievements got lost. A lot of what I now paint carries formal elements which are very similar to what I painted much earlier.”37

AN EMOTIONALLY CHALLENGING INTERLUDE In 1963, Bak received a letter from Erwin Piscator, the prominent theater producer and artistic director of the re-established Freie Volksbühne in Berlin, informing him that fresh off his production of the universally shocking Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, he intended to stage the play Dos Groyse Gevins by Sholem Aleichem. Piscator had approached Peter Frye, with whom Bak had worked so closely in Israel, to direct the play in his newly revived theater. Frye agreed on the condition that Bak create the costume and stage designs. Bak was “not very happy to have to go to Germany. It was not easy for me.”38 Staging this play at that time, about the people of the mythical Eastern European Jewish shtetl, Kasrilevke, had as its essence the knowledge of hindsight. It was now known what had meanwhile happened to these little people of Jewish lore who had been wiped out, with a few survivors scattered across the earth, among them Sam himself. But as a favor to Peter, he forced himself to go to Berlin and worked together with him on the designs in a feverish hurry. He says he “worked in Berlin for about two weeks. Two days before the opening night I flew back to Italy.”39 He did not want to see the play. Nonetheless, these designs have beguiling beauty and a depth that spans time and place. Stylistically they conjure the book illustrations of the tales by Sholem Aleichem that Bak had prized in the DP camp in Landsberg. They exude a profound nostalgia for a time that is forever gone. Following the demand by Israeli theaters for Bak’s work as a stage designer, in 1964 he brought his family for a prolonged stay near Tel Aviv. Ilana was a toddler but Daniela, old enough to be put into a local kindergarten, began to pick up some Hebrew. Again, Bak worked with Peter Frye,

as well as his old friend the composer, Noam Sheriff. Their major success was the production, mounted at the Ohel Theater, of an old and very funny play by Sholem Aleichem entitled 200.000. It is the story of a poor tailor and his close family who suddenly, and quite erroneously, are believed to have won a lottery and become billionaires. Its Hebrew title was Amk’ho (a word that identifies being Jewish and means “one of your people”).

INFLUENCES IN ROME As Paul Nagano points out, Bak’s life in Rome was suffused with the profusion of art around him.40 Bak mentions with gratitude artists of the Italian avant-garde whose exhibitions he visited assiduously. There was Giorgio Morandi whose poetic still lifes41 inspired him, though he poignantly admits, “…my paintings of still life weren’t that still.”42 He was moved by the works of the Sicilian Renato Guttuso, who had the courage to incorporate allegory and visual quotations from works by other artists, as Bak would later do. Since his time in Paris, he retained his admiration for Alberto Burri, who used sacking as canvas and whose work, through its sheer aesthetic beauty, almost concealed its horrific content. Bak also admired Afro [Basaldella] and his Abstract Expressionist canvases and valued the art of Mario Sironi, a deeply complex artist who hailed from Pittura Metafisica’s43 existential alienation. His style, use of color, and architectural structures became signposts for Bak’s stylistic metamorphosis. In Italy, Bak began feeling even closer to Francisco Goya and his savage Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), whose macabre scenes exist within the drama of light and dark and depict human atrocities committed by all sides of the war. Bak wrote that: …my memories of hiding in darkness and total silence gave birth to several paintings, which were inspired by Goya’s famous black paintings which he painted on the walls of his home, and exclusively for his own pleasure. The human figures are grotesque, pathetic, tragic, mystic and at times just ordinary. Goya was becoming deaf, and he desired to distance himself from other humans.44 He added that, “Sometimes a prisoner by Goya would end up looking like a Jew at the Western Wall.”45 In addition to watching films to learn Italian, Bak immersed himself in its literature. His favorite authors were Luigi Pirandello, Alberto Moravia, and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who

addressed the disintegration of the Italian and Sicilian class structures and the role of fascism in Italian culture and politics. He had a special admiration for Giorgio Bassani, whom he regarded as one of the greatest Italian writers of the 20th century.46 One of Bassani’s novels, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, compares the destruction of the Jews of Ferrara during World War II to the lost civilization of the pre-Roman Etruscans. The mausoleum of the Finzi-Continis is in the Jewish cemetery of Ferrara, though the last members of the ancient family, from grandmother to grandchild, were never entombed there as they were all deported to Auschwitz in 1943. The book inspired Bak to visit Etruscan tombs in the area where he lived and he became fascinated with the fate of this extinct civilization, now only known through its art dedicated to the dead. Their necropolises, built within conic cavities, are filled with artifacts of daily life and portrait sculptures in stone, clay, and bone. Their walls are decorated with paintings in colors extracted from plants, displaying images of husbands and wives reclining on their bedsteads or enjoying the fruitful abundance of life. In the Etruscan Museum of Tuscany, Bak was gripped by its faded paintings, which had been transferred from the tombs for preservation. In his own work, he was inspired to reinvent the artifacts of an ancient, extinct culture to convey the transience of life. In Woman and Birds, which evolved in his studio over the course of six years, he captures an inkling of life and its ephemerality in dark, gloomy tones more familiar to realms of the World of Shadows. Could the Etruscans have been annihilated by a destructive war? Does Bak attempt to conjure shadows of an afterlife in this painting? Anatomically, the figure appears more man than woman, cut off by the tomb’s lid which is covered with fragmented objects and little animal carcasses. The figure (whose hands and fingers are reminiscent of talons) holds a bird whilst another bird flies away. Birds assumed a powerful meaning for Bak, parallel to that of angels. The painting Etruscan War is derived from the style of Etruscan murals, but here the birds take on the form of swastikas and target marks. Almost imperceptibly, using birds and angels, metaphor began to assert itself in the art of Samuel Bak. A sense of time and transitoriness takes hold in his work. The characters in Fallen Bird and Fallen Angel are in a state of decomposition. In contradistinction to the disintegrating bird or the fallen angel, the Angel soars with a transparency that reveals his inner being. His spiked and damaged wings carry him into the sky, upright and victorious.

REACHING INTO THE JEWISH ESSENCE Through the works of Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber, Bak nurtured an interest in Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah, exploring the mystery of Creation and the interdependence between the human and the divine.47 The semi-abstract painting Under the Wings of Sorrow may

be regarded as a summary of the Italian period up to 1963. In it, Bak poses an introspective question regarding the image of the biblical flood and the raven (which sometimes doubles as a dove) in the biblical tale. With this painting Bak attempts to “…convey a slimy and oppressive force that hinders a rebounding into the space of freedom. The sorrow of loss can be crippling. Indefinite mourning should be overcome—or can it?”48 By 1963, Bak’s work became suffused with a primordial fear. His own identity began asserting itself, even as he remained within the aesthetic constellation of the contemporary vernacular. In him kindled a desire for a more open admission of who and what he was, and through his paintings he began to establish a dialogue with the viewer. More and more his canvases reveal different layers of meaning and engage in a reciprocal discourse, comparable to a Talmudic debate. He wrote that he “…concentrated on the creation of a world that is beyond the one which surrounds us. Yet it echoes it in a meaningful way.”49 In his memoir, Painted in Words, Bak relates how at a certain stage of his artistic career in Rome he had to stop and reflect.50 He was a highly acclaimed and internationally recognized artist but whenever things are running too smoothly, he becomes suspicious. Something was brewing inside him and pushing to the surface like burning lava, pressing into consciousness. It was a gradual process, like that of a subterranean flow, surfacing at times then disappearing again. He said that “in spite of my successes, something in me was starting to change.”51 The painting Reflections 64 indicates a new progression in his abstract style. An interlaced composition based on Cubism displays disparate elements interlocked in different layers. It is once again reminiscent of a Talmudic mindset, in which the artist confronts the viewer in a discourse of regrouping of different levels of meaning and their analysis. At the beginning of 1964, Bak was consciously aware that something had to change in his art, because, “It slowly dawned on me that my inescapable scars of WW2 were nourishing my art.”52 A stylistic renewal had to give expression to this inner force. But how? Having striven so hard to be part of the momentum of modern art and its current tendency to abstraction, it was difficult for him to turn into the direction of a narrative that needed to be expressed by realistic means.

THE TECTONIC SHIFT: POP ART AND THE FINAL TRANSITION “Before one can ‘be’ what was seen, one must first see what has been. Bak’s paintings demand a seeing beyond mere looking, until sight gradually glides into insight, an agenda for internalizing the artistic

encounter that helps to explain the process of how one can be what was seen…”53 It happened as if by chance. Bak attended the 32nd Venice Biennale, which took place from June 20 to October 18, 1964. The winner of the Gran Premio was the American Robert Rauschenberg, with whom American Pop Art had made its debut in the 20th century Western canon. Inspired by Dada and the ‘Ready-Made’, realism and irony had returned to art. Pop Art pinpoints the bland, everyday consumer life of mass civilization, mass production, and mass media, encompassing its flagrant banality. Consumer kitsch, the comic strip, and the Hollywood icon appear in big format as ironic citations of the photographic image. Pop Art is totally free of any moral or critical engagement. The image alone is the statement. In this arid aloofness lies its message. Bak suddenly felt at home. He knew irony, he knew incongruity. He had grown up with a bittere gelechter (a bitter laughter) that was part of his mental DNA. His Aunt Yetta and his mother could laugh in the face of adversity until the tears rolled down their cheeks. They laughed when they realized they had forgotten the precious family candelabra on their flight to the west. They laughed when Yetta remembered how she had planned to kill Mitsia when they were children. Since Bak’s early childhood, nothing in his life was straightforward. He was no stranger to banality, though his existed in a different realm. In relation to Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil,” he could now look the Holocaust in the eye and uncover its deadly absurdity. He had at last found the stylistic equivalent and the inner distance to express it. The little drawing Emerging may be seen as his self-portrait at the time: the artist is opening the lid of the box of his artistic confinement and emerging from it, “liberated.” From this point forward, Bak transformed his style to the realism of the Old Masters, which in and of itself carries an element of irony. He wrote that: At the time of the crystallization of my style, when I have reached the point of dealing representationally with Icons and metaphors…I wanted to do it in a non-style style. A lesson I received from Magritte. A style that in order to convey my most subjective vision of the world and the world that I share with the rest of humanity is as objective and communicative as possible.54 His art would henceforth be representational, embedded in his personal experience of the Shoah, which had meanwhile been ripped out of Jewish consciousness,55 back to civilization.

Symbols irrupted from his inner being which would become the icons of his art: the “landscape of indifference,” the Tablets of the Law, the stranded ark, the shtetl and its inhabitants, the Shabbat candles metamorphosing into the crematoria chimneys, the fateful trains, the Warsaw Ghetto boy, the torn prayer shawl, the disrupted still life, the Fruit of Knowledge, the great flood, the Melencolia, the dice of chance, the book as metaphor for those who perished, toys replacing the murdered children, the Creation, and so many more. He started with himself in the little gouache entitled B & A & K, in which the letters spelling his name are carved into a cube (or a die, the metaphor for chance). A cracked exterior reveals the bricks inside a crematorium—which he himself managed to evade—and a stone is placed in memory of those who perished. The lower part of the letter B could be circumscribing a furnace. In Figures, a multitude of anonymous, featureless human shapes in a desert landscape (Ezekiel’s prophecy?) all look upright, shrouded mummies at a destination point. They seem to have risen from the tombs of forgetfulness. They exude the enigmatic stillness of Pittura Metafisica, claiming their presence in space and time and silently affirming their existence. Pear Mountain holds within its skin the city of Bak’s birth. More pears (which for him replace the apple as the Fruit of Knowledge and can be ascribed to the Garden of Eden’s Tree of Life) stand upright in the landscape around it. The emptied shell of a pear lying in the foreground points to the opposite of life and fecundity and looks like a swooping bird of prey. Tiny trees and shrubs point to an as yet reluctant feeling of outgrowth, of life happening through the cracks. Wreckage and Smoke, with smoke billowing from its cracked roof, is a subtle homage to René Magritte, evident in the blue color, covering the brick walls of crematoria. The abandoned house is on fire and is irretrievably damaged while around it looms the “landscape of indifference” which will reappear in many of Bak’s later works.

DISILLUSIONMENT AND RELOCATION Bak was happy enough in Rome. He now lived in a spacious and beautiful apartment on Via Pompeo Magno 2 that contained a large atelier and a terrace that towered above the Tiber and offered views of the Villa Borghese and St. Peter’s Basilica. Summers were spent in the country house near Monterosi, close to a small lake. Life was safe, he was at home with the Italian language and sheltered in his close circle of friends. Italy was an enriching part of his creative life. He had reached an artistic breakthrough and become an internationally recognized artist. And yet a feeling of disquiet took hold of him, which he described as a “…penetrating indifference

and unbridgeable alienation, and finally the deep despair detectable under the thin layer of dolce vita.”56 His life consisted of what he describes as “…’poses’ in a theatrically constructed everyday life; the pathetic exposition of the Italian bella figura.”57 One day, his daughter Daniela came from her Montessori kindergarten and asked him, “Was Jesus a nice Man?”58 Sam, a bit startled, replied that he had obviously been a nice man as all around them there are so many wonderful churches and art works in his honor. But he was further cross-examined when she asked, “Then why did the Jews kill him?”59 Bak had a sudden, powerful feeling that he wanted his daughters to truly know what it is to be Jewish. He and Annalisa decided that they did not want them to grow up in Italy. They had begun to tire of the lifestyle and yearned for a more authentic surrounding. He wanted to “live as a Jew who feels that he is a Jew, not because he obeys certain religious orders but because of a much deeper connection.”60 In 1966, they left Rome and relocated to Israel, where they started a new life in Tel Aviv.

ALTAR 1959 Oil on linen 29 x 19 5/8 inches Amidst a glorious Italian environment, Bak began to recognize the grip of the past and find metaphorical ways to express it in his art.

SHELTER 1959 Oil on canvas 19 5/8 x 39 3/8 inches Shelter is “a direct recall of hiding in one of Vilna’s ancient basements from bombs and incinerating fires.”

CYCLISTS IN THE CITY 1960 Oil on linen 63 x 51 1/8 inches In contrast to the cool grayness of Paris was the warm light of Italy, which often appeared in Bak’s work from the 1960s.

AFTER THE FLOOD (RECEDING) 1960 Oil on canvas 44 1/2 x 58 inches Bak considered the 1959 collapse of a dam north of Fréjus, France, which killed 421 people, as a metaphor for post-war Europe .

FROM ABOVE 1960 Oil on canvas 31 1/2 x 39 3/8 inches This aerial impression teems with dynamic movement and the deep blue of the Mediterranean.

VILNA 1960 Oil on linen 35 1/8 x 46 1/8 inches According to Bak, “The main inspiration of my Italian period alternated between a haunting past and a peaceful present.”

IN THE MOUNTAINS 1960 Gouache on paper 27 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches In Italy, Bak cultivated a deep enchantment with nature, conveying landscape elements and atmospheric conditions with dynamic vigor.

AT THE END OF A HOT DAY 1961 Oil on canvas 45 x 57 5/8 inches In Italy, Bak cultivated a deep enchantment with nature, conveying landscape elements and atmospheric conditions with dynamic vigor.

NIGHT 1961 Oil on linen 32 x 39 3/8 inches Bak wrestled with a need to address his past in his work, recognizing that doing so might propel him far outside prevailing artistic trends.

THREE FIGURES 1961 Black pencil on paper 12 1/4 x 22 1/8 inches IN PAIN 1961 Charcoal, pastel, and pencil on paper 19 x 23 3/8 inches Figures emerge that confront the physical and emotional realities of being a survivor.

PEN DRAWING 1961 Ink on paper 19 5/8 x 27 1/2 inches SCREAM 1962 Black pencil on paper 8 5/8 x 10 inches These early examples demonstrate how Bak morphs objects, as when hazy figures and anguished faces materialize out of smoke and clouds.

JEW III 1963 Black ink on paper 10 1/8 x 14 inches JEW II 1963 Black ink on paper 10 1/8 x 14 inches Bak perceived an obligation to his people to tell a “story about a trauma that had been silenced for too many years.”

SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE VI 1962 Mixed media on paper 13 5/8 x 19 1/2 inches SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE XXII 1962 Gouache on paper 13 3/4 x 19 1/2 inches In a series of 23 works, Bak articulated his experience during the Holocaust with ambiguous but emotionally potent images.

CHILD 1963 Charcoal and gouache on paper 9 5/8 x 12 3/4 inches HEAD 1963 Gouache on paper 9 5/8 x 12 1/4 inches Drawings of the human face, in Hebrew the panim, are an exploration of inner emotion, not outward appearance.

DARK FIGURES (UNCERTAIN RUMOURS) 1963 Oil on linen 28 x 39 3/8 inches In opposition to the commercially-viable abstracts Bak exhibited in galleries in Rome were paintings he made for himself, ominous inquiries of his past anguish.

IDENTIFICATION (UNEARTHED) 1962 Collage, oil, and linen on paper 20 1/2 x 28 inches Bak visualizes testimony on the atrocities at Ponary, specifically the unfathomable ordeal of those forced to unearth the dead..

PASSING BY 1963 Mixed media on paper 19 x 24 5/8 inches Figures dressed in concentration camp stripes emerge from their hiding places, “gradually and inevitably [turning] in my art into the material behind which they hid...”

UNDER A STAR 1963 Acrylic and collage on burlap 32 x 45 5/8 inches Embedded within this chaotic composition are abstracted symbols that later dominate Bak’s work, among them the Yellow Star, Hebrew letters, birds, and angels.

FROM ONE GHETTO TO ANOTHER 1963 Acrylic and pumice on burlap 51 x 63 inches Unconventional canvases were not unusual at the time, but the use of burlap as a surface had personal significance for Bak, whose father hid him in a burlap sack to free him from the forced labor camp.

THE BIG LOTTERY (AMK’HO 200.000) COSTUME DESIGN VII (ETTIE MENNIE) AND XIII (MOTL) 1963 Gouache on paper 13 3/4 x 10 inches each STAGE DESIGN V 1964 Gouache on paper 11 3/4 x 17 3/4 inches An invitation to do the costume and stage design for Peter Frye’s production of Sholem Alecheim’s play 200.000 precipitated a prolonged stay in Tel Aviv.

STILL LIFE 1961 Oil, pastel, charcoal, and highlighting on paper 19 1/2 x 27 3/8 inches A particularly strong influence on Bak during his time in Rome and beyond are the contemplative still lifes of Giorgio Morandi.

AFTER A PRISONER DRAWING BY GOYA 1963 Ink on paper 10 1/4 x 13 3/8 inches AFTER GOYA IV 1963 Watercolor and ink on paper 9 1/2 x 12 1/4 inches Against the historical tide of art that heroicized war, Goya’s unflinching series of prints created from 1810-1820 laid bare war’s barbarity and horror.

ETRUSCAN STILL LIFE I 1963 Oil on linen 38 1/4 x 25 5/8 inches Bak was inspired by his proximity to the lost Etruscan civilization, whose fascinating history and aesthetic legacy are reflected in his work.

ETRUSCAN WAR: BIRDS AND WARRIORS (ETRUSCAN WALL BATTLE) 1963 Acrylic on canvas 32 x 25 5/8 inches Bak imagines what the walls of the Etruscan necropolis might look like if birds were shaped like swastikas and target marks and shadowy figures lurked over the tombs.

WOMAN AND BIRDS 1957-1963 Oil paint and gouache on paper 10 x 12 3/4 inches Bak imagines what the walls of the Etruscan necropolis might look like if birds were shaped like swastikas and target marks and shadowy figures lurked over the tombs.

FALLEN ANGEL 1963 Ink and watercolor on paper 15 3/8 x 22 1/4 inches Birds and angels are multi-layered metaphorical symbols in Bak’s work, sharing connotations such as their otherworldliness, their innate freedom, and the sense that they are watching over us.

ANGEL 1963 Mixed media on paper 13 5/8 x 15 1/2 inches Birds and angels are multi-layered metaphorical symbols in Bak’s work, sharing connotations such as their otherworldliness, their innate freedom, and the sense that they are watching over us.

FALLEN BIRD 1963 Ink and gouache on paper 12 1/8 x 17 3/4 inches Birds and angels are multi-layered metaphorical symbols in Bak’s work, sharing connotations such as their otherworldliness, their innate freedom, and the sense that they are watching over us.

UNDER THE WINGS OF SORROW 1963 Oil on linen 35 1/8 x 45 5/8 inches Of this painting, Bak wrote: “The sorrow of loss can be crippling. Indefinite mourning should be overcome—or can it?”

REFLECTIONS 64 1964 Oil on linen 40 1/8 x 48 1/8 inches By 1964, Bak juggled trends in Cubism with the intellectual vigor of Talmudic debate and a personal desire to let the past nourish his art.

AS DARK AS IT GETS 1964 Oil on linen 39 3/8 x 32 inches Though acclaimed for his gallery work, a darkness brewing in Bak’s consciousness was stirring a momentous shift in his art.

EMERGING 1965 Ink and gouache on paper 10 x 13 3/4 inches B&A&K 1965 Gouache on paper 10 x 13 3/4 inches In small, unassuming drawings, Bak emerged from the confines of his creative struggle for identity to crystallize a style unique to him.

REMEMBERING 1965 Ink and watercolor on paper 10 5/8 x 14 1/8 inches Gathering fragments from the artist’s memory are reassembled in this work.

FIGURES 1965 Oil on canvas board 21 1/2 x 17 3/4 inches Like the sculptural figures of di Chirico’s Pittura Metafisica, Bak’s enigmatic forms inhabit a mysterious landscape.

PEAR MOUNTAIN 1966-1967 Oil on canvas 24 1/8 x 19 5/8 inches An ancient city rises out of a ragged, mountainous pear, while shadowy birds of prey swoop ominously in the painting’s negative space.

WRECKAGE AND SMOKE 1965 Oil on board 8 5/8 x 12 5/8 inches In this early example of Bak’s “landscape of indifference,” clouds and smoke mingle and a house turns to stone

SMALL UNIVERSE 1965 Oil on canvas board 11 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches A small universe of balls and targets crowd this dark room, as light from the cloudy blue sky peeks through a small window.

DE PROFUNDIS 1962 Oil on linen 50 3/4 x 63 inches The title of this work comes from Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I call you, O Lord / O Lord listen to my cry;”

6

RETURN TO ISRAEL 1966 TO 19741

RISK AND REWARD In 1966, Bak held his final exhibition at the Galleria Schneider in Rome, satisfied with the evolution and solidification of his pictorial statements but out of sync with the gallery, its American owners, and their cosmopolitan public.2 They preferred the subtle and elegant language of his abstract paintings to the conceptual visions of his latest work, executed in the style of the Old Masters and investigating essential realities, ironies, and contradictions. At the time, Israel was a fledgling state in a process of consolidating its identity,3 in a mood of collective soul-searching, and experiencing dire financial hardship. The Israel of the perilous mid-sixties was defined by insecurity, and threats by its neighbors would soon bring war to the country. To make such a significant move with his family was not an easy decision. In this process, Annalisa’s support was essential. For her part, she felt a strong desire to distance herself from her Italian family, from the bonds of what she called its “bourgeois wealth,”4 from the tedious demands of constantly maintaining an impeccable appearance and always having to live up to social standards. She also needed to escape what she regarded as a load of “stale prejudices.”5 Israel looked to her like salvation. During previous visits, she had developed a passionate admiration for the people she had met there. Sam had a more sober perspective on the possible implications of the move, but her enthusiasm gave them both the fortitude they needed to undertake this audacious step.6 Despite emphatic warnings by his artist friends that living in Israel would be laden with challenges, and despite his own recent and painful experience attempting to return,7 he was determined to make it work. His passionate need to be rooted in his country, and his desire to enrich Mitsia’s life as a doting grandmother, had become even more fervent. He felt he owed this to his mother as her only child, whom she had miraculously and repeatedly saved during the terrible days of the Shoah and amidst the dangers of its long aftermath. He has said, “Today I know that it was her tremendously brave personality, which achieved the miracle of our survival.”8 Later, he became the extension of all her dreams and aspirations; Sam’s happiness

and success were the raison d’être (reason for being) of her life, a devotion that Sam privately carried like a heavy weight akin to survivor’s guilt. He took care to hide this burden from her, as it would have been beyond her understanding. After arriving by boat in Haifa, the four Baks proceeded to travel southwards in their car, jampacked with luggage and carefully wrapped packages of painted canvases. Mercifully their Italian vehicle was still functioning, despite having been dented when the ship’s chains had clumsily lowered it to the ground. The carsick Daniela, now six years old, and little Ilana, aged three, kept their strained faces close to the edge of the half-open windows, ravenously breathing in the fresh sea air. For Sam, the smell of Daniela’s retching constituted the stuff of parental apprenticeship. That this would be a precursor to future fatherly vexations did not yet cross his mind. He wryly mused on the differences between the real life of parenting two toddlers and the allegory that nourished his art.9 At the wheel he felt at ease, unperturbed by the aggressive nature of the Israeli drivers. Everything felt so very familiar. The family’s lodging in Ramat Chen, one of Tel Aviv’s sprouting suburbs, had been chosen by Mitsia, who had been lucky to find it and sign a nine-month lease. After a few wrong turns they arrived at a street corner where a semi-detached, furnished cottage serenely awaited their arrival. It was adequate and clean, on a quiet street with parking, and with a little backyard, the remains of a green lawn, and a few thinning shrubs. The size of the little two-story dwelling hardly compared with the ample space they had left behind in Rome, but Israel’s new reality was eagerly embraced and accepted and any doubts or regrets were put aside. One of the bedrooms served as a makeshift studio. A foldable easel, brushes, and paints were unpacked. Bak, not taking any chances this time, reached out to his old friend and former associate Peter Frye about resuming his work as a theater and costume designer. At the same time, he approached Ethel Broydo, the director of the newly established Gordon Gallery, which showed contemporary Israeli art. The paintings he had brought from Rome intrigued her and spoke to her heart, and though she was eager to take him under her wing, she suggested it might be temporary as times were very uncertain. She warned him about the economic stagnation afflicting the young country, cautioned him to keep his expectations low, and discussed that because she was not the owner of the gallery, she could neither assume any obligations towards him nor expect any specific commitments from him. With all the caveats came a question: Would it be possible for him to set up a show for the fall of the same year? Yes, yes, yes! Bak agreed and enthusiastically returned to the cottage to work.

THE ISRAELI PUBLIC APPROVES The response to his inaugural exhibition in Israel was beyond Bak’s wildest dreams.10 It sold very well and marked the beginning of his incredible success with the Israeli public (a notion that never ceased to surprise him). He became a local celebrity and experienced all the highs and lows of such a status. Not prone to naïve credulity, Bak told himself that this unexpected achievement was due to his kinship with the wildly popular European Surrealists and masters of Magic Realism, concurrently featured in an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum.11 He surmised that in the eyes of the Israeli public, his pictorial language bore stylistic similarities to the European painters, and in his characteristic irony remarked, “I created art that was Kosher!”12 Indeed, an affinity between the Surrealists and Bak was distinctly apparent. One of Salvador Dali’s paintings in the Tel Aviv exhibition entitled Woman with a Head of Roses (1935) is rendered in a more formalized style than Bak’s painting entitled Egg-Eye, but hints at an analogous vision of infinite depth. Dali’s work, which evolved from his “Paranoiac Critical” period, explores the world of dreams, of non-reality springing from the subconscious. The miniscule egg in his painting is depicted among a variety of elongated forms, incongruously juxtaposed within an incommensurate space. Bak’s egg, on the other hand, is based on a visual rendering of reality that more evokes the art of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In contrast with Dali’s playful randomness and choreographed absurdity, Bak’s content is weighty and metaphorical. It derives its meaning from a lexicon of universal idioms, such as the egg, which in his artwork is a symbol of life, growth, and unpredictable potential. Here, the egg is also a bird’s eye and the winged animal is an ephemeral presence upon a rocky promontory from which some pale succulents laboriously emerge. If it were to take off, where would it fly? After his unanticipated success at the Gordon Gallery, Bak gained confidence that he could earn a living by painting. Prominent art galleries offered him opportunities for future exhibitions and negotiated purchases of his paintings, thereby creating within a very short space of time a substantial waiting list for his art. He understood that such success had to be handled delicately as it carried with it the seed of rapid burnout. His plans for theater design were put on hold, though not rescinded. He would strike while the iron was hot. Much to Bak’s surprise, his art was even embraced (albeit briefly, as we will soon see) by the new Israeli avant-garde, among them Raffi Lavie (whom Bak regarded as an Israeli Cy

Twombly).13 Lavie founded the newly established Group 10 Plus, which rebelled against the lyricism of the New Horizons movement and represented, in Bak’s words, a “mishmash”14 of styles greatly indebted to the irony of Pop Art. It featured large, scribbled-on or stained canvases, compositions of found objects, and arrangements of current newspaper clippings, or photo montages of local scenes. Bak accepted this friendly acknowledgment with lighthearted irony. The objet trouvé (found object) had been a novelty forty years ago, even before his time in Paris, filling Bauhaus collections. Remembering the Merzbild (Psychological Collages) of Kurt Schwitters and the assemblage boxes of Joseph Cornell, which had nourished an entire generation of American artists, Bak wryly recalled to himself King Solomon’s pronouncement about “nothing new under the sun.”15

HOSTILE RUMBLINGS IN THE ART ESTABLISHMENT Bak’s return to Israel initiated a fruitful and productive period of creativity. He forged meaningful and lasting friendships, many with his fellow Israeli artists, empathizing with their struggle for artistic survival and regularly buying their works. However, the atmosphere of friendly welcome and camaraderie was short-lived and unable to survive in the climate of Israel’s intellectual claustrophobia. The stagnant atmosphere that pervaded the Israeli art scene pushed several artists and leading critics to view Bak’s popularity and success as proof of an utter lack of value. He began to experience a brand of professional envy that was stifling and, at times, downright mean. “What kind of shit are you showing here?” bellowed the prominent Israeli sculptor Igael Tumarkin to Ethel Broydo in a crowded Gordon Gallery during an exhibition of Bak’s paintings.16 The unspeakable rudeness, for all to hear, was hurtful and shocking. While Bak’s conceptual metaphors of 20th century Jewish experience, Eastern European life, and the Shoah found an eager reception in Europe and the Americas, the Israeli art establishment generally regarded them as somewhat shady expressions of nostalgia for what was forever gone.17 The shtetl? The old hat of Surrealism? Many of Israel’s influential artists seemed stuck in lyrical or expressive abstraction, a style that Bak had experimented but not stayed with years earlier. Others, like the artists of Eretz Yisrael, still produced poetic evocations of the Holy Land in an orientalist style for a hankering and wealthy American Jewish clientele. Bak realized with some bitterness that much of the art at the time was mere merchandise created to put food on the table.

THE SIX-DAY WAR In June 1967, for the third time in the history of the new state, threatening storm clouds were gathering. War with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria was imminent. The radio was switched on 24 hours a day, and with the news came an agonizing reemergence of Bak’s past traumas. Fear for the survival of his two little girls held him in its grip. When the lease in Ramat Chen ended in May 1967, the four Baks temporarily moved into Mitsia’s small flat. They planned to spend the upcoming summer in Italy, then return to Israel in October to a furnished house which they had rented in the suburb of Savyon. Would those plans, made for times of peace, come to fruition? The Israeli skies continued to darken, the collective memory of its inhabitants reawakened old and new wounds. Anguish and confusion ruled the day, and as Bak wrote, “The smell of gas chambers and the smoke of extermination ovens were in the air.”18 Bak was urged by his mother and stepfather to stick to their plans and leave for Italy. As a reservist he reported to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), but his superiors reassured him that the tension was easing, there would be no war, and he could confidently leave. He could not have known that feigned nonchalance was the official ploy of the Israeli authorities, and he naïvely went along. On June 2, he landed in Rome with Annalisa, Daniela, and Ilana—three days before the Six-Day War broke out. On the memorable day of June 5, 1967, the Baks were in their house near Rome. Sam was busy painting as there was no better way to calm himself. The sun was radiant, and the air smelled of freshly cut grass. Intermittently he listened to music and news on the radio. Mozart and Schubert were soothing his soul when suddenly the news interrupted with words of sheer horror. Reports of a newly erupted war in the Middle East poured from every station. The enemy’s propaganda machine was ringing loud and clear, announcing that Tel Aviv was in flames and the Jews would be driven into the sea. The Israeli news remained silent. This silence, as it turned out, was part of the same thoroughly thought-out Israeli strategy through which Bak had been told just weeks earlier that there would not be a war. Despite the bluster, the war was over after only six days and Israel celebrated an unprecedented victory. Sam and Annalisa left the two girls with their Italian grandmother and returned to Israel. In the chaotic aftermath of the war, Annalisa volunteered transporting stranded people in her car and Sam reported to the army for post-war service.19 The Chief Education Officer of Zahal,20 Mordechai Bar-On, instructed him to produce a series of drawings for the military archives of the IDF, which was to constitute a visual legacy for later publication. In his duty as an artist

rendering images of war, Bak set aside his personal artistic language and created dispassionate and accurate accounts of the events, free of emotional commentary, personal experience, or sentiment. In paintings done on his own time in his studio, he endeavored to resolve his feelings about the shattering events of the Six-Day War. After the war, several galleries approached him for exhibitions, among them the Raaya Ben Dror Gallery and the Gallery of Fine Art in Jaffa,21 which exhibited the work A Prophecy (In the Desert), painted in 1967. The painting resonated so powerfully with the Israeli public that it drew crowds to the gallery.22 Many people saw in this painting a vision of the prophet Ezekiel, who foretold the rebuilding of the First Temple.23 They identified the renewed fulfilment of Ezekiel’s prophecy, as the Western Wall of the Second Temple had been captured during the Six-Day War. In the painting, the Western Wall floats in the sky above the desert in which soldiers had been fighting for their survival. Its mystical aura elevated the image to the sphere of the numinous. For viewers, it became a motif of redemption and a symbol of collective hope. This, however, was not how Bak saw the work and not what had inspired it. With this composition, he was offering a perspective on contradicting elements that could only be captured visually. In an interview conducted at the time, he stated that he saw in the floating stones the total lack of feeling for the thousands of lost lives that the desert sand had covered up.24 He says, “Lives pass and stones remain.”25 To Bak, human life is precious, but stones (whether belonging to the Kaaba in Mecca, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, or St. Peter’s in Rome) “are just stones.”26 In his view, “Land cannot be sacred. Life is.”27 With this painting, Bak stood up as a prophet of a different era whose revelation had yet to be understood.

THE IDEOLOGICAL PRICE OF VICTORY During the Six-Day War the young Jewish state showed tremendous strength and resilience in its mortal struggle for survival. Critics, however, accused Israel of becoming intoxicated by victory and blind to its own irrational thinking. Bak recalls that when the aging David Ben-Gurion warned that Israel’s hold on the occupied territories was a mistake that would plague the nation for generations, most Israelis considered him demented.28 But Ben-Gurion was not alone in this view. One of the first voices to query the “victorious drunkenness of the Israelis”29 and raise questions about the country’s future plight and moral character belonged to writer Amos Oz, a

close friend of Bak’s and a kindred spirit with a shared weltanschauung (world view).30 In the painting Flight, two metal birds soar to freedom in the guise of fighter planes. This is a perfect illustration of how paradoxical meanings often coexist in Bak’s paintings. Fighter planes bring freedom to some, and death to others. Can freedom be fought for, and won through military combat alone? The [current] war in Ukraine seems to be hinting at the most polarizing answers and leaves us wondering. The mere definition of freedom asks for a lot of reflection. Does every question possess an answer, or every answer fit in with only one possible question?31 This enigma of the human condition has always nourished Bak’s art. Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War also changed the attitude of the world towards the Jewish state. Public opinion hungers for victims, not for victors, and Bak explains that: Israel’s existence within a very hostile environment inevitably pushed it toward a military and non-compromising stance. Religiosity became a substitute for the core of its self-search. The Israel of today has none of the Tolstoian spirit that once nourished the early generations of its Zionist founders, the socialist creators of its statehood, the Kibbutzim and Moshavot. Alas, my biography cannot deal with the infinite perplexities of Jewish life today.32 It was no longer the vulnerable little nation capturing the pity of the world. It had become a self-sustaining state, and Bak caustically adds, “even when another people had to pay for it, and Russian Oligarchs find in it heaven.”33

LIFE GOES ON Bak eventually did move his family to the house in the suburb of Savyon, and there they felt at home. When the lease expired, they rented a different house in the same area, where they lived among South African Jews with lineage in Lithuania.34 The painting Moving Shabbat encapsulates their sense of togetherness, grown from transplanted roots that originated in the same subsoil. He wrote that, “Especially important…was the feeling shared by all, of being a community, one big family which shares memories of a past reality and tries to project itself into

a better future.”35 Bak continued exhibiting widely in group and solo exhibitions, inside Israel and abroad.36 In 1967, he participated in a group exhibition of Israeli artists at the Tel Aviv Museum entitled Image and Imagination. Bak enjoyed a special rapport with the director of the museum, Dr. Haim Gamzu, who greatly admired his work.37 In 1969, Bernard Pucker, the director of the Pucker Safrai Art Gallery in Boston who during a visit to Jerusalem had met Bak in person and been greatly impressed by his work, brought Bak’s art to the United States and began exhibiting it. This was the beginning of a profound and deeply meaningful friendship that turned the gallerist and the artist into true soul brothers.

A RENEWED AWARENESS OF JEWISH HISTORY Bak’s success in the Israeli art market did not abate and by 1969 he was able to acquire a plot in Savyon, one of the most sought-after bedroom communities of metropolitan Tel Aviv. On it stood three ancient, magnificent olive trees that Bak wanted to preserve and highlight, so he hired his friend and architect Dan Eytan to design a house around the arboreal trio, complete with a spacious studio. Bak’s resonance with the Israeli public inspired him to delve more deeply into the collective history and destiny of the Jewish people. The country was still suspicious about anything that lapsed into reminiscence or nostalgia for the lost Jewish world. The word galuti, which in Hebrew means “pertaining to the diaspora,” was considered an offensive epithet. But when he reached into himself, the picture changed. He wrote that, “As an artist I became more and more involved with the themes that sprang from the depth of my personal experience. I meant to search for symbols that possess a communicative power and at the same time, keep away from the language of illustrators.”38 Bak is not prone to the cliché, instead he developed icons of Jewish experience that sprang from his innermost being. The key, for instance, appears early and frequently in his work as a symbol of self-searching and questioning. Its three-pronged shape recalls the Hebrew letter Shin, which stands for the female denomination of God as Shadday (my breasts). The painting entitled Secret poses layers of questions about transience and the secrets of life. A pear-shaped rock formation holds a lock which is unreachable by the broken, rusty key buried under the rocky slope. The key is weathered and damaged, and in its present state rendered totally useless. It

might have been waiting over millennia to open the lock and reveal the hidden secret, but it will continue to wait into infinity. Here, Bak alludes to the Kabbalah, the epitome of Jewish Mysticism, which seeks to understand the Divine mysteries of creation while warning about the impending dangers of such an inquiry. For Bak, the question of religious belief is a matter of deep personal choice. The Jewish religion has a strong social and political weight, which is not a question of determinism, but a question of fate. Jewish identity, and the drama of the Jewish existence, are shaped by the human need to find answers to questions that are beyond the realm of pure reason. Who are the ones, who are the others? Who do we lock in, who do we lock out? How did racism invent race? The blackness of the painting’s keyhole gives no hint of revelation or understanding, while the clouds of the painted sky carry on.

THE FATEFUL YEAR OF 1971 1971 began joyfully, with a second exhibition of Bak’s work at the Pucker Safrai Gallery in Boston paving the way for his artistic future in the United States. With great anticipation, he moved into his newly built house in Savyon.39 Soon came the intense happiness of the birth of his youngest daughter, Mikhal. But the fateful year ended in sadness. Mitsia, not yet 60, succumbed to a fast-growing cancer. Sam’s grief was boundless. Once when he was five years old, Bak had unwittingly saved his parents’ lives by being an exasperatingly naughty boy. Had he not been throwing up forbidden delicacies (devoured during one of their much-resented outings), thus waking them up in the middle of the night, they would have succumbed to toxic fumes emanating from the coal stove in their bedroom (where he had been guiltily carried after their late return from a joyous party). While this episode made Sam a much-lauded hero, the actions of his parents years later during a time of genocidal terror made them his repeated saviors. After his father was murdered, this responsibility fell solely upon Mitsia and her acutely developed survival instincts. He owed her not only his life but his art. He has said that, “The first and foremost, of all my art teachers, to whom I owe the world, was Mother. She studied in one of Vilna’s art-schools and had quite a discerning eye. Her total belief in the exceptionality of my talent was supreme.”40 And, he continued that, “For as long as she lived (only till age 60), she wouldn’t refrain from commenting on my art.”41

Mitsia was formidable, erudite, distinguished, feminine, with a flair for elegance (which she shared with her sister Yetta), striking good looks, and a discerning chicness. She had a wise way of handling delicate family dynamics. She was a passionately devoted grandmother who was able to experience the joy of the births of all her grandchildren before her passing. She was charismatic, with an infectious sense of humor that she often invoked to drown her pain. She could be abrasive, judgmental, and crushingly cynical. She would, at times, exhibit an irrational rage and sense of betrayal towards her husband for allowing himself to be killed at the bitter end of the Shoah. Though Sam understood his powerful and tenacious mother, it was not easy for him to assert himself with her. But her refusal to succumb to self-pity, especially outwardly, and her ability to maintain her pride in the direst circumstances, was transmitted to Sam, who followed her example throughout his life and in his art. In her professional assessment based on her study of Painted in Words, psychologist Dr. Laima Vince explains the unique relationship between Sam and Mitsia, defining Mitsia as an “overbearing, overprotective, but doting mother,”42 and explaining that, “Despite her scolding, Mother (as Bak’s mother is called in his memoir) does everything she can during war, the Holocaust, and postwar displacement in the Landsberg DP camp, to ensure her son receives a well-rounded education.”43 Vince concludes that Bak experienced a sense of total security, even under extreme circumstances, that “Bak stresses how protected he felt by his parents’ unconditional love while hunted by the Nazis and Lithuanian Security Police in Vilna during the Holocaust, how he felt certain his parents would protect him.”44 His sense of security became the basic nutrient of his creativity, and Mitsia’s dedication to him was rewarded by her pride and joy in his intelligence and extraordinary artistic talent, and in the knowledge that one day he would fulfil his destiny to give testimony as a survivor of the Shoah. Vince also made the important finding that Bak was so close to his mother that his post-memory narratives were conveyed through her eyes.45 Bak’s painting Yizkor (Point of Departure)46 reflects the darkness of his mood following the loss of his beloved mother, with whom his very soul was inextricably linked. The spirit of fathomless mourning in this painting extends beyond her single life to include the fate of the entire Jewish people, and the forlorn vessel that debuts here would become an icon of Bak’s later work. A stranded ship of stone is surrounded by an infinite ocean of quivering waves, which appear like gushing tears. The ship—or is it an ark?—is bogged down by a pile of ruined Eastern European houses which render it immobile. Two towering Shabbat candles, reminiscent of crematoria chimneys, rise from its base, their flames swirling darkly into a tumultuous sky. Still, in all its

hopelessness and despair, this image exudes a touching and otherworldly aesthetic beauty. Etchings such as Birds further reveal the artist’s inconsolable grief and ongoing sadness about the loss of his mother. In Birds, one bird lies stranded on weathering rock, its helpless eye forming the epicenter of the small composition, while his companion, supported by poles on a rocky promontory, is paralyzed mid-flight.

MARKUSHA’S DECLINE Right to the end of her life, Mitsia remained deeply loyal towards her second husband, Sam’s stepfather Markusha, who in his seventies began suffering from dementia. At first Markusha summoned all his strength to cover up his forgetfulness, but when it eventually overpowered him and he became a danger to himself, he was moved to an assisted living home. Mitsia visited him regularly, each way an arduous bus trip with several changes, to bring him (and some fellow residents she had taken under her wing) food she cooked in the evenings. At some point he no longer recognized her, but she kept coming as long as she could. Bak empathized with his dignified, cultured stepfather whose fate it was to succumb to this humiliating condition, saying: …I tried to imagine the inner spaces of his structured world, which was governed by rational rules that had become, in his youth, the underlying source of his certitudes. I then thought about the cataclysmic forces that swept through him in the black years of the Holocaust and all the havoc and destruction that came with them. I translated those forces into the images of a world of chess after the universal flood, when hardly anything remained intact.47 Recalling that, in the Landsberg DP camp, Sam’s stepfather tried in vain to teach his unenthusiastic stepson the game of chess, it follows that chess would become, in Bak’s art, a metaphor for Markovsky’s failing mental acuity. In the painting entitled Second Expectations, a stony rook stands in a vast ocean next to a chessboard doubling as a promontory, projected into the deluge. On it are poised a forlorn trio of anthropomorphic pawns. The ocean is pushed back by three huge boulders, a fragmentary rook serves as a repoussoir48 in the composition, and wooden crossbeams hold a suspended hoisting device. Are these gallows? In the hazy background, the outlines of a mountain range and a clearing horizon underline the irony in

this painting, at once a deeply optimistic expression of hope for the best and a pessimistic acceptance of the utter futility of expectation. Another metaphorical rendering of his stepfather’s tragically corroding mind, capturing the mental breakdown of a once bright and able man, is the painting After the Fall, in which a disintegrating chess board and eroding figures are placed into a “landscape of indifference.” Author Richard Raskin wrote: …the chess motif features prominently in Sam’s art, throughout the ensuing decades. He once said, “Think of it, what could be more banal than the game of chess? We all know that it deals with a list of pre-established rules of war, with guessing an opponent’s plans, with accepting sacrifice. Besides, don’t we all often feel that we are pawns in a game that somebody else is playing? Chess provides me with metaphors that are easily readable; it is a sort of icon of a popular myth. And mythological themes have always fascinated artists.49 Lost in the haze of Alzheimer’s, Nathan Markovsky never comprehended Mitsia’s death, and about a year later, he too died. More than the fate of Mitsia and Markusha is memorialized in Les Adieux, painted two years after his stepfather’s death. The composition, offering different perspectives on one scene, does not make it easy for the viewer to enter its soaked ground. On the left the eye is led straight into a gorge, with artifacts of the past strewn around. Foliage in a sickly green, crawling over a rock on the right, bar another possibility of entrance. Distinct mounds of dirt in random chronology illustrate Nathan’s mind in different stages of turning to dust.50 By one mound, the dark, heavily coated figure of a woman (Mitsia, perhaps) sits on a delicate chair, facing the visage of a man (Markusha, perhaps), his ossified features rising from the withering earth around him. A basket of food and drink lies next to her. A pipe leads limply out of a turbid pond to nowhere, as if to show that communication between the two is no longer possible. Iterations of her chair are mired in repeating dunes, in each of which the figures present at different stages of existence until they finally disappear. One chair holds Markusha’s bodiless clothes, slumping over, while his halfboots are placed neatly in front. It is a scene of inevitability, dejection, gloom, and sorrow, of stagnation in numb immobility and hopelessness. In the eyes of the artist, Les Adieux focuses on the cruel fate of his loved ones, which he explains with grace and intimacy in his monograph Between Worlds, writing:

This painting might look like a scene from a play by Samuel Beckett, but it is an image from the life of Samuel Bak. In the late sixties, my stepfather Markusha, afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease, had to live in a specialized clinic. It was sad to see him slowly drifting away. Mother visited him daily, bringing from her home baskets with his favorite food. She used to keep him company, talk to him, and listen to his confused speech. But I was not sure whom he saw in her person. His first wife and two daughters had perished in the Holocaust. Mother died in 1971, struck by a galloping cancer. Markusha, in his demented state, had no notion that he was a widower for a second time and regularly called one of the nurses by Mother’s name. He survived her by ten months. Three years later, in front of a large horizontal canvas, I confronted the subject of eternal sleep. So much was happening on earth that I decided to limit the expanse of sky and set the horizon high in the pictorial space. Later I added the little mounds of dust and then equipped the painting’s landscape with chairs on which the sleepers, before turning into such heaps of ashes, could place their garments. As I started to apply the paint, my mind wandered to those who did not have the privilege of dying slowly and were forced to discard their clothing on the ground. I thought of my father, murdered in Ponari at thirty-seven. In the upper part of the painting, visible above a dust mound, is Markusha’s head. With his clear eyes looking into an ever growing void, his mouth perpetuating a toothless smile, his body already departed, he is gradually returning to ashes. In front of him, but seen from the back, is seated an unknown woman with an old-fashioned hat. She might be one of his two deceased wives or perhaps the clinic’s nurse. Through her image I tried to represent this interchangeability. Mother was gone, but my life went on and my memory of her continued to nourish me. To mark this thought, and to recall the moment in which she gave me life, I brought into the composition a reflecting surface of water. A little accident accounts for my choice of this image. Once I had left a garden hose running to water some plants near my studio; forgetting it, I almost drowned them. An overdose of nourishing love had created a big puddle. I dedicated the mounds of golden dust to those I loved. I knew that in

my painting a strong wind was blowing, but something had prevented the little dust mounds from being scattered, covered by vegetation, and forgotten. Maybe my fresh recollection of Markusha’s passing and Mother’s sudden death, and my desire to perpetuate their memory, kept these little heaps from disintegrating too soon. The one long stretch of horizon and the monotony of an uneventful sky spoke to me of nature’s indifference.51 While Bak brings his own narrative history to each work, it is ultimately his intention to create works of art of universal content that resonate with the world of the beholder, and whose final meaning lies with them.

NEGATIVE IMPULSES CONTINUE Despite his personal distress, his artistic success with the Israeli art galleries continued and he was becoming more comfortable with his status of art celebrity. Whenever he returned from an exhibition abroad, he was warmly welcomed by the airport officials. He wryly admits that this popularity among the Israelis gave him a “fantastic ego-boost.”52 But something gnawed at him, making him wary. His intuition as a survivor made him attune to hostility and he was picking up increasingly negative impulses from fellow artists and members of the art establishment. Sometimes to his face, and he suspected more often behind his back, he continued to receive the Yigael Tumarkin treatment. He could not pinpoint what triggered the behavior, instead admitting, “When I think what were the attitudes of the establishment towards my art I would not know where to put my finger.”53 Israel’s cultural community was relatively small, and everyone knew everyone else. Some jealousy was predictable and he could stomach that, knowing that it was impossible to have success as an artist and not face some antagonism and ill will.54 He wondered whether the capacity for his art in the Israeli art market was exhausting itself, but his continued success disproved this conjecture.55 The biased attitude of the Israeli cultural establishment to Bak’s art gradually began to hurt and even anger him. In contradistinction to the public and the art dealers, the intellectual elite did not accept his art. It pained him that some academics and official representatives of art institutions regarded his realistic “non-style style”56 with continued suspicion. They had embraced his abstract works but were hopelessly out of their depth when

confronted with his conceptual metaphors. He was told by the guardians of the cultural establishment that his new subjective vision, captured by objective means in the mood of irony, was breaking the momentum of western art history.57 This was especially troubling for Bak, for whom it had been emotionally painful and creatively challenging to step away from abstraction and break through to his current style. What was the cause of the baffling condemnation of his art? Cultural elites and official representatives of academia, often not creative themselves, find comfort in the development of and adherence to categories and canons. This can lead to stagnation and at some point, they are outpaced by connoisseurs and art collectors with their fingers on the collective pulse. It may be that notable members of the art establishment felt insecure about the ways in which Bak’s art did not fit neatly into their established structure. What is more, Bak’s paintings broke the Israeli taboo against revealing its “shameful” past. All of this was likely exacerbated by Bak’s characteristic irony. Unable to define his work or easily fit it within the entrenched framework, it might have been easier for members of the art establishment to simply write it off as a populist commodity. One experience with a fellow artist wounded him a great deal. One day on a gallery visit, Bak found that this artist, in his eyes a man of great ability, had unbeknownst to the gallery owner been pretending to be Bak, painting a fake “Bak” painting and benefitting from Bak’s commercial viability. Some artists may feel that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and be bolstered that they have “arrived” enough to be copied, but Bak was deeply hurt. He indignantly reported the matter to the gallerist, and before long the culprit came to his house, tearfully apologizing for his act of betrayal and trying to justify it by bemoaning his dire financial straits. Bak felt betrayed, unappeased by the knowledge that other great artists in the history of western art had suffered a similar fate. Creatively, Bak did not need the recognition of the art establishment for reassurance. He never suffered from artist’s block or doubted his capacities and had an undeniable vision that drove his prolific output. But he was also human and he yearned to belong. As the confining reality of the society in which he lived was unwilling to grant him the feeling of inclusion and acceptance, he redoubled his efforts to exhibit abroad, where his work was received with high regard. An exhibition at the Fischer Fine Art Gallery in London was scheduled for November 1973.

THE YOM KIPPUR WAR

One month prior to the exhibition, lightning struck once again. Another brutal war brought Israel to the brink of annihilation. It was during the month of Ramadan, a period of fasting, prayer, reflection, and community in the Islamic religion. It was October 6, 1973, the 10th of Tishri 5734 in the Jewish calendar, the holy day of Yom Kippur. The streets were empty and all was quiet. People were in synagogue, fasting, or at home out of respect to those observing the Day of Atonement. Sam was relaxing in his garden. Suddenly the sound of sirens wailed through the silence. He knew immediately that there was something terribly wrong and he was “very, very frightened.”58 The Yom Kippur War, initiated by Egypt and Syria, had begun. As a reservist, Bak was again called up to serve in the IDF to record scenes of this unforeseen, brutal war.59 In Drawing from the Army from 1973, the hurried assembly of a mobile cannon and the neatness of the soldiers’ uniforms reflects the surprise onset of the unexpected war. About the war, Bak said: It was a very costly one and could easily have been avoided. Thousands of lives might have been saved, had the then arrogant Israeli Government under Golda Meir accepted Anwar Sadat’s secret offers, but they were ignored. The socialist administration lost the oncoming election, and Menachem Begin, the premier of the Likud, welcomed Sadat to Jerusalem. For Israel, the Yom Kippur War was a bitter lesson. It generated innumerable books, analyses, and contributed to much of the stagnation that its history has been dealing with.60

ART IN THE AFTERMATH His own work from the time, such as the small diptych entitled Bird and other paintings of this motif, conveys the artist’s disenchantment and sadness about the state of his world. A wooden bird suggesting the blue and white stripes of the Israeli flag, or possibly a concentration camp uniform, endeavors to fly in a craggy mountain landscape under a brooding sky. Does it attempt to take off and get to the rocky promontory, which it will never reach as its wings are caught up in two scraggy bushes and a pole? The flightless bird becomes an icon of the Jewish experience and the conflation of recent European history (the prison stripes) with current Israeli politics (the striped flag) creates an unsettling connection between two eras, positioning Bak in opposition to the current zeitgeist of Israel as a modern state that had put the past behind it. Bak’s references to the Shoah are often ironically and masterfully camouflaged in nonliteral ways. Just as the bird is a metaphor, so the still life, conceived in the aesthetic purity of

Renaissance compositions, appears pleasing to the eye and belies its ominous narrative. In Fruit Bowl, an exquisitely shaped bowl holds seven pears offset by a bright red curtain, slightly drawn to reveal a brick structure. Any beholder’s imagination familiar with the categorized reading of Bak’s art might see in it the wall of a crematorium, but it is not obviously so. On closer looking, the bowl is cracked, the pears are shrouded or bandaged, leather-bound, or partially denuded, and an egg emerges out of the skin of the pear in the middle. A picturesque mountain in the background rises to a hazy sky. Charming and alluring at first glance, the still life’s biting cynicism emerges gradually but forcefully until it flirts with the threshold of satire, all the while in intense dialogue with the viewer. It is a nature morte, rather than a “still life.” The painting entitled Dreaming Angel is one of the most powerful paintings Bak completed after the Yom Kippur War. The messenger of God is a middle-aged man, reminiscent of Jesus, or the “Man of Sorrows” in Western iconography, facing the viewer with his eyes closed. His arms are amputated and his scrap metal wings (maybe collected from the fields of battle) are shackled to his chest and shoulders. With these wings that hold him down, his dream of flying will never be realized. In the analysis of Avram Kampf, he is “trapped by technology and his attempt to reach the sky is absurd and ridiculous.”61 The painting, once again intensely ironic and quite shocking, is an expression of the utter collapse of reality and the notion that escape can only be found in the realm of dreams. Cityscape with Rainbow, also painted after the Yom Kippur War, travels from the biblical past to the turbulent present. The scene is dominated by a fragmented rainbow structure bedaubed in primary colors which stand in contrast to the sickly browns and bilious greens of the color composition. The tired rusty rainbow is an ironic reminder of God’s promise to humanity, that He would never again destroy the Earth, as it hovers in a tempestuous sky, below which converge repeated annihilations from ancient times to the present. A Roman bridge leads past sparsely growing shrubs to an assemblage of architectural structures from different eras and places, all with disintegrating edifices. This is a bitter indictment presented with a deeply aesthetic appeal. The painting Blue Morning (Into the City) shows Bak’s conceptual power at its height. In a unity of space and time it captures, in stark realism and with a deeply detached irony, a cluster of industrial buildings and skyscrapers traversed with the shadows of the “Shtetl Man,”62 while the gabled façades of an Eastern European structure bookend a house. On the right, a small wooden house perches on a ruined base beside a crematorium chimney. Another pair of belching cylinders arises among the skyscrapers, reminiscent of Shabbat candles forged out of crematorium chimneys, their smoke billowing into stone. Pipes and rubble lurk beneath the

cracked floor, beside which an artist’s canvas, meant to capture the scene, lies damaged. It is intensely alive, unceasingly interacting with the viewer as if in a Talmudic dialogue, constantly revealing more spheres of insight and questions. First shown at Bak’s inaugural exhibition at the Aberbach Gallery63 in New York, it resonated powerfully among American Jewish viewers, as captured in an article written by Isaac Bashevis Singer entitled “The Humanscape of Destruction in Samuel Bak’s Art” for The National Jewish Monthly.64

“ISRAEL HAD ALWAYS BEEN FOR ME A COUNTRY OF PROBLEMS”65 When the Yom Kippur War was over, and despite his steady commercial success and good rapport with the pubic and collectors, Bak’s unpleasant encounters with members of the Israeli art authorities continued. It raises a fundamental question for the historian: did these custodians of art ever have an appetite for Bak’s message, in which he dared to connect the fate of the Jewish state with the Shoah? Bak’s unease began to affect his mood, his day-to-day life, and far worse, his creativity. He felt a growing urgency for a break, a need, for at least some time, to leave Israel. Already in 1968, before the death of his mother and the Yom Kippur War, premonitions of uprootedness emerged in a series of paintings with the Wanderer motif, as if his art was a prescient vehicle to express his growing sense of unease at home. The painting The Wanderer (Trans-Plant) features Bak’s prototype of a Hassidic Jew clad in a long garment, carrying a torn tree trunk to which his left arm is tied. His eyes gaze downward with a centuries-old sadness. He stands in a barren landscape, the torn branches of the tree hindering him in his way forward. The crown of the tree is filled with the foliage of the Ponary forest, in whose mass graves Bak’s grandparents and his father lie buried. The foliage is inhabited by blackbirds, symbols of death.

LEAVING BUT STAYING Bak often speaks about his dislike for travelling.66 The post-World War II years, in which he was forced to wander over a war-torn continent, left in him a deep distaste for suitcases, cars, boats, and trains. Throughout his life, travelling has been a required part of his profession, but even when necessitated by the pleasures of a family vacation, or exploration of the world’s museums, it demands special mental effort on his part and stirs up feelings of rootlessness. The painting The Wanderer III expresses Bak’s pain at being unmoored. The metaphorical nomad, who is tied by a rope to an uprooted tree trunk deposited in a rickety pushcart, is

carrying cleaved Ponary trees whose foliage is, once again, inhabited by blackbirds. Unlike the typical shtetl man, he wears the popular fedora of the fifties, just like all the self-respecting men in European and American movies of the era. He carries a pekalach (small bag) on his back filled with more branches, transports his plate and flask on his belt, and wears a tattered coat that looks less like a garment and more like a curtain from an abandoned living room. He stands before the chasm of a steep gorge, which he must negotiate to reach the craggy mountains and the boundless distant and threatening sky. If the man in the picture is Bak, is the dangerous path ahead the place he will soon find himself—the New York of 1974? Bak felt that if he moved to New York, he could continue exhibiting in Israel, remain in touch with its art world, and create a long-distance relationship with his home country that was easier to bear. From New York, he could maintain connections with supporters such as Haim Gamzu,67 the director of the Tel Aviv Museum, and the prominent art historian Avram Kampf,68 but he could also block out the negative noise that was dogging him in Israel. In 1978, Kampf organized a retrospective of Bak’s work at the Art Department of the University of Haifa69 (which he had established), exhibiting a selection of his oeuvre. To Kampf’s shock and dismay, the exhibition received a bitingly negative review in a local newspaper.70 Bak was less surprised, for it was his awareness of the possibility of this type of reaction that in part compelled him to leave Israel in the first place.

ISRAEL IN REVIEW Bak’s art remains inextricably linked with the collective identity of the state of Israel. Misunderstood at a certain point in time and by a certain sector of the Israeli art establishment, he nevertheless remains bound to the history and culture of the Jewish people and has only now received his due recognition as a prominent artist. Today, a new generation of Israeli art historians and museum curators have reassessed their country’s relationship to Bak’s work, designating him as a leading Israeli artist in the permanent exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum entitled Material Imagination: Israeli Art from the Museum’s Collection. Current members of the local art institution have a critical distance from the fraught landscape of the 1970s and a deeper appreciation of Bak’s contribution, all the while acknowledging the ways in which Bak had previously been unfairly denigrated. The current head of the Department of Art History at the University of Haifa, Professor Jochai Rosen, stated with some regret, “Samuel Bak is a very interesting painter and he did not always receive in Israel the favorable attitude he deserves.”71 The Israel Museum, whose former director had appreciated Bak’s abstract style to the exclusion of his more challenging allegorical pieces, has meanwhile built a collection of Bak’s conceptual

works and published a catalogue of his paintings found in prominent collections worldwide. Bak’s life and art are deeply entwined with the impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish psyche, as well as the fledgling and tenuous existence of the Jewish state, which from its inception experienced war, insecurity, and painful inner contradictions (both physically and culturally), repeatedly facing extinction, and with no just answer to its existential issues. However dysfunctional the family, Bak is part of it, as his work is part of the momentum of Israel’s art history and that of the West. Universality in art is anchored within the demarcated borders of a reality defined by time and space.

EGG-EYE ca. 1966 Oil on canvas 13 3/8 x 9 1/8 inches Bak credits some of his success in the 1960s with his affinity for the popular Surrealism, though his weighty content engages with universal idioms in a very different way.

DRAWING FROM THE ARMY 1967 Black pencil on paper 13 1/4 x 16 1/8 inches DRAWING FROM THE ARMY (THE WOUNDED) 1967 Black pencil on paper Dimensions unknown As a reservist with the IDF, Bak was called upon during the Six- Day War to visually record the events.

A PROPHECY (IN THE DESERT) 1967 Oil on canvas 39 3/8 x 32 inches The Israeli public responded strongly to this painting as a vision of the prophet, Ezekial, but for Bak it was a lamentation on war’s senseless loss of life.

FLIGHT 1968 Oil on canvas 24 1/8 x 21 5/8 inches Metal birds soar like fighter jets over the mountains, bringing freedom to some but death to others.

WARRIOR 1968 Oil on canvas 13 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches A soldier’s one exposed eye gazes unsettlingly at the viewer, while the rest of his face is encased in blinding, silencing armor.

MOVING SHABBAT 1970 Oil on canvas 46 1/2 x 46 1/2 inches The Baks felt at home in the suburb of Savyon, amongst neighbors with shared traditions and mutual hopes for the future.

SECRET ca. 1968 Oil on canvas 20 1/2 x 24 3/4 inches The three-pronged shape at the end of the key recalls the Hebrew letter Shin, which stands for the female denomination of God as Shadday (my breasts).

YIZKOR (POINT OF DEPARTURE) (REMEMBRANCE) 1973 Oil on canvas 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 inches The death of Bak’s beloved mother in 1971 elicited a series of works on the Jewish prayer for the dead in which stony ships with belching candles pass through rocky seas.

IN MEMORIAM (YIZKOR) 1971 Lithograph from zinc plate 9 1/8 x 9 1/8 inches BIRDS 1971-1972 Etching, drypoint, and aquatint 5 1/8 x 6 1/4 inches In Israel, Bak acquired an etching press and several books on the topic, and with his existing knowledge of lithography delved into printmaking.

SECOND EXPECTATIONS 1970-1988 Oil on canvas 23 5/8 x 28 3/4 inches BK635 In addition to its power as a metaphor for war, chess reminds Bak of his stepfather, Markusha.

AFTER THE FALL 1990 Oil on linen 26 x 32 inches BK150 The chessboard is eroding, the pawns are underground, and the mighty queen has fallen in this oversized, outdoor chess game.

LES ADIEUX 1974 Oil on linen 45 x 76 3/8 inches French for “the goodbyes,” Les Adieux depicts “the subject of eternal sleep” as it relates to the passing of Bak’s father, mother, and stepfather.

DRAWING FROM THE ARMY 1973 Mixed media on paper 12 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches Bak was again called up as a reservist for the IDF to document the sudden and costly Yom Kippur War.

FRUIT BOWL 1973 Oil on canvas 13 3/4 x 10 5/8 inches Classically beautiful still lifes turn ominous with cracked and pieced-together vessels, and petrified, shrouded, and pierced fruits.

STILL LIFE WITH YELLOW BACKGROUND 1974 Oil on linen 24 1/8 x 19 5/8 inches Classically beautiful still lifes turn ominous with cracked and pieced-together vessels, and petrified, shrouded, and pierced fruits.

BIRD 1972-1973 Oil on paper mounted on board (diptych) 20 1/8 x 13 inches each The blue and white stripes of a flightless wooden bird suggest both a prisoner’s uniform and an Israeli flag.

DREAMING ANGEL 1973 Oil on linen 36 1/8 x 29 1/8 inches The angel is this painting, completed after the Yom Kippur War, is not so much a divine messenger of God but a blind and bound human.

CITYSCAPE WITH RAINBOW 1974 Oil on canvas 13 x 21 5/8 inches A broken and faded rainbow arcing over a destroyed city indicts God’s broken covenant with man.

BLUE MORNING (INTO THE CITY) 1973 Oil on canvas 32 x 25 5/8 inches Exhibited in Bak’s inaugural show at Aberbach Gallery in New York, this compelling painting resonated powerfully with American viewers.

THE WANDERER (TRANS-PLANT) 1968-1969 Oil on canvas 39 3/8 x 32 inches The Wandering Jew must carry his own roots with him across often inhospitable terrain in search of a place to safely rebuild.

THE WANDERER III 1996 Oil on linen 50 x 34 inches BK436 This itinerant nomad carries his shattered past and pulls his scant belongings, but the pack on his back contains the seedlings of new life.

7

THE WANDERING JEW

NEW YORK: 1974-1977 In 1974, Sam, Annalisa, and their girls—Daniela, 14, Ilana, 12, and Mikhal, 3—left Israel and moved to New York. Having already secured a contract with Aberbach Fine Art (located in the Parke-Bernet building at a prestigious art address on Madison Avenue), they moved into a furnished flat across from the Metropolitan Museum that the gallery had prepared for them; there was an art studio three blocks away. Joachim “Jean” Aberbach agreed to exhibit Bak’s work annually,2 each time accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue for which the perceptive and sensitive Austrian-born collector and art dealer often wrote the introductions. His financial assets came from several music publishing companies which he owned, representing musicians like Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles. When his gallery on Madison Avenue opened, its walls were hung with artworks by Bacon, Picasso, Hundertwasser, and the Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux, among others. Bak’s first exhibition at his new New York gallery consisted mostly of works he had created in Israel and represented his evolving visions of human figures, landscapes, and still lifes. Many of the show’s paintings had been set aside for an exhibition slated for the fall of 1973 at Fischer Fine Arts in London, but the Yom Kippur War had produced an international energy crisis and thrown the British capital into darkness, resulting in the cancellation of the exhibition. Aberbach, an acquaintance of the Fischers, travelled to Israel in 1973 after this turn of events, to meet with Bak. There, he first proposed hosting a Bak exhibition in his New York gallery. Included in the exhibition was the ironically titled Experiments in Wisdom I. Bak could not have verbally articulated at the time the meaning of this scene of terribilitá,3 which he saw as “some kind of improvised corner of a contemporary Garden of Eden.”4 It had simply burst out of his subconscious. The dark corner of Paradise expressed in Experiments in Wisdom I is an early example of Bak’s work in which the irreparably damaged souls of Holocaust survivors are visualized. On a stony bluff cast against a ghostly mountain range, mangled, tied, incurable victims are reduced to their crippled reality. A soldier with a wooden, flat, cut out face and a

gnarled arm sits between two mutilated winged figures who will never fly again. A discarded vintage radio contains the severed head of an elderly man with cables leading to his skull. These maimed beings have tasted “wisdom” (the apple of the tree of knowledge) and tossed away its core with a disdainful no thank you. A torn tree trunk fastened to a gourd for rescue does so in vain, as it will not grow again, and a pathetic nursery of fledgling potted plants, one of which sprouts a new apple, are scattered around hollow trunks.

THE FAMILY Also included in the first Aberbach exhibition was a seminal work entitled The Family, painted in 1974 and best described by the artist himself: The ‘story’ of The Family starts at the top. Near an elderly face, wearing the black glasses of a blind man, is another face depicted on a half-lost panel, cut off just at the eyes. Its Leonardoesque features allude perhaps to the inventive talents of my blind great-grandfather and his son-in-law, my grandfather. At the time I was working on this canvas, my memory was calling up whole crowds of figures from my family’s colorful history. I painted many of them, some familiar some less so. Several are pictured as broken monuments, a few as eyeless masks, and certain ones as fragments that defy recomposition. Strewn among expressionless faces are composite beings in various modes of destruction and reconstruction, some of them images derived from the broken plaster molds that my first art teacher in Vilna gave me as models. Some heads are entirely covered in a shroudlike fabric, and some are partly so. Among them we can make out several soldiers who have come directly from the Yom Kippur War. Positioned on an artist’s easel, as a painting within a painting, I placed two ladies wearing hats from the late 1930’s. In those years my parents, uncles, aunts and grandparents—my entire family—seemed blind to the fate awaiting us. A boy with a cap, possibly from the famous photo of the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, peers at us from behind this imagined canvas. The painting contains hints of primitive machinery, for me a reminder of the inventive spirit of my Grandfather Khone, a precision mechanic, whom I picture as a wounded World War I soldier. Improvised devices have been

jerry-rigged in the effort to hold together the fragments left from some cataclysm. These devices, which could serve as metaphors of every artist’s craft, in my paintings have always suggested the limits of re-creation. No artist—whether dreamer or man of practicality—can restore a lost world. Surrounded by all this struggle and disintegration, confronted with a civilization that seems to have rejected the knowledge of its past errors, on an earth whose burning horizon illuminates an endless stream of refugees, an afflicted people gathers into this huge Family portrait. They look at us inquiringly, asking to be remembered.5

METAPHORICAL PEARS, MANHATTAN FRIENDSHIPS, AND LANDSCAPES OF JEWISH EXPERIENCE From his first apartment on the Upper East Side, close to the great masters housed in the Metropolitan, Bak soon moved to more comfortable lodgings, not far away near the Guggenheim Museum. The windows of the spacious apartment opened onto Central Park, and there were two large living rooms, one of which served as a studio. Here Bak painted the works for his second exhibition at Aberbach, focused on variations on his metaphorical pears as the mythical fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. He explored these idiosyncratic images, developed them on a larger scale, and introduced a rich palette of colors. In Legend II, the pear metamorphoses into a symbol of fecundity and hope, its dry skin bursting as it gives birth to legions of smaller pears who tumble into barren and fissured earth under ominous skies. It was during this period that Bak forged a friendship with Elie Wiesel, whom he had met in Israel in 1967, shortly after the Six-Day War. In 1974, they lived across the reservoir of Central Park, Sam on the east, and Elie on the west. Their friendship blossomed, including frequent get togethers in which they began to plan a never-materialized publication of Wiesel’s unpublished poems alongside Bak’s paintings. Wiesel instead published his poems in a novel about an assassinated Jewish poet entitled The Testament (1981). The friendship with Wiesel, forged by the shared experience and pain that had brought them together, somehow never deepened. Manhattan was a tough place. Elie Wiesel became a public figure and winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 put increased demands on him. He gradually and more deeply embraced a Jewish orthodoxy rooted in his religious childhood, while Bak, an agnostic, assumed a different approach to the lessons of the Holocaust. Bak feared the loss of privacy that being a celebrity entailed, as his recent experiences in Israel had revealed the unsavory side of fame. Bak was

more drawn to the Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi, whose book If This is a Man was for him a pure and unique Holocaust testimony. Bak knew that his and Wiesel’s disparate worldviews were significant, and, like the considerable park that lay between them geographically, unlikely to be bridged. The relationship was not without its fine points, and something of Bak’s formative but evanescent friendship with Wiesel germinated in the painter’s imagination and engendered a new, powerful, and lasting outlet. Triggered by his and Wiesel’s ephemeral and uncompleted plan to publish their poems and paintings together, Bak immersed himself in a new series of works entitled Landscapes of Jewish Experience.6 He said that, “It was there [in New York] that the Jewish symbols began to enter directly into my work. The Star of David that I had to wear as a young boy in the ghetto stitched to my clothes; the Tablets of the Law, which adorned most synagogues; the extinguished candles of Sabbath.”7 In the drawing Project for the Sheen of Shabbat, these symbols are fused. The broken yellow star, traversed by rickety wooden rail tracks, supports burning candles that stand erect before the ruined tablets of the Ten Commandments (which display the letter Shin for Shadday [God]). The crumbling tablets are supported by a rock and a pole, preventing them from collapsing into a metaphorical “landscape of indifference.” A ladder, reaching into the heavens, avoids the fragmented tablet, turning away from it. During this period, the motif of the Tablets of the Law crystallized in Bak’s iconography. Often, they preside over shtetl ruins, or as in the painting City of Jews (Town of the Jews) huddle in a ruptured landscape under threatening skies, engraved with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet but obliterated by bullet holes. The broken tablet on the left is supported by pillars so that it can stand upright above the shtetl houses which shelter beneath it. The ghetto motif also manifested itself during this period. In the painting entitled The Ghetto, the asphalt of the present time is ripped open by a hole in the shape of a six-pointed star, revealing a hidden subterranean ghetto paved over by collective amnesia. In Yellow Stars, a cluster of defenseless shtetl houses, their anthropomorphic façades expressing their dread, are assembled under an immense apocalyptic space. Shadowy tallith stripes drape across the walls and a torn yellow star riddled with bullet holes marks the letter X, which in Bak’s iconography connotes death. The chimney motif appears as well, spewing billowing clouds which condense into clusters of tombstones, conjuring the terrible irony of Paul Celan’s poem “Death Fugue” in which he declares “…then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease.”8 This cemetery in the sky provides a final resting place for those who perished in the crematoria or lay tangled in mass graves, having had no burial places of their own.

In the mid-1970s in New York, Bak experienced a feeling of liberty to portray ideas which “…had already been hiding in my earlier paintings (…) hoping that no one would guess what they meant to me.”9 Physically and emotionally distant from Israel, Bak became more candid in his rendering of these symbols. He was simultaneously cautious of being pigeonholed by the art establishment as a “Holocaust Artist,” a designation he feared would sideline him from the momentum of western art history. He was painfully aware that the world considered the Holocaust a calamity confined exclusively to Jews. “From the beginning I have believed that specifically Holocaustrelated interpretation would narrow the meaning of my work. After all, I am trying to express a universal malaise about our human condition.”10 Even reflecting on the weight of the word “Holocaust” caused him a certain unease. In biblical terms, the word holocaust means a burnt sacrifice offered to God. Bak was uncomfortable with this designation because he “…felt it carried a notion of self-sacrifice that did not respect the desire for life to which millions of victims had clung desperately, though in vain. It belittled the magnitude of their tragedy.”11 Because of its inherent inadequacy, the term Holocaust is often replaced by the word Shoah, the Hebrew word for catastrophe. Bak knew that many artists in Europe and the United States who were first- and second-generation survivors refused to have their work categorized as “Holocaust Art,” as it would have impeded their aim of belonging to the current of western art. For many, this attitude ultimately proved harmful to the reception of their work, which when it was evaluated by critics purely from an aesthetic viewpoint, proved lacking. Alert to the potential pitfalls of being narrowly known for creating Holocaust art, in 1975 Bak nonetheless contributed several important works to the exhibition Jewish Experience in the Art of the 20th Century at the Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, which was very well received and included work by Ben Shahn, Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Chaïm Soutine, Max Weber, and Leonard Baskin. He quickly made inroads into the American art world, treasured his life in Manhattan, and was full of creative energy. His sense of freedom in the intellectual and artistic climate of New York nourished him. Every day included many hours in his studio immersed in painting, creating works of great power. As happy as he was, Annalisa disliked the city and deeply missed her life in Israel. She was more afflicted by the grimmer realities of Manhattan—its size, social inequalities, drug scene, and the surging criminality of the mid-1970s, which cast a shadow of peril on the family. Ironically, she had felt safer in beleaguered Israel. There was more to her malaise. Annalisa was herself a highly talented person, gifted in her own world of ceramic sculpture, which bore much affinity with the

spirit of Giorgio Morandi. It was not easy to be a struggling artist who longed for recognition of her own but was only seen as the wife of a successful artist. The marriage was beginning to crumble.12

ROLF KALLENBACH Despite the overwhelming success in the seventies of established genres in art (Abstraction, Pop-Art, Op-Art, and Constructivism) some greatly talented artists did not neatly fit in. Those who were good enough and offered originality or historic relevance retained their devoted admirers even though they could not be easily categorized. One such person was the German filmmaker Peter Schamoni, then at work on two documentaries on Max Ernst and Friedensreich Hundertwasser. In 1971, Schamoni visited Israel, fell in love with and acquired Bak’s work, and began to ponder the idea of a film on him. As numerous engagements prevented him from doing so, he introduced Bak’s art to another filmmaker, his friend Rolf Kallenbach. Kallenbach immediately fell under the spell of Bak’s work, whose imagery addressed his very soul as a German grappling with the past. He too had lost his father, a documentary filmmaker of the Reich’s army who was killed in World War II, in one of the bloodiest battles of the eastern front. Kallenbach approached Bak with deep admiration and awe and the feeling that he needed to bring this work to the attention of the West German public. Bak gave him permission to produce a documentary on his life and work for German television but by the time Kallenbach was ready to begin, Bak was in New York. Insel Films of Munich, which produced the film for channel ZDF,13 sent Kallenbach, his wife, and several crew members to New York for more than a week of filming. They immersed themselves in the Bak family’s life, setting up a network of rails over carpets and parquets that held enormous 35mm cameras, sizable projectors, boxes of various dimensions, and dangerous coils of cables. By the time they cleaned up their invasion of equipment and departed, Annalisa was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. So, Bak wryly adds, was the cat. Repression of recent history and denial of the barbarous acts of the Holocaust were prevalent in Germany, induced at the time by holdouts of the Nazi generation. Attempts to address these crimes were often shunned. Members of the younger generation began to question the activities of their parents in the war, but they were met with repudiation. A far-left West German militant group called the Red Army Faction (RAF), led by journalist Ulrike Meinhof and bohemian Andreas Baader, instigated a generational uprising through subversive activities and acts of terrorism within West Germany. Threatened by their militancy and hesitant to accept the

premise that Germany should answer for its actions during World War II, citizens wrote them off as “communists” and “terrorists” and were relieved when they were behind bars and could be forgotten. It would be another ten years, when the film Shoah (1985) by Claude Lanzmann was serialized on German television, before the country began to acknowledge the impact of its atrocities. With its somewhat circumspect and quite romantic sounding title, the film about Bak’s life and art called Autumn of the world—a painter from Israel 14 was broadcast on primetime West German television in 1977, in the era between the insurrectionary actions of the RAF and the widespread dissemination of Lanzmann’s Shoah. For Bak, too, this was still a delicate and fraught time. Germany was inextricably linked with his deepest anguish, but Kallenbach’s efforts at rapprochement between Bak and the German public had engendered in Bak a feeling of trust. Kallenbach’s passionate engagement helped to bridge the gap between Germany’s repression of the memory of the past and Bak’s reluctance to engage with the nation. Bak then collaborated with Kallenbach on a book entitled Denkmäler unserer Träume (Monuments of Our Dreams)15— an equally romantically titled book—in which a selection of Bak’s oeuvre was published for a European readership. The impact of Kallenbach’s film on Bak’s career was immediate; numerous art institutions and galleries in West Germany were eager to show his work. Kallenbach had become active as an art dealer himself, opening Rolf Kallenbach Art Management in Munich16 and taking an active role as intermediary between Bak and the art scene in Germany. Bak had conflicting feelings about this arrangement, which demanded from him a substantial effort to overcome a keen sense of unease. As time has passed, personal friendships with German individuals of his generation, who despite his hesitating stance have warmly embraced him, greatly contributed to his sense of comfort and trust.

A MOTIF OF MELENCOLIA Bak’s sojourns in Germany served to reinvigorate his childhood fascination with Albrecht Dürer, first discovered during his time in the Landsberg DP camp. He explained that, “My desire to focus on Dürer and exploit his art came to me from an utterly non artistic impulse, an old and unadmitted desire for symbolic ‘revenge’. I wanted to experience the sheer pleasure of looting something that the Germans treasured as being thoroughly German.”17 Conjuring up specifically the image of the 1514 copper engraving Melencolia I, which he had imbibed as a child, Bak created the drawing The Melancholia of Old Age, after Dürer.

The angel is rendered in a spiteful mood. The facial features in Melancholia of Old Age fuse with Dürer’s portrait of his mother, also from 1514 (the year of her death), in which he portrays her with a crass and pitiless realism. Bak’s visual interpretation of this physiognomic fusion of Dürer’s mother and Melencolia I appears as a vengeful counterpart to the nasty Jewish caricatures that appeared in Julius Streicher’s Nazi periodical “Der Stürmer.” The Melancholia of Old Age was included in an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Bak organized by Kallenbach that travelled through West German museums, then through the mediation of Kallenbach was eventually purchased by the Albrecht Dürer House.18 Bak’s skepticism towards Germany began to subside into a more objective perspective and he wryly stated that in hindsight, “enacted in the sphere of creative art, the harmlessness of this deed makes me smile.”19 He had meanwhile moved on to a state of philosophical reflection in which the Melencolia motif would transcend the original German prototype to become an ironical counterpart. The first time Bak could bring himself to attend a museum exhibition of his in Germany was in 1978 at the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg.20 In 1977, there had been exhibitions of his work in Esslingen and Heidelberg21 but he had been psychologically unable to go. In Nuremberg on the eve of the opening of the exhibition, which would be introduced by a showing of Autumn of the world—a painter from Israel, he was overcome with mounting emotion. He had chosen to walk alone from his hotel to the venue as a pilgrimage in commemoration of the city’s past crimes. Here the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws had been adopted in 1935 at a meeting of the Reichstag held during the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party, after which subsequent Wagnerian Nazi rallies stoked the poisonous nationalistic and racial hatred of the Jews. Here the post-war Nazi trials took place in which German atrocities against Jews were starkly, albeit partially, revealed. Bak’s eyes were wet with tears when he arrived at the venue, where he politely assured his hosts that he was suffering from allergies. They were grateful to him for exhibiting his work in their museum and treated him with deference. When on the following day Bak returned to the exhibition he observed a guided tour of German school children. The teacher’s sensitive interpretation of his paintings and the unexpectedly eager reaction of the children moved him and changed his attitude towards exhibiting his works in Germany. He realized the importance of showing his work to a generation of German youth with little knowledge of what had occurred during what their parents euphemistically called “the wartime,” that he might give voice to the silence about the German genocide of the Jews. The catalogue’s introduction by the art historian Ernest Landau deftly codified the message of Bak’s paintings to German viewers and readers. Overcome by his encounter with the

paintings, Landau conveyed simultaneously his shock in first seeing the paintings with his understanding of the assuaging and cathartic effect that a presentation of such boundless horror in its full magnitude can have. He describes Bak’s paintings as metaphors of warning, and thereby messages of hope.22 Avoiding the central issue of the German genocide of the Jews—it was still too early to be so forthright—he described Bak as a humanist who does not lead people to the seductive message that the world is idyllic. He characterized him as a “true prophet” holding a mirror to the world as it really is and as he had witnessed it as a child.23 Through his circumlocutory writing style, the impact of the paintings was meant to seep into the consciousness of the viewers by a process of osmosis. Bak contributed to the introduction of the catalogue by offering a glance into his life as a child survivor of the Holocaust and the way he proceeded to deal with it, matching with his words the overall tone of moderato (moderation). He wrote, “I have learned to look to the inside, without locking myself out from the outer world, and I continue to dedicate my entire time to art which in my view is the best path towards rescuing human individuality.”24 Twenty solo exhibitions travelled West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, to cities and towns such as Munich, Düsseldorf, Esslingen, Bonn, Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, and Braunschweig, each with its own history of persecution of Jews—from blood libels of the Middle Ages, to expulsions and pogroms throughout the centuries, to the culminating genocide of the Jews under the Third Reich. The roles and identities of the perpetrators were discretely left to the guides and the sensitivity of the viewers.

FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH In 1971, before he moved to New York and was still living in Israel, his Boston-based gallerist Bernie Pucker visited Bak’s home in Savyon. Pucker had by then already been successfully exhibiting Bak’s work in Boston for four years. The two men enjoyed meeting each other and learning about their individual worlds but it was not until an exhibition in 1975 at the then Pucker Safrai Gallery in Boston, after Bak had moved to New York, that the portentous friendship between Sam, Bernie, and his wife Sue was cemented. When the Puckers came to Manhattan, they often stayed with the Baks. In 1976, Pucker and Aberbach cooperated in curating an exhibition of work by Bak for the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University entitled Bak: Works of the Last Decade.25 This was followed by an exhibition of drawings and prints in Pittsburgh,26 and numerous exhibitions across the United States through which his work began to achieve acclaim in his new country. In 1977, Bak began to create bronze sculptures (of which In Flight is an

example) to further capture artifacts of a broken world that once had been whole. Other bronzes capture the Kiddush cup, bottles, the teacup, and the pear, consolidated back to a haptic materiality, representing tactile monuments of the cataclysm.

A PAINFUL TURN AND A THEATRICAL INTERLUDE Bak’s creative life in America was disrupted by a distressing, though not completely unforeseen, turn of events. After two years living in New York, Annalisa declared that she could no longer endure life in Manhattan. Determined to settle her life once and for all she took their three girls and returned to Israel to live in their house in Savyon, suggesting that if Bak wished to work in New York but remain in contact with his children and be part of the family, he would have to commute between the two. Sam could not leave the United States—it was too important to his career—but neither could he give up being a father, or Aba, to his daughters. He complied with the plan, but under such stressful circumstances it was hard to focus on his creative work. An interlude during his first stay in Israel ignited his artistic passion for the stage and theater design when he collaborated with his friend, the composer Noam Sheriff. To celebrate the centenary of the first performance, in Bucharest in 1878, of the renowned Yiddish and Hebrew playwright Avram Goldfaden’s play The Witch, Yossi Yzraely, then the head of Tel Aviv University’s Drama Department, was preparing to stage it in a new form at the Godik Theater. He was delighted to engage Bak, who designed enthralling settings and costumes for the play, an operetta originally entitled Di Kisherfmachern (The Sorceress). It is a tale of evil in which a malevolent stepmother persecutes her guileless stepdaughter, Mirele, with the help of a wicked witch who perpetrates her malicious deeds through magic. In one of his stage design drawings, the beams of the witch’s house are engirded by magical symbols, among them (ironically) the menorah, the Magen David, the magic hand, and Shabbat candles (one of which ominously arises from a chimney). The intrinsic message of the musical is that the sorceress can only carry out her evil plans because she leads the gullible people to believe in her supernatural powers. The play was characterized by dynamism and constant flux, with the actors moving about and up and down between platforms and ladders, darkness and light. Through his sets, lighting, and costumes, Bak conveyed the interaction between darkness and light, the backward past and enlightened present, maliciousness and joy, and finally expressed redemption when good prevailed over evil. He felt at home in the ambience of this famous Jewish musical, full of magical moments, sudden changes of space, and a surrealistic atmosphere.

In 1979, he again worked with Yzraely on an ambitious production of the play The King of Morocco to be staged at the Habima, the national theater of Israel. Set in an imaginary village of Jews in North Africa, a mysterious troubadour inspires its inhabitants to fly to the promised land. The show was a success, and Bak’s work received an ovation, but by the time of the muchdelayed opening Bak had begun to drift away from the theater. Balancing stage work with his career as a painter was no easy task, though Picasso and Chagall had occasionally managed to do it quite well, and Bak realized that he had outgrown any desire to pursue stage design professionally. It is not that he viewed it as an inferior form of art, but he conceded that his artistic career imposed a complete demand on his time and energy. To carry on this arduous path, he had to be available to participate in the organization of exhibitions, interact with dealers, oversee installations, be involved with the production of exhibition catalogues, and manage all the other challenges an artist of his caliber must endure alongside his creative work. Commuting between Israel and New York was unbearably strenuous and could not be sustained. But Israel was too far and presented too many obstacles to the smooth execution of his daily chores; just to ship paintings from a country immersed in a “bureaucratic quagmire”27would have been an untenable nightmare. After a tentative period that lasted over a year, and an accumulation of travel fatigue and deplorable jet lag, he gave up this impossible idea of commuting, liquidated his residence in New York, and returned to Israel.

PARIS 1980-1984 In 1980, Bak decided to move to Paris, a compromise suggested by Rolf Kallenbach who originally suggested Bak move to Munich to be closer to him. Instead, Bak took up residence in a new studio at rue des Plantes. Annalisa was also willing to come to Paris with 10-year-old Mikhal, fondly called Lalli by the family. In 1981, their two elder daughters joined them to pursue their studies. In Paris, Bak was able to fulfil the imperative need of earning a livelihood, submit to the responsibilities imposed by his career, and be with his family. The ironic title of the painting Instant Paris is a summation of his situation at the time; the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and prototypical Parisian buildings are presented in a neo-cubist style reflective of earlier times in the art metropole but stand on his metaphorical stone bridge of transition over the flowing waters of uncertainty. Everything is made of a child’s building blocks, like pieces in a strange game whose conclusion is impossible to foretell. Will it hold on, or will it collapse?

RESUMING MELENCOLIA Bak’s geographic proximity to Germany seems to have revived his interest in the Melencolia motif. His painting entitled After Dürer (Melencolia) was the first of a series in which he used iconographic quotation as an artistic device, imbuing an iconic work with new meaning steeped in ironic twists. Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I is generally interpreted in several ways: as an allegory of melancholy (one of the four temperaments defined by Hippocrates), as a metaphor for the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and as a representation of the tortured artist, wedged between two generations, in a gloomy state of creative paralysis. In Dürer’s engraving, a winged female figure in long dress ponderously rests her wreathed head in her hand. Melencolia’s expression and posture convey despair, and her eyes stare bleakly into the distance. She holds a compass in her right hand but seems disengaged with the tool, just as she does not notice the various objects around her, implements of a craftsman’s workshop and objects related to alchemy, geometry (specifically the sphere and truncated trapezohedron), and a hairless dog lies asleep at her feet. A putto is perched on a millstone. A ladder leans against the building behind her. On the wall appear a magic square, a bell, an hourglass, and a scale. In the background the sea is visible, lit by the rays of what is perhaps a comet. A fully arched rainbow forms a prominent curve over the scene above which a bat-like creature carries the inscription “Melencolia I.” Over four hundred years separate Dürer’s original and Bak’s interpretation. Between them lies the great catastrophe of the Jewish people. In After Dürer (Melencolia), in the words of Erik Gustavson and Marin Sullivan, Dürer’s “pre-action Melancholy” is turned into Bak’s “post-action Melancholy.”28 The scene gives testimony to how the scientific and logical order of Renaissance enlightenment paved the road to genocide. Like Dürer’s Melencolia I, Bak’s Melencolia sits transfixed in time between two worlds. She is a refugee from a human cataclysm with her belongings strewn around her, not knowing where fate will take her. She is the personification of Sam’s Aunt Yetta and his mother, Mitsia, fused into one. On her head she wears a white headband, her tousled hair cascading over her forehead (no time for personal care), her eyes downcast. She is clothed in a long, elegant, silken skirt with a red cloak, reminiscent of the dresses Yetta would find on the black-market clothing trade, when she had worked in Łódz to earn their keep. Bak’s Melencolia has relieved her feet of the elegant but painful high-heeled shoes, and the compass she holds in her lap is rusty. Keys that in Dürer’s figure hang on her belt lie scattered on the rocky ground. The same white sphere

rests at her feet, but in lieu of Dürer’s pen and inkwell, painter’s utensils lie scattered around. A red velvet bundle of belongings slumps next to the figure and an empty suitcase sinks into a rocky cavern on her left, next to a bag of deep blue velvet. The millstone is covered with a cloth (perhaps a shred of Bak’s boyhood memories), Dürer’s magic square on the wall is devoid of numbers, the scale is damaged, the sundial has become a clock with three cyphers, attached to a chime. Bak’s ladder, which leads beyond the picture plane, is damaged, with a broken rung. The rainbow is fragmented, symbolizing God’s broken promise to His people. A rope snakes over the crevassed rocks from a green shrub in the foreground (perhaps leaves from Ponary) into a fathomless grave on the left. Given that the people who perished in the Holocaust had no graves, is this a metaphor for a tomb waiting for the internment of an era? In the distance a rugged landscape stretches out to sea, an ominous pair of smoke columns forming a dark cloud. In Bak’s Melencolia, the silent struggle towards human rationality, science, and logic has turned into a state of utter hopelessness.

RENEWING NUREMBERG29 In 1989, a significant exhibition entitled Bak and Dürer took place at the Dürer House in Nuremberg, for which Bak painted the work The Four Evangelists (later acquired by the museum). As with works on the theme of Melencolia, this diptych is a product of Bak’s engagement with the German psyche. It is based on a painting by Dürer of the same name from 1526 which itself was an iconographical variant from traditional German medieval altarpieces in which the four Evangelists, the authors of the gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—appear in the four corners of the panels. Dürer depicted only two Evangelists (Matthew and John) and added the figures of the Apostle Peter and Paul (not an Apostle, he had, according to the New Testament, only known Jesus through visions, but he had founded the Christian church). Dürer’s four figures represented Renaissance humanist thought, depicting the four temperaments as characterized by Hippocrates. Through an irony of history, and contrary to the wishes of Dürer, the panels were removed from Protestant Nuremberg in 1627 and transferred to Roman Catholic Munich by the decree of the Holy Roman Emperor of Bavaria, Maximilian I, who had the Lutheran verses at the bottom of the panels sawed off. Three hundred years later, in 1922, the inscriptions were reaffixed to the panels, but they remained in Munich, where Bak saw them in the Alte Pinakothek during his sojourn in the Landsberg DP camp. Bak’s four Apostles are remarkable because they do not stand on the ground on sturdy feet, as they do in the Dürer painting; instead, they float. Saint Peter on the left with his attribute, the key, is an old and tired embodiment of the “phlegmatic” temperament. In front of him is John, the

“sanguine” evangelist, full of strength, hope, and vitality. (Dürer believed that John’s gospel was the essence of the New Testament). On the right-hand panel of Bak’s diptych, the facial features of Mark are a picture within a picture. He is the second Evangelist, known to have written the first gospel upon which the other gospels are based. Bak represents him as detached from the other figures. In front of him, the bottom part of his figure crumbling into pieces of floating stone, stands the “melancholic” and “choleric” Paul, who was often described this way in the New Testament. His face is shown in profile and his one eye gleams fanatically. He is regarded as the founder of Christianity, on whose teachings the Reformation based its chief doctrine, and through him Dürer wanted to show his affinity with the principles of Martin Luther. Bak transformed the figure of Paul in the aftermath not of the upheaval of the Reformation but the cataclysm of the Shoah. Though the Dürer House acquired Bak’s panels to hang in the stead of the original work they do not own, his Four Evangelists carry a very different message. Bak admits that, “They are false prophets, as I experience all evangelists of all times and all religions. They are real or imaginary persons who carry a message that satisfies our need to believe in a divine entity.”30 Today, his panels are relegated to the storeroom as an enormous digital reproduction of Dürer’s original panel of the Four Apostles now hangs in the museum.31

THE AUGSBURG PROJECT One project that brought Bak to Germany while he was living in Paris took a less auspicious turn. The city of Augsburg, about 30 miles west of Munich, possesses a beautiful synagogue that had been spared the Nazi’s infamous destruction of Jewish places of prayer because it was close to the edifice of an important bank. Only a massive organ in one of its upper niches was dismantled and transferred to a church in town. In 1980, Bak was asked by the Jewish community of Augsburg to create a bronze sculpture to fill the emptied space of the niche. A contract was signed based on a drawing and a three-dimensional model. When the plaster cast was ready for the foundry, Bak was notified by the new, ultra-orthodox heads of the Augsburg community that they would not honor the former director’s commitment. They simply voided an agreement that did not suit their world view. Bak took a hammer and shattered the model.

UNFORESEEN OBSTACLES IN PARIS Bak planned to live and work in Paris, but gradually discovered that insurmountable obstacles imposed by custom laws in France made it impossible for him to do his international business

from there. Prior to 1993, when the creation of the European Union annulled these cumbersome custom controls, shipping a painting from Paris required procuring consent from a special commission of experts. The painting had to be professionally evaluated before the committee would decide if it was of national value. In the face of this onerous bureaucracy, many active artists who made their living by selling their work abroad left France. Bak realized that he needed to do so as well. He would have to uproot himself once again. In 1984, he moved with Annalisa and Lalli to Switzerland and settled in French-speaking Lausanne, where his youngest daughter, who had studied in a bilingual school in Paris, could smoothly continue her lessons. For two years in Lausanne Annalisa was often absent, regularly travelling to spend time and be near friends in Israel or with her older daughters in Paris. Switzerland, she said, was her coffin. She had transitioned from ceramics to photography and undertaken a project of portraits of Israeli artists that would eventually become a book.32 In 1986, she returned alone and at last to Israel, leaving Bak and sixteen-year-old Mikhal. Bak was in the throes of a highly creative period, simultaneously beset by the pressures of painting and arranging exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. Annalisa’s departure created an administrative problem when the tax authorities inquired about a property that she had purchased in Switzerland, of which Bak was totally unaware. He had to file for a legal separation and finally for a divorce. Annalisa rejected this final step, trying to create as many obstacles as possible. The process of the divorce, in Bak’s laconic language was “not so simple”33 and quite lengthy, and its aftermath created in both a painful sense of failure and loss. Thankfully, their three daughters were sufficiently adult to understand and accept their parent’s predicament. Sam, much questioning himself, began to see the dean of the Swiss psychoanalysts, Marcel Roch, who helped him to prolong the ongoing journey through life’s vicissitudes, an analytic exploration he began in Israel, continued in Paris, and seemed to terminate in Lausanne, where his lungs began inhaling life’s gifts.

A ROSE EMERGES FROM THE THORNS After many years of marriage and raising children, Bak was a bachelor, fully devoted to his work. He was not alone for long. A mutual friend introduced him to Josée Karlen and it did not take them long to discover the many affinities they shared: art, jazz, books, movies, theater. They were genuine soulmates, attracted to each other both physically as well as mentally. Josée lived alone in a small and tastefully designed flat and directed an ergo-therapy unit in a psychiatric institution close to Vevey, a small town on Lake Geneva not far from Lausanne which

garnered fleeting world fame when Charlie Chaplin settled there after his dramatic departure from America. Josée had attended a four-year school for applied arts, studied psychology and social work, and was a passionate scuba diver. Before long, Josée moved in to share the life of Bak and his teenage daughter, with whom she developed an affectionate relationship. Mikhal, upon finishing high school in Lausanne, decided to continue her studies in Paris, just as her older sisters had done. The new couple had the world to themselves. The painting A Rose is a Rose bears witness to the happiness Bak had found. It was about that time, when Kallenbach was exhibiting Bak’s work at Art Basel, that the artist was contacted by Parisian art dealer, Jacques Carpentier. Knowing that Bak had no dealer in France, he proposed an agreement for an ongoing collaboration. Carpentier, who was Bak’s age and Jewish, believed Bak’s art was underrated and destined to be much better valued, a development he maintained he could shepherd. Bak’s first show in the Galerie Carpentier opened in 1988 and was accompanied by a beautiful catalogue with an excellent introduction by Alain Bosquet,34 a well-known poet, writer, and biographer. The commercial success of the show reassured Bak of his material future, since his recent divorce had been very costly. Carpentier outlined many ambitious plans and his connections and means to accomplish them. A search for more adequate and comfortable lodgings than the old villa in north Lausanne, where he lived with Josée, brought them to an ample apartment in Vevey, much closer to Josée’s hospital, and with space for a new studio. His life finally settled in the peaceful atmosphere that he had sought for so long. The couple had many friends whom they loved to entertain in their pleasant abode. His art flourished. A fax machine allowed him to intensify contact with Bernie Pucker in Boston and continue a mutual collaboration that produced regular exhibitions both at the Pucker Gallery and at institutions across the world.

ARTISTIC IMPULSES IN SWITZERLAND A visit in 1991 to the memorable retrospective exhibition of the great sculptor and satirist, Jean Tinguely, who had died that year, confirmed for Bak that he was totally in sync with the European creative zeitgeist. Tinguely, with his brilliantly ludicrous, Dada-esque, kinetic “machines” (some of them constructed for self-detonation) lampooned how megalomaniacal technological aspirations of the time led nowhere. After his visit to the exhibition, Bak paid tribute to him in his painting Après la Visite chez Jean (After the Visit to Jean’s House). Dominated by the cathedral of Fribourg on the horizon, the foreground depicts a world in which the wheels have come off and lie next to a bridge that leads over a running stream and back to a barren

shtetl scene. On the occasion of his exhibition in Zurich in 1992,35 which was well received by the Jewish press but studiously ignored by official Swiss newspapers such as the NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung), Bak met and befriended the Jewish film producer Erwin Leiser. Leiser was born in Berlin and at the age of 15 had fled from the Nazis to Norway. Documentaries of his such as Mein Kampf, Germany Awake, Murder by Signature, Die Feuerprobe (The Acid Test) and Nazi Cinema unveiled and categorized Nazi atrocities. He was held in high esteem by the Jewish community, but the subject of the Nazi era in Switzerland was still taboo and the country was still in deep denial about the clandestine role it had played. At the time the Swiss refused to acknowledge revelations about Swiss bank accounts belonging to Jews who had perished in the Holocaust, let alone initiate any reparations.

GERMANY GRAPPLES WITH THE PAST November 9, 1989 saw the fall of the wall between East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR), which had been under Russian hegemony, and West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany). The date coincided with the commemoration of Kristallnacht, the German pogrom which took place on November 9, 1938. In the ensuing years in Germany, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall threatened to eclipse commemoration of Kristallnacht, reinforcing the German drive to suppress the memory of the Holocaust. In the late 1980s, before the fall of the wall, the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Dispute), also known as Schuldverlagerung (Deflection of Guilt), had raged between conservative and leftist academics and intellectuals about how best to integrate the truths about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust into German historiography and identity.36 German historian Ernst Nolte sought to spin the narrative of German history according to his and his colleagues’ conservative perspective that the Holocaust was not unique in world history and that consequently Germans should be absolved from any burden of guilt regarding the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. Were there not genocides in all countries throughout history? Were not more people murdered in Stalinist Russia than Jews under German rule? This viewpoint, named the Relativierung (Relativization) of German history, was contradicted by German liberal historians, led by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who passionately countered what he described as the “revisionism” of conservative Germans. Though the liberal faction secured victory in the debate, it required a raging battle among German intellectuals fought out in prominent newspaper feuilletons and necessitated constant vigilance going forward.

In the continuing conversation about Germany’s willingness and ability to come to terms with its past, Bak’s art has played an important role. In 1993, he was approached by the director of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Georg Heuberger, with the request to hold a major exhibition of his work. It would be the museum’s first exhibition of a contemporary Jewish artist, and was co-curated by Ljuba Berankova and Eva Atlan, who at the time and with the support of the artist, wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Bak’s life and work. She had been introduced to Bak by Ida Bubis, wife of the great Ignatz Bubis, then chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. He was a towering figure within the Jewish community of post-war Germany, involved in high profile cases of German antisemitism. The exhibit featured large canvases from Bak’s Landscapes of Jewish Experience series37 and watercolors from his childhood in the Landsberg DP camp. In her scholarly text for the catalogue,38 Atlan interpreted Bak’s work for a specifically German public.

A RETROSPECTIVE IN BAD FRANKENHAUSEN One of Bak’s most notable exhibitions took place in 1998, in the former East Germany, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel. It was initiated by the liberal art historian Gerd Lindner, director of the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen, a town situated in the region of Thuringia, home of the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. The retrospective was close to Lindner’s heart but he was careful with the wording of his preface to the catalogue, in which he chose to dwell on the stylistic side of Bak’s paintings and not address their political implication. In particular, he addressed the discrepancy between content and form, noting how the theme of destruction Bak expresses contrasts with the aesthetic perfection with which it is expressed.39 Bak took this exhibition in the former GDR very seriously, once again contributing an introduction to the catalogue and in it addressing the ideological debates in Germany at the time.40 The most powerful contribution to the Bad Frankenhausen exhibition catalogue, written in English by Lawrence L. Langer and translated to German, compared Bak’s visual language with the poetry of Nelly Sachs, written in German and quite well known to the public. Langer quoted her poem, “We, the Rescued,”41 relating it to Bak’s art in the way that life and death are no longer opposites or alternatives but coexist with a painful intimacy that alters our way of viewing the self in its relation to history.42 Langer connected Nelly Sachs’ cry, “My metaphors are my Wounds,”43 directly to Bak’s pictorial language. He insightfully sums up his essay by saying that, “The Union between the memory of atrocity and the search for form to represent it is the paradoxical subject of his work.”44

THEN, ONE DAY, A THUNDERBOLT! It was delivered from Paris by a seemingly benign ring of the phone, which in one go changed the entire picture of Bak’s future. Jacques Carpentier was dead. He had succumbed to an aneurism that within a couple of hours ended his life. Carpentier’s gallery was a typical one-man business, and it was clear that with his demise all the wonderful plans for the forthcoming years were abruptly and irrevocably null and void. Josée and Sam assessed the sudden change in their situation. The regular payments from Paris stopped, but not the prosaic demands of daily life. Josée was 51, Sam 59. What was it that kept them in Switzerland? Why not move to America, start something new together? Sam had loved living in Manhattan and Josée knew the country from a former stay. She was drained after years of work with mentally challenged patients and ready for an early retirement. Above all, she was keen to trade her career for a support role in Bak’s creativity and art. After years of fruitful collaboration, the relationship with Kallenbach seemed to be on a natural decline as the Kallenbachs were more and more enjoying leisure time cruising the world. Bak’s exhibitions in Switzerland, Zurich, Montreux, and Fribourg were important, but did not produce the network and meaning that Bernie Pucker succeeded in giving them in the United States. Pucker was the ideal advocate, with his exceptional understanding of Bak’s art, his esteem for his person, and his dedication to the educational value of his paintings. Switzerland had witnessed in Bak a fruitful phase in his creativity and while there he exhibited extensively and became more widely known.45 There he met Josée, experienced the utter joy of the birth of his first grandson, Raphael, and made notable inroads into Germany and its burdens of the past. But aside from its geographical proximity to his daughters in Paris and Josée’s mother in Chateau d’Œx, Switzerland had little to hold them anymore. Bak began getting organized, contacting Pucker and applying for a Green Card. His old paintings and several belongings, scattered between Savyon, Paris, and Rome, were reunited in Vevey then packed to be transported to the States. To satisfy the American authorities, Sam and Josée had to be legally married, so in 1992 they were wed in the townhouse in Vevey in the presence of family—Daniela, Ilana, and Mikhal—and friends such as Bernie and Sue Pucker. Bernie was Sam’s best man. That same year, the Baks travelled to Boston and found a splendid house in Weston, Massachusetts (about 15 miles west of the city) which boasted abundant space, a light-filled studio, and tranquil grounds.

In July 1993, Sam and Josée took possession of their home in Weston. His belongings, furniture, books, and paintings followed in a huge container. Was it their last station? After decades as his own version of the Wandering Jew, Bak carried with him an angst about uprootedness. Paintings like Home of the Wandering Jew I, from 1991, capture a life in shards, a shtetl house built on rock floating above the detritus of chance, ambivalent chimneys billowing into the night sky, a barren tree helplessly gripping the air, a landscape of uncertainty. At the time of the writing of this book, after almost 30 years in which the couple has never ceased to marvel at their extraordinary luck in their beloved nest, the answer to whether Weston is the last stop for this wandering Jew remains almost certain. Sheltered by Josée, and under the caring wings of Bernie and Sue Pucker, Bak landed upon a new threshold in his creative life in which his groundbreaking work was to continue.

EXPERIMENTS IN WISDOM I 1974 Oil on canvas 63 x 78 3/4 inches Bak described this haunting painting, exhibited at Aberbach Gallery in 1974, as “some kind of improvised corner of a contemporary Garden of Eden.”

THE FAMILY 1974 Oil on canvas 63 x 78 3/4 inches Bak wrote of this painting: “Surrounded by all this struggle and disintegration, confronted with a civilization that seems to have rejected the knowledge of its past errors, on an earth whose burning horizon illuminates an endless stream of refugees, an afflicted people gathers into this huge Family portrait. They look at us inquiringly, asking to be remembered.”

LEGEND II 1975 Oil on canvas 49 5/8 x 37 3/8 inches Bak’s second exhibition at Aberbach featured paintings of pears, and here the symbol of fertility pours forth a bounty of smaller fruits.

PROJECT FOR THE SHEEN OF SHABBAT 1989 Mixed media on paper 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 inches Bak reimagines and reexamines iconic Jewish symbols such as the Star of David and the Shabbat candles.

CITY OF JEWS (TOWN OF THE JEWS) 1977 Oil on canvas 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches Bak was inspired by a never-completed collaboration with Elie Wiesel to explore symbols of Jewish history such as the Tablets of the Law

THE GHETTO 1976 Oil on canvas 48 1/8 x 52 inches In this iconic painting, the sidewalk is carved in the shape of a six-pointed star, revealing a subterranean ghetto underneath.

SMOKE 1976 Charcoal and heightening on paper 12 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches Bak visualized a stanza from “Death Fugue” by Paul Celan declaring “…then you’ll have a grave in the clouds / there you’ll lie at ease.”

YELLOW STARS 1975 Oil paint and pastel on paper 19 1/2 x 25 3/8 inches Anthropomorphic shtetl houses are shrouded in prison stripes and yellow stars. Their frightened eye-like windows seem to look right at the viewer.

THE MELANCHOLIA OF OLD AGE (AFTER DÜRER) 1977 Crayon and pastel on paper 25 5/8 x 19 5/8 inches While visiting Germany, Bak awakened his childhood interest in Albrecht Dürer, taking pleasure in “looting” something German (Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia I) for his own creative purposes.

IN FLIGHT (BIRD I) 1978 Bronze 15 3/4 x 21 5/8 x 2 3/4 inches In the late 1970s Bak experimented with bronze sculptures using some of his favorite subjects, from birds to still lifes.

THE WITCH STAGE DESIGN IX 1978 Gouache on brown paper 12 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches STAGE DESIGN V 1978 Gouache and pastel on brown paper 12 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches In 1978, Bak was invited by Yossi Yzraely, head of Tel Aviv University’s Drama Department, to do the design for a production of Avram Goldfaden’s play The Witch.

THE KING OF MOROCCO STAGE DESIGN XIX 1980 Charcoal, pastel, and pencil on paper 12 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches STAGE DESIGN XVII 1980 Charcoal and pastel on grey-green paper 19 x 24 3/4 inches Bak worked with Yzraely again in 1979 on the design for a production of The King of Morocco.

INSTANT PARIS 1979 Oil on canvas 32 x 39 3/8 inches Bak returned briefly to Paris in the early 1980s; the construction of these buildings from child’s blocks speaks to the tenuous nature of this time.

AFTER DÜRER (MELENCOLIA) 1980 Oil on canvas 63 3/4 x 51 1/8 inches The Renaissance tools of scientific inquiry that populate Dürer’s original engraving become, in Bak’s rendition, the detritus of the post-Holocaust era.

THE FOUR EVANGELISTS 1989 Oil on canvas (diptych) 57 1/2 x 35 1/8 inches each The Dürer House acquired Bak’s Four Evangelists to hang in the stead of Durer’s original work, which was moved to Munich in the 1600s.

AUGSBURG PROJECT 1980 Pencil and oil paintmon purple paper 9 1/2 x 12 5/8 inches Plans for Bak to create a bronze for a church niche in Augsburg, Germany were suddenly canceled by a new church leader.

ENCOUNTER (BREAKING UP) 1985 Oil on linen 32 x 25 5/8 inches In 1986, Bak and his wife Annalisa filed for a legal separation, which he explores in this painting with the subtitle Breaking Up.

A ROSE IS A ROSE 1985 Oil on canvas 36 1/4 x 25 5/8 inches This lovely painting of roses corresponds with Bak’s introduction to Josée Karlen, whom he would later marry.

STILL LIFE WITH STILL LIFE 1985 Oil on canvas 36 1/4 x 25 5/8 inches Bak exhibited this luminous still life in Boston in 1986. It has been featured in several books on the artist.

APRÈS LA VISITE CHEZ JEAN 1991 Oil on paper 19 5/8 x 25 5/8 inches Bak pays homage to Jean Tinguely’s kinetic machines, which he viewed at Tinguely’s retrospective in Frébourg (whose city’s landmarks appear in this work).

ON THE MOVE 1988 Oil on linen 25 5/8 x 39 3/8 inches Bak packed his life and his paintings for what would turn out to be his final move, to a bucolic suburb outside Boston.

HOME OF THE WANDERING JEW I 1991 Oil on linen 18 1/8 x 21 5/8 inches BK192 Bak never fully relinquished his identification with the Wandering Jew and the anxiousness of the uprooted.

8

A NEW VOLUME

“I believe that what has happened to me in the last thirty years, here, in this new hemisphere, is partly familiar and partly unknown and scary. More than a new chapter in my life, it feels like a new volume.”1

THE NEW WORLD Sam and Josée settled happily into their new home, a converted single-family house built over one hundred years ago as an appendix to a large farm originally owned by a Boston Brahmin (19th century elite) family and later brilliantly restructured and transformed by a contemporary architect. Expansive spaces for living, entertaining, working, and storing artwork made it an ideal fit for their personal, social, and professional needs. Massive oak and steel beams lend to the interiors a lovely balance of authenticity and modernity. Ample grounds, countless trees, and other plantings provide shelter and privacy. After unpacking their trunks, Bak began a daily routine, one in which he would ascend to his studio in the morning to immerse himself for hours in his work, and one “that kept my inner pressures ventilated and my entire psyche under control.”2 He and Josée confronted any “frustrating” demands of the outside world in tandem. For Josée, who transitioned from full-time employment to retirement, it was in some ways a more challenging time. Sam’s English was fluent, while Josée’s was limited to what she remembered from high school. An avid reader, she dedicated much of her time to the onerous task of acquiring the new language. With her excellent culinary skills, her knack for hospitality, and her warm personality, she gradually made new friends and acquaintances who became part of and greatly enriched the couple’s life in New England. Of utmost importance was the companionship and support of Bernie and Sue Pucker. Professionally Bak’s affiliation with the Pucker Gallery proved to be extremely rewarding. “Our artistic partnership is over half a century old. It is the story of a deep and precious friendship. I enjoy his unwavering commitment to my art, his appreciation and strong belief. It gives me a much-needed sense of stability. Moreover,” Bak acknowledged, “his gallery, its administration and excellent staff allowed me to achieve numerous recognitions and rewards. Had I continued to stay in the old world, this wouldn’t have happened.”3

Bak felt “settled” and gave himself over to his creativity, communicating with his canvases and “like an obedient servant [doing] what the painting demands from me.”4 Painting for Bak is a sensuous process. He finds pure joy in the interaction with his tools (the brushes, the tubes and bottles, the palette knives), in the smell of turpentine, in the raw linen of a new canvas. He languishes in the way that forms take shape on a blank surface, the way that tones melt into one another on wet surfaces, the rhythm that develops within the composition, and the pulsating progress of an image. He is fascinated by the way a painting evolves towards a new reality, the way it crystallizes from its initial conception to something new.5 His paintings are living entities which grow from a dialogue between the artist and his subconscious, which he refers to as his “wonderful partner.”6 He submits himself (“I let things work themselves out”7) to the process, creating work that is ultimately an intermediary between himself and the viewer. In his words: …my paintings flow from an inner source. Something that is to me a mystery, indescribable. What a chance! Each one of my canvases or drawings, which tries to say what it says, and remains open to interpretation, is much more than an intellectual workout. Rather a demonstration of what could happen when an adequate space and boundless time allow me to exercise my steady discipline of work. They happen to me, my paintings, they arrive, and I welcome them.8 Paintings can take months, or even years, to complete. Works-in-progress in different stages of gestation fill his studio. Only upon completion does Bak give the work a title because, as he says, “the whole process of my work is trying to understand what I’m doing.”9 It would be tempting to wonder if the newfound tranquility Bak experienced in Weston would diminish the nature of his work, so deeply shaped by suffering. It did not. The world remains rife with ongoing dramas, catastrophes, generalized injustice, and permanent brinkmanship. Conscious of the comfort of what he calls “living in one of Boston’s privileged bubbles of civilization,”10 Bak maintains a firm grip on his history and a sober view of harsh realities, and is able to simultaneously enjoy the good fortunes of his life and channel personal and global challenges in his art. He believes that, “Some of my best and complex works were created in stretches of time in which I felt sad or misunderstood. Even in the painful times of personal crisis.”11 He thrives under the yoke of commitments, time pressure, and deadlines.

THE PASSING OF SISTER MARIA On August 12, 1994, a little over a year after moving, Bak celebrated his 61st birthday in Weston. On the same day in Poland, Sister Maria Mikulska (the Benedictine nun who had been so instrumental in the chain of events that, under the most terrible of circumstances, had saved Bak’s life) died. She had left the Benedictine order and was living in Warsaw as a muchrespected librarian. Bak only learned of her death several years later. The concurrence of her death and his birthday might for some conjure a mood of esoteric indulgence, but not for the pragmatic Bak, who with characteristic rationality warns, “the coincidence of the date of August 12 would have made the famous Dr. Jung and his idea of synchronicity very happy. But let us not fall into his ideas of the collective subconscious, his religious mysticism, or some surreal kind of determinism.”12 Though the date of her death was of little import to Bak, the fact of her passing gave him pause to reflect on her incredible life and its role in his. Often he acknowledges that, “If it wasn’t for Maria, or Father Stakauskas, as well as the incredible German Major Plagge13 who, shaken by the exposure to Nazi criminality became determined to save Jews (and created the HKP camp)—I wouldn’t live to write these lines.”14 To these heroes, Bak adds his great-aunt Janina, whom he regards as “the single person to whom I am most indebted from among all the various angels who have risked their lives for mine.”15 Psychology has yet to definitively answer the question of why someone would risk endangering their own life or the lives of their children to save the life of someone else. Neuroscientists have identified that altruism lodges in the prefrontal cortex and is likely a relatively recent evolutionary development of the human brain. In Judaism, the principle of pikuach nefesh, or the saving of a human life, takes precedence over almost every other ritual obligation or human act. In putting the safety of others before their own, Sister Maria and Father Stakauskas (perhaps inadvertently, but nonetheless courageously) defied the unuttered wishes of their highest leader, Pope Pius XII, who refused to condemn Nazi atrocities and whose deplorable feeling towards Jews is still being uncovered through documentary revelations.16

FACE TO FACE WITH HIS TWELVE-YEAR-OLD SELF In 1994, Nat and Roz Durlach, two dear friends the Baks made after moving to Weston, accompanied Josée and a reluctant Sam on their first visit to the Holocaust Museum in

Washington D.C. Bak was in the blackest of moods. Must he have the agonizing experiences of the past thrown in his face again? As they entered the museum, the group of visitors dispersed; the highly stressed Bak was better left alone. He proceeded through the exhibits with growing anguish and pain. When at last he approached the exit, he heard behind him a familiar voice and turned to find, to his utter amazement, a movie of himself as a child in the DP camp in Landsberg, playing on a large digital monitor. Several frames captured him in the process of painting a watercolor named On the Street.17 Suddenly, he remembered the team of American filmmakers, brought to the camp by the world famous and much adulated Leonard Bernstein, who filmed the gifted twelve-year old Bak painting a street scene of people sitting and waiting for something to happen. Standing in front of this film in total surprise, Bak was overwhelmed with an inexplicable joy. What a miracle that his path had somehow led him back to witness his younger self and the dawn of his artistic endeavor. So much lay between the two Sams, and the intangible proof of his survival stared him directly in the face. In the somber halls of the museum, amidst the crowd of unsettled visitors, he was almost ashamed of his elation. When Josée and the Durlachs re-joined him, they found a Sam now radiating an embarrassed happiness.

A STUDY IN JEWISH MYSTICISM “I am sure that if God existed, He would never have permitted the horrors I had to witness, and this is a strong point in His favor.”18 Though Bak is secular to the depths of his being, he concedes to an awareness of something bigger than the simplistic notion of the individual self. Martin Buber’s existential philosophy in I and Thou (1923) and Tales of the Hasidim (1933) has been particularly influential, along with the writings of Gershom Scholem, which opened his eyes to Jewish mysticism, a “labyrinth”19 to be approached with awe and trepidation. During his abstract period in Italy, Bak painted De Profundis, in reference to the Latin translation of Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I call you, O Lord. O Lord, listen to my cry.”20 The painting was done on burlap (which we learned played a role in Bak’s imprisonment and rescue) and is in the art collection of the University of Haifa.21 While in Switzerland, Bak further explored the theme by incorporating broken Tablets of the Law, sunken into the earth, then using those recessed forms as structures in paintings on the theme of Pardes. Soon after settling in Weston, Bak again took up this theme, which he describes as “an elementary image of what exists in me as part of my

knowledge of our Jewish heritage.”22 In the study of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah, the four levels of interpretation of the Biblical text are represented by the Hebrew consonants PRDS. The P stands for Peshat, or “surface,” and represents the literal and immediately understood meaning of the text. The R stands for Remes, or “hints,” and alludes to the hidden allegorical meaning within the text. The D stands for Derash, or “seek,” and asks the reader to make comparative meanings with other texts. The S stands for Sod, or “secret,” and deals with the deepest and most mysterious realms of understanding. Penetration to this fourth level of the Kabballah is fraught with danger and is thought to risk death. In Bak’s painting entitled Pardes II, completed early in his time in Weston and now in the collection of the Samuel Bak Museum at the University of Nebraska Omaha, the ruined Tablets of the Law occupy a “landscape of indifference” like an abandoned foundation. Four entrances to four chambers are marked from right to left with the Hebrew letters PRDS. The rightmost gate marked with the P is open and leads through a barren garden to a dark-leafed Tree of Knowledge. The next door marked with R is slightly ajar and through it winds a maze of ruins of eastern European shtetl buildings. A pair of upright Tablets of the Law juts out at the far end, the right one displaying letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The third door marked with the letter D is sealed and offers no means of possible access to (or escape from) the impenetrable labyrinth that fills this compartment. The last door marked with S is sealed with an X of wooden planks, and inside, an open book seethes in flames and a glowing furnace belches columns of acrid smoke. Indistinct shapes echo charred human remains, though Bak rarely explicitly depicts the dead or the dying in his work. The painting, moving as it does from the blighted Tree of Knowledge on the right to the chimneys of Auschwitz on the left, epitomizes the notion of yetzer hara, or the inclination to do evil.

A GERMAN OF “IMPURE RACE” In Weston, Bak revisited the artistic device of referencing then re-imagining an Old Master prototype by Albrecht Dürer to carry the viewer from the known to the unknown, from the surface to a deeper realm of awareness. Among the drawings by Dürer that Bak had discovered paging through a book on the artist in the DP camp was a pen drawing of a pillow, held by the beautifully rendered hand of a then-young Dürer. Bak had been curious why Dürer would draw a pillow, but mostly he had been struck by his own associations with the object. Remember that on the fateful day when he and his mother had been forced from their home and herded

with thousands of other Jews through the streets to the Vilna Ghetto, he had brought along his pillow. In the pouring rain, it became too heavy to carry and he was forced to discard it onto the rain-drenched street, where it was trampled on by the forlorn crowd. The pillow has since been for him an emblem for the way that the innocence of his childhood was instantly and irrevocably shattered. The painting Elegy for a Home depicts his lost pillow lying abandoned on the cracked pavement, slumped towards the ruined houses in the background in an anthropomorphic posture of despair.23 At some point in his later study of Dürer, with whom Bak had an uncanny and not always benign affinity, he learned that Dürer’s father had emigrated from Hungary to Germany. Bak mischievously mused that the “German” Renaissance master might indeed have been a German of “impure race.”24 Bak also rekindled his use of Dürer’s Melencolia, as in the painting from 1994/1995 entitled Nuremberg Elegie.25 Here, the winged figure is seated before a damaged globe, under a canopy of a tattered green cloth tied to a cross, connecting a modern scene of desperation with the holy emblem of Christianity. A broken rainbow arches over the cross, fragments of it lying on the ground in colored tatters, signifying the broken promise of God. The damaged Tablets of the Law, one etched with the number 6 to reference the six million murdered Jews and the 6th commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” the other tablet engraved with the numbers 1 (“I am the Lord your God….”) and 3 (“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”). The wall behind the Melencolia is a façade of an archetypical house, its blind arched windows chiseled with schematic Shabbat candles whose flames turn into the smoke of crematoria. A rickety ladder arises from tepid waters. Barren trees grow from rocky soil, from which some tired greenery emerges. Distant smoke billows into the evening sky.

THE WARSAW GHETTO BOY On May 16, 1943, the SS commander of Warsaw, Jürgen Stroop, was reveling in victory. He had at last crushed the surprisingly protracted, 27-day uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. The untermenschen had given him a tough time (150 Nazis lost their lives, which Jürgen circumspectly reduced to 110 in his report) but he and his men reacted with brutal power. 7,000 Jews died fighting and 7,000 more were captured and mercilessly butchered to death, an “accomplishment” for which Stroop was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st Class. In a particularly heinous act, he wrenched the remaining inmates from a bunker his men had not managed to set alight. The event was captured in photographs, some of which were included in Stroop’s seventy-five-page report entitled “The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is No More!” Two copies of the report were bound in black leather, one for the head of the SS police, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger,

and one for Heinrich Himmler with the secret hope that the Reichsführer would present it to the Führer as a birthday gift. During the Nuremberg Trials, an unbound copy of the report was presented. One of the photos depicted a disheveled group of survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt, herded from their bunker to their destiny of “liquidation” under the pitiless eyes of Nazi soldiers in their shiny boots. Captured by the camera’s lens, standing a little apart from the crowd, a little Jewish boy wears a pageboy cap and outgrown jacket, his knobby knees protruding from his socks.26 He was the same age as Sam, and as Samek Epstein, Sam’s friend who had been shot by the Nazis and left lying in a pool of his own blood as an example to anyone contemplating escape. This nameless boy, innocently caught up in the turmoil of an inhumane situation beyond his grasp, became the symbol for all the children who perished in the Shoah. Bak writes: To me the iconic and much-published Holocaust photograph of the Warsaw ghetto boy remains the most poignant image of Jewish Crucifixion. With his arms lifted in an attitude of resigned and bewildered surrender, and his depleted gaze focused on my eyes he has never stopped questioning me. In the Vilna ghetto I was his age and I looked—as did thousands of other children destined for the same fate—exactly like him. Same cap, same outgrown coat, same short pants. I always considered this picture a kind of portrait of myself in those times.27 This image became, for Bak, a trope to commemorate all the child victims of the Shoah.28 In Crossed Out III, the boy stands on a stony ridge under the Cross of Golgotha, his hands marked with the stigmata and a threatening sky roiling behind him. The makeshift cross leans behind him against a tree trunk (reminders of Ponary), while in front of the boy, held together by ropes, a fragment from a die and a truncated branch (with a single stem of hopeful growth) form the shape of an X (which is a symbol for death in Bak’s work). The boy, who has been separated from his shoes and stands vulnerably in blood-red socks, is literally being crossed out. The painted boy’s gesture is clearly reminiscent of the boy in the 1943 photograph, but also mimics the body language of Jesus on the cross. The Crucifixion is one of the holiest moments in Christianity, establishing how the son of God took the sins of the world upon himself. It reminds Christians of his self-sacrificing love, his promise of hope, peace, and redemption. For Jews, who in the New Testament are repeatedly accused of having killed Jesus,29 the Crucifixion has throughout the ages been a symbol of persecution, oppression, and discrimination in the

Christian world. But during the 19th century, Jewish artists began depicting Jesus as one of their tribe and an iconological tradition of appropriating the Crucifixion in art and poetry began to emerge.30 In 1922, Yiddish poet Uri Zvi Greenberg published the poem “Before the Cross” in his self-established periodical Albatross 2, its letters displayed on the page in the shape of a Christian cross. In this poem, steeped in characteristically Yiddish irony, he addresses Jesus as his “brother Yeshu,” writing: (… )Brother Yeshu. Two thousand years you’ve had your peace; And quiet on the Cross. / Around you the world is ending. Ach, don’t you remember a thing? / Why doesn’t it enter your numb brain / To set a Star of David at your pillow, blessed by upraised hands, sheltered by olive branches and groves of esreg31 trees. / Eyes too numb to see what lies at your feet. / A heap of severed Jewheads. / Prayer shawls ripped to shreds. / Stabbed scrolls. / Blood-spattered white linens. / And standing over them, a drunk peasant and his wife, / All rotten gums and drooling maws. / Snow. Frost. Ice. Numb Hebrew pain. Primordial Jew-woe. / You turn to stone. You have your peace and quiet on the cross. Not I. Not I. – (…)32 In the 20th century, Marc Chagall experienced the terrible pogroms in Russia, fled to America to escape the Holocaust, then boldly painted Jesus on the Cross with a tallith (prayer shawl) as his loin cloth. For Chagall, Jesus was not a divine being but a suffering fellow Jew.33 To this, Bak layers the dimension of the crucified child. According to the perverse German race laws under Nazi rule, a young Jesus would have been selected for annihilation, joining the community of the Warsaw Ghetto Boy, Samek Epstein, Samuel Bak, and all the other innocent Jewish children. The artist has referred to the Warsaw Ghetto boy as “this alter ego of mine”34 and though he by no means sees himself as a deity, he remembers the Yiddish irreverence of his two grandmothers, who lovingly called their firstborn grandson their “Jesusl”, their “little baby Jesus.”35

LAWRENCE L LANGER In 1995, Bak exhibited at Pucker Safrai Gallery 20 large paintings under the title Landscapes of Jewish Experience that featured icons of Jewish life. It was around this time that Bernie and Sue Pucker introduced Bak to the prominent Holocaust scholar, Lawrence L. Langer, a distinguished (and later alumnae) professor of English at Simmons College whose groundbreaking research into the Holocaust, enriched by his literary scholarship, has made a significant impact on the study of the Shoah. Langer describes the Holocaust as “a permanent hole in the ozone layer of

history, through which infiltrate the memories of a potentially crippling past.”36 In both macroand microscopic perspectives, from Dante’s Inferno to Franz Kafka, he concentrated his research on the victims and survivors of the Shoah with an intensely deep compassion. Quoting from his studies of survivors’ testimonies he draws the reader personally into their abysmal ordeal, demonstrating how the victims of the Shoah were bereft of the means to articulate experiences that seemed beyond human imagination and beyond expression.37 At first Langer was reluctant to write about Bak, submitting that he was a literary scholar and not an art historian. But once he stood face to face with Bak’s paintings, he embraced their visual content with tremendous depth of insight. To Langer, the art of Samuel Bak conveyed the same horrific truth as the verbal and written testimonies he had devoted his life to discussing. Langer had boldly criticized the use of concepts regarding Holocaust victims such as “martyrdom,” or “indomitable spirit,”38 arguing that in their situation of torment and humiliation such a notion of moral values was nothing but an irrelevant luxury.39 A similar epithet like “heroic,” from Langer’s perspective, diminishes the sheer enormity of the experience of an “incompatible universe of gas chamber and human dignity.”40 Both artist and scholar knew from the depths of their beings that, “After we peel the veneer of respectable behavior, cooperation, hope, mutual support and inner determination from the surface of the survivor ordeal, we find beneath a raw and quivering anatomy of human existence resembling no society we have ever encountered before.”41 Langer’s ensuing exegeses of Bak’s art, written over nearly thirty years and numbering hundreds of thousands of words, are literary masterpieces. With an effortless command of language drawing from the depths of his literary scholarship, and profound compassion for the Holocaust survivor, Langer decodes Bak’s visual metaphors with extreme sensitivity and erudition. With his grasp of the artist’s inner psyche, his interpretations of his art transcend into a throbbing discourse between painting and viewer. Following the authoritative, scholarly assessments of Bak’s oeuvre by Aberbach, Pucker, Paul T. Nagano, and other notable scholars of art history,42 Langer’s interpretations reached newly intuited dimensions of insight. His monographs and exhibition catalogues on the art of Bak, published by the Pucker Gallery, are beacons of perception of the inner visions the artist.

IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT Stories from the Old Testament had, since his early childhood, fascinated Bak, and in 1999 he published a collection of his paintings entitled In a Different Light: The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak (Langer authored the accompanying text). One painting that Langer unpacks

is Creation of Wartime III, a multi-layered riff on Michelangelo’s rendition of Creation from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted in 1512. Clothed in tattered soldier’s garb, Bak’s Adam reclines in front of the patched brick walls of a concentration camp. In Creation of Wartime III, Bak memorializes his Israeli schoolmate Adam Federgrin, the friend who died during his service in the IDF. But Bak’s Adam is also a proxy for all the Israeli soldiers sacrificed to a senseless war, and all those whose lives were destroyed in the Holocaust. He is also universal man, left behind by a broken covenant. His hand stretches limply towards God, whose gloved hand, so lax that it must be supported by a string, implies a distance between the Creator and his creation. In the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel the space between the hand of God and the hand of Adam is igniting life. In Bak’s painting, the space is dull and lifeless. The shape of God emerges from negative space, breaking through the brick wall, towards Adam. In the background, crematoria chimneys billow over rocks and ruins. Naked logs which sustain the derelict structure read as a Vav and a Gimel, hinting at the Vilna Ghetto. Of this painting, Bak has asked, “Is God creating man in his image, or is this man’s creation of God? Could these gestures express any disappointment or accusation?”43 He formulates his philosophy by these words in his description of the theme. “Man has failed his Creator, given our endless history of injustice, cruelty and war; and God, by allowing it, has invited the accusing finger that mirrors his own.”44

“PAINTED IN WORDS” In the throes of unprecedented creative output in the late 1990s, Bak put down his brushes. It was not a sudden decision, but the process of painting the Genesis images inundated him with childhood recollections. “I was flooded, immersed, indeed almost drowned in an uncontrollable flow of memories,”45 he recalls. He needed to record his story, this time in writing. Each day he obeyed the call of his computer, sat down, and recorded family history, anecdotes of his early childhood at Vilna’s No. 10 Wilenska Street, events during and after the war, and moments from his present life in Weston. Fittingly titled Painted in Words: A Memoir, and written in English (Bak’s eighth language), it is a masterpiece of memory and prose that has since been translated into four languages (German, Polish, Lithuanian, and Spanish). Bak’s friend, the eminent Israeli author Amos Oz, marveled in the introduction to the book how, “Despite being suffused with a sense of loss, horror, degradation and death, it is ultimately a sanguine, funny book, full of the love of life, rocking with an almost cathartic joy.”46 Bak recorded his recollections organically, as they welled up in him. What might be regarded

as a literary device in fiction was authentic in Bak’s writing, as he began by describing the world from his perspective of a naïve, but unwittingly manipulative child at the epicenter of his adoring family. The innocent voice is blissfully unaware of the facts known to the reader. The narrative flows under dark clouds of foreboding from the periphery to the essence, within the unimaginable catastrophe that little boy was fated to witness, endure, and survive. He offers hilarious, tragicomic, and ironic tales of his family members, from his astonishing mother and inimitable father to his autocratic and devious housekeeper, who was reigned over only by Mourka, the cat. He thoughtfully describes the lives and characters of his deeply cherished grandfathers and passionate grandmothers. His two wonderful aunts come vibrantly alive in the book, competing for his affection. As the narrative unfolds, the reader is palpably aware that this congenial childhood world, populated with sparkling, lively characters who carefully protect Bak from the gathering storm, would perish entirely. With Bak’s unique sense of irony, humor, and pathos the reader is led, layer by layer, into the abyss and back again. The child survivor answers the mandate to give testimony, and Painted in Words is a moving witness to how he did it. A leitmotif of the memoir is the story of the 19th century Vilna Pinkas, the book that poets Shmerke Kaczerginski and Avraham Sutzkever had rescued from Nazi looting and surreptitiously given to Bak in the Vilna Ghetto for him to use as drawing paper. The book had been lost in the chaos of the liquidation of the ghetto, and though Kaczerginski and Sutzkever later relocated it in the rubble, Bak was unable to look at it just after the war. He heard nothing of the Pinkas for many years, until he was living in Israel and was contacted by the Soviet Embassy in Tel Aviv. A Lithuanian cultural representative, with the assistance of a Russian agent, had tracked him down to inquire whether he had been the artist who had made the drawings in a book which had been discovered in Vilna after the war. The Pinkas had re-surfaced, but Bak did not see it and the trail ended there for a time. Years later, while in Weston writing his memoir, the Pinkas suddenly re-emerged to catapult him into an unexpected turn of events—his unforeseen return to Vilna and his reunion with this remarkable little book. It was as though the book, which had been a record of the life of the Jews in Vilna, refused to be part of its destruction. Instead, it stubbornly re-surfaced again and again as a witness to their survival.47

AN INEFFACEABLE TRAGEDY In the year 2000, absorbed in the emotionally draining process of writing his memoir and freshly re-experiencing so many long-ago family losses, Bak was plunged into an even deeper state of mourning. His beloved daughter, Daniela, gave birth to a stillborn child. This lovingly anticipated grandson, Leo, was strangled by his umbilical cord. The event “…shook me more

than anything else [that] emerges from my American past whenever I think of my last thirty years in Weston.”48 A letter Bak wrote to his lost grandson lays bare the abysmal depth of his pain; his heartrending lines are a glimpse into his innermost being, his manner of overcoming pain and darkness, his ability to restore his soul by grasping at sparks of joy and beauty. Samuel Bak For Leon Bak Weston, MA. September 2000

To my little one,

To what address should I send you this letter? The area in which you exist has no code. I know how much you are in your Mother’s thoughts. Should I send it to her? It may add tears to tears. It pains me so—to hear my girl cry. My little Daniela So bitterly wronged. You, my little man. I should have written to you in Yiddish. Today, the language of ghosts. When I was a child they spoke to me in this old language of Jews. And also in Polish and Russian. When your Mother was a child I spoke to her in Italian, then Hebrew. How strange that I speak to you in English, not my mother tongue. Yours was supposed to be French. But you had no time to receive it from your parents. My little one, how little it now matters. I speak to you in a language that my fingers best know how to click. I speak to you silently, in letters inscribed on a screen of light.

I know that you’ll understand The Dead speak all languages of the world. They make up a special Esperanto. The tongue of the ones who have lost all hope. You were meant to bring joy. You were meant to grow. You were meant to learn to know the world. To question it, to attempt in it changes, like all kids. You were meant to do things. To carry on the lifeline of a family destroyed by human evil. To perpetuate the memory of its long-lost members. Now you are settled among them. At the kitchen door that vaguely reflects my image, I depart into time. I try, in my own reflection, to decipher your face grown with years. Yet it remains tiny, wrinkled and blue. Earlier, your Mother’s trembling voice has painted it to me over the phone. The way she saw you when she bade you Goodnight. For the first time, and for the last. Your sweet little face now floats in my head. I stand at the kitchen door and look at my overgrown backyard. The dogwood tree gives me a sign. A red cardinal has landed on a leafless twig. In the green grass, up and down, wiggles a fluffy tail of a squirrel. What joyful grace! You would have loved it. Two chipmunks race across the lawn. A blue jay crosses the air. Far away, a disobliging cloud that has been pushed aside, now lets in the sun. What a peaceful sight! It is the image of paradise on Earth. Is yours as beautiful? I look at your eyes that have remained closed.

I take you by your little hand. And magically we go through the door’s glass-pane. Magically, like in a Chagall painting, we remain suspended in mid-air Your other tiny hand reaches out to the bird in the sky. “Old Fellow,” I say, “You amaze me.” ‘Striking luck is akin to a blind man catching birds.’ “What China-man has made you familiar with this ancient saying?” You keep silent. I know, I know, luck was not on your side. When your Mother’s voice told me that you now have a name—I sobbed. We embraced over the ocean’s chasm. And we cried some more. And then we put down our receivers. Your certificate of birth is the certificate of your death. My stillborn grandson. You have injected an ominous meaning into a much-used word. Still and life… All my life I painted Still-lives. They’ll never be the same. My Leon My Leo In Hebrew, my Arieh, my Arik, or even better Arik sheli You naughty, naughty boy! Why did you make your Mother cry? Pressing the receiver to my ear I listened to her weeping voice. Suddenly she became my little Daniela. Huge tears slipping down her cheeks. Her trembling lips took the shape of an inverted U. She used to protest.

“Aba, it isn’t fair.” A small child’s world is full of injustice. I, the Aba, the father, I had to be strong I had to console. But now… What words could I use? A world of a woman that has lost her child knows no consolation. You naughty, naughty boy. What did you do? Hold it, you silly child. Stop crying. Please. We do not accuse you. It was not your fault. You must have had your reasons. What kind of world did we prepare for you? A world polluted by dirt, by interminable battling and infinite cruelty. A world in which hungry children die in endless wars. Perhaps you hated it. And you might have been right. Little did we do to rectify injustice. Little did we do to stop pain. At times we thought about all that. Then our daily chores took all the oxygen. When you rejected this world, you had your reasons. But you gave us no time to explain. No chance to prove that this is the world the way we have found it. Much of what is wrong is not our making. Please, believe us. We are ashamed of the way many things are. We try to be kind. Whenever we take the time—we are ashamed.

Former generations have tried to improve our condition. But they failed. We have learned to live with the world’s defects. To tolerate. It isn’t easy. So we claim that there is no life without struggle and suffering. But you, my little one, you have chosen to glide away to another space. And we respect your decision. We love you. Gently we touch the fresh scar that now carries your name. Goodnight, my Leon. And Goodbye. My Leo. My sleeping cub. Whenever I shall paint a still life I’ll think of you. And embed a particle of your being into the magma of drying paint. Your Bereaved Grandfather.49

RIMANTAS STANKEVICIUS In the midst of his grief, as his memoir was nearing completion, a young legal adviser of the Lithuanian Parliament named Rimantas Stankevicius came to Boston with the intention of tracking Bak down. Among other things, he brought news of the Pinkas, now in Lithuania. A thread began to weave which would bring about a catharsis in Bak’s life. Out of a personal interest, Stankevicius had embarked on scholarly research into the life of the Righteous Christians of Vilna, the heroes who had saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Among them he had found Sister Maria Mikulska and Father Stakauskas. After regaining its independence from Russia in 1990, Lithuania had begun to acknowledge its complicity in the murder of 96% of their Jewish citizens, but research into this dark stain of Lithuanian history was not universally welcomed. Stankevicius needed courage to pursue the project, but he was passionate in his conviction that his country must face the reality of its past. After meeting Bak in Boston, Stankevicius gently tried to persuade him to visit Vilna to

participate in a ceremony unveiling a commemorative plaque in memory of its Righteous Christians. It was an impossible thought! Instead, Bak sent a tribute to Sister Mikulska, Father Stakauskas, and teacher Vladas Zemaitis. Bak wrote: Dear Friends, you are reunited here today to give honor to the memory of three exceptional people: Sister Maria, Father Stakauskas and Vladas Zemaitis—grey, unassuming, unsung, and (I dare say) unknown heroes. Over half a century ago, in the bleakest of times, they preserved the spark of a deep humanity. By opposing the murderous actions of the Nazi regime, they stood ready to pay for their principles with the most precious thing a person possesses—with their own lives…Although all of us must be grateful to those few who kept the light of humanity glowing, however feeble it sometimes seemed, my individual gratitude is limitless. That I am alive today, that I am able to send you this message at all, I owe to these three guardian angels. Audacious, ingenious and ready for self-sacrifice, they created a secret oasis within the walls of this convent, filled at the time with Nazi officers. Here they gave refuge to a young Jewish woman and her tenyear old boy. Had it not been for them, the story of my life would have been quite different. I would have shared the fate of many of my family who, along with thousands of other Vilna Jews, were killed in the woods of Paneriai…50 Among those present at the ceremony was a member of one of the three other families who had hidden with Sam and Mitsia during the last months of the war. Sheltered by mountains of looted books and manuscripts, directly below the Nazi headquarters, day and night in naked terror of their lives, hungry and cold, they were fed and sustained during the darkest hours of night by their rescuers. The ceremony ended but the quiet persistence of Stankevicius that Bak consider a return to Vilna did not, and the idea began to fester inside him. Stankevicius then suggested a visit to the old town, a viewing of the construction of the new Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, and a meeting with its director, Emanuelis Zingeris. Soon after, Zingeris, in the name of the small Jewish community of Vilnius, called Bak, and in a slightly hesitant Yiddish, officially invited him and his wife to the city of the artist’s birth. A large show of his paintings would mark the historic event. Eventually, Bak worked through his amassed reservations. Were the scars of the old wounds sufficiently mended? Cautiously, he accepted the official invitation but planned to precede this public visit with a more private one. A return after an absence of 56 years carried with it many

emotional loads. In the early summer of 2001, accompanied by Josée, he descended the plane’s narrow steps and his feet touched Vilna’s ground. At the airport, upon his arrival, there were Stankevicius, Zingeris, friends and journalists, smiles, embraces, and flowers. All recognized the emotional significance of the moment. Within days, the friendship between the Lithuanian Rimantas Stankevicius and the Jewish Samuel Bak had evolved into a genuine brotherhood.

PAINTING THE HOMECOMING Visiting the city of his birth touched deeply on the anguish of his loss, the agony of his bereavement, and the miracle of his survival. Accompanied by Josée, he toured the places of his childhood—those that evoked memories of joy and those that seared with pain. The painting Blind Alley, painted as part of a series called Return to Vilna that Bak completed after his trip, offers a glimpse into how he viewed Vilna after 56 years. Loose façades of damaged houses and heaps of rubble line a narrow lane leading to monuments of the city of his childhood. Ruined buildings under a sinister sky bear witness to this scene of grief. A row of bookshelves is covered with the white shrouds that traditionally cover mirrors in the house of the newly deceased. Never one to depict death literally, he instead uses substitution and metaphor as artistic devices. The “People of the Book” who perished during this unspeakable catastrophe become the books themselves, books which were a spiritual part of the people and which were also threatened with eradication. Vilna’s Strashun Library, the impressive pre-war Jewish library that housed a massive collection from early Jewish texts to contemporary literature in multiple languages, was earmarked for looting by the Nazis under Alfred Rosenberg’s ERR. Simultaneously, the wall of books in Blind Alley, partially hidden by soiled sheets, references the books that created a maline (hiding place) that had sheltered Bak and his mother in the convent.51 His visit to the Ponary forest is captured in the painting Under the Trees, which seethes with the emotion of standing in the killing fields where 70,000 Jews (including his father and four grandparents)52 were shot dead and thrown into the pits. In the painting, Bak severs the trees from their roots and allows them to fly away, releasing them from taking their nourishment from the mass graves beneath their roots. He cuts away the ground as well, revealing murdered Jews represented by bullet-ridden tombstones, to give them a semblance of the burial they were denied. A rusty shadow spills across the canvas, conjuring the sea of blood spilled in these now peaceful woods.

TIKKUN OLAM It was Emanuelis Zingeris’ wish that the inaugural exhibition at the new Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum be of Bak’s work. It really could not be otherwise. The idea of tikkun olam (repair of the world) was lodged in Bak’s inner soul and since Stankevicius’ visit to Boston, he had wrestled with the feeling that a newfound relationship with Vilna might be a proper step in that direction. The painting entitled In Search of Tikkun bears witness to this inner debate. Nestled amongst the trees, a chipped memorial stone reveals bits of crematoria bricks. Arching over the woods are fragments of the rainbow of God’s broken promise interspersed with camouflaged Hebrew letters that spell the word tikkun. Through his study of Jewish Mysticism, Bak acknowledges: Our world is composed of broken things—things with bruises, cracks and missing parts—and we must learn to live among them. Of course people, too can be broken in body or in spirit, or both. One may even attempt to repair the soul (…) A continuing effort to mend is what made our lives possible.53 Not long after their return from the preparatory trip to Vilna, and with the assiduous help of Bernie Pucker and the Pucker Gallery, a collection of work, including his early works entrusted after the war to Shmerke Kaczerginski before the family’s clandestine flight to the west,54 was selected and shipped to Vilna. For a second time, Bak traveled to the city of his birth to witness, in the presence of his wife, his daughters, and his gallerist and friend, the remarkable miracle of a retrospective exhibition of his work in Vilna. Since the building of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum was not completed it was installed in Vilna’s Gallery of Art, in the former palace of the aristocratic Tyszkievicz family, whose governess had adopted and converted Bak’s Aunt Janina when she was a teenager (“yes, yes, Dr. Jung…the miracle of synchronicity can happen!”)55 The exhibition Returning Home opened on 24 September 2001,56 and in the central display case sat the Pinkas, embellished with drawings by young Bak. Bak and his traveling companions also visited the memorial in the Ponary woods, and near the stone which marks the burial of the last victims of Jewish Vilna, Daniela buried her child’s ashes. Father and daughter embraced, and so did all the others, with tears in their eyes. In 2002 Bak again returned to Vilna to speak at a ceremony held in honor of the Righteous Among the Nations. On that occasion he revisited Ponary then toured his home at 10 Wilenska Street, which had been turned into an educational center devoted to teaching children about the Holocaust.

TRIBUTES TO THE ARTIST Since that visit to Vilna in 2002, which would be followed by others, the artist has exhibited extensively and received countless honors. In annual exhibitions at the Pucker Gallery, Bak has continued to probe motifs such as: still lifes (sometimes titled, in characteristic irony, Unstill Life), cups, hammer and nails, time, From Generation to Generation, chess, HOPE, tikkun, angels, Landscapes of Jewish Experience, Adam and Eve, candles, justice (satirically titled Just Is), figures, and many more. Each exhibition at the Pucker Gallery is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue introduced by eminent scholars. More recently, lively debates also take place among scholars during Pucker Gallery’s WebinArts (online discussions that reach a worldwide audience). 2002 saw the publication of the comprehensive monograph, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, which formed the basis for decades of subsequent research on the artist. Exquisitely produced, it contains probing and excellent scholarly essays by Lawrence Langer, Alicia Faxon, Irene Tayler, and Saul Touster, and an Afterword by Bernie Pucker.57 Bak contributed autobiographical texts and analyses of his themes in his own words, and this along with its detailed research cast light on the intrinsic essence of his art. In December 2006, a memorable retrospective exhibition of Bak’s work was presented in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Museum entitled An Arduous Road: Samuel Bak 70 Years of Creativity. His work was at last embraced by Israel’s younger generation of art historians. The Senior Art Curator of Yad Vashem, Yehudit Shendar summed up the collective resonance in Israel of Bak’s art with empathetic words. She expressed how his creativity emerges from that decisive juncture where artistic expression and inner truth meet. She wrote that, “The journey and burden are shaped into a single identity, which, while it may be paradigmatic, is nevertheless unique and private.”58As part of the Yad Vashem exhibition, a monitor projected an hour-long video which Sam’s daughter Ilana, a graduate of a filmmaking school in Paris, created during Bak’s journey to Vilnius in 2004 with his 13-year-old grandson, Raphael. It marked Raphael’s Bar Mitzvah and provided exposure to his family’s history, its devastated community, tragic past, and above all the sweet memories of his grandfather’s childhood. When Sam’s second grandson, Tom, reached the same age, the grandfather brought him to his Litvak birth town, and all the places that were etched into his memory. In 2013, Pucker Gallery organized an exhibition of Bak’s work entitled Retrospective Journey into the Art of Samuel Bak at the South African Jewish Museum in Cape Town. The South African

Jewish community largely hails from Lithuania and several members of Bak’s extended family (most recently his eldest grandson) have settled there, making it a place where he had long hoped to exhibit. The work was eye-opening not only for the Jewish community but for the entire South African public, made up of different ethnic groups and walks of life, all of whom resonated with the narrative and messages. The burden of the past still weighed heavily on the inner psyche of people of the “New South Africa.” Bak’s paintings revealed that its wounds had not yet healed and stimulated the urge to articulate the pain of the country’s recent past. Guided tours were attended in increasing numbers, and people often returned for follow-up visits. Representative of the impact of these works on viewers is the story of a member of the museum’s cleaning staff, the late Andrew Hendricks, who was unable to tear himself away from the painting entitled From Generation to Generation (1968-96), in which three Hassidic men bless their descendants, each one more diminished in size as they carry the burden of their heritage. His reaction to the painting was immediate and visceral and prompted in him an urgent need to speak about it to Ute Ben Yosef, the author of this biography, who had just conducted a guided tour through the exhibition. In 2019, The Samuel Bak Gallery and Learning Center, In Loving Memory of Hope Silber Kaplan opened at the Holocaust Museum Houston to house more than 125 works donated by the artist and to be a venue for discussion and debate about the layers of meaning in Bak’s art. The following year, The Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy as well as the Natan & Hannah Schwalb Center for Israel and Jewish Studies partnered with Pucker Gallery to create Witness: The Art of Samuel Bak, an exhibition of Bak’s works at University of Nebraska Omaha. This has led to the great honor of a new work-in-progress at UNO, the Samuel Bak Museum: The Learning Center, which opened Phase One in a temporary 5,200 square foot venue in early 2023. Phase Two envisions a brand new, state-of-the-art, free-standing museum to house the largest collection of Bak’s work (he has already donated over 500 works spanning 80 years). Not just a repository for his legacy, the Samuel Bak Museum: The Learning Center is a nucleus for members of the university and community to engage in critical conversations about human rights, genocide, social justice, artistic expression, and more. Countless additional exhibitions, publications, documentary films, and honorary doctorates tell the story of the last twenty years in the United States for Bak, highlighting an ongoing season of fruitfulness, creativity, and harvest, of honor and international recognition as a major artist of the 21st century.

CECILIA WITTEVEEN, SIEGFRIED SCHÄFER, AND THE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ Bak considers the creation of the catalogue raisonné of his art as one of the most remarkable events of his career, one of those precious gifts of life that is beyond belief. It so happened that several years ago, a couple visiting from Germany entered the Pucker Gallery. They were experienced in the structuring and management of artists’ catalogues and had been following up on the work of Lux Feininger (1910-2011), who lived in Cambridge. In the gallery they discovered Bak’s paintings and soon became fascinated by their distinctive power, especially by the significance of his art about the epoch and for the times in which they were created. The making of the catalogue that contains close to ten thousand of Bak’s works produced over a span of eight decades has demanded from Cecilia and Siggi years of devoted work.59 The friendship between Cecilia, Siggi, Josée, and Sam has developed into one that is most precious and warm in nature. Separately, Bak’s assistant, Briana Howard (who carefully photographed many, and numbered all the works) contributed with her expertise and devotion an invaluable help to the entire enterprise. The artist feels an untold depth of gratitude whenever he travels via the online raisonné through his years of creative work, observing from the comfortable seat of the present the evolution from source to germination to fruition of the different themes and styles of his entire oeuvre.

THE FINAL CHORD In 2017, The Samuel Bak Museum opened in Vilna, on the first two floors of the Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History through the generous donation by Bak of several hundred notable works dating from the 1940s on. One of the works is a pencil drawing from 1996 entitled Musician, part of a series of works the artist has done on the theme. A cellist wearing a tallith that seems to have been made from the striped uniform of a concentration camp inmate sits alone among tattered shrouds, absorbed in the soundless waves of his instrument. He sits upright in a pyramidal composition reminiscent of Bak’s early figure of Moses.60 He gestures at playing, without bow or strings, his face covered by a mask of normalcy behind which he hides his damaged self. Behind him, a chimney rises from a furnace. The player emits vibrations that spread across the sky in soundless tremors. His cello contains gas chamber bricks and the music stand in front of him crosses over itself in the form of two deathly X shapes. He belongs both to the dead and to the living. In his analysis of the motif of the musician in Bak’s art, Langer discusses the famous statement by the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”61 He

interprets it to mean that any poetry written after Auschwitz in the style in which it was written before Auschwitz—that is any poetry that does not acknowledge the paradigmatic shift in the universe engendered by the Holocaust—is fundamentally cruel and inhuman. Langer extends this notion to all forms of art, including painting, arguing that Bak’s ability to create art after Auschwitz is one of his crowning achievements. He has found a language that speaks to the painful tragedy of the European Jews and simultaneously explores the roots of the human condition and our existence on this planet. Man’s polarization (his ability for limitless evil and, on the other hand, inconceivable altruism) is clear in his work. Universality cannot communicate with or touch the human spirit if it is not anchored in the specifics of time and space, whatever the cost in personal pain. There is an acknowledgment, both mute in the medium of paint and spoken in the medium of words that: Josée and I feel very privileged. We live in a Bostonian bubble of good luck, which doesn’t represent the real USA. But I can’t close my eyes to what is going on in this split country, packed with bigotry, racism and mere violence, and at the same time generosity, humanity and kindness. Thus, my past thirty years has enabled me to continue nourishing whatever was set in my being. Whether in Israel, Italy, France, Switzerland or the USA, my little suitcase that travels with me carries my Litvak roots.62

BAK PAINTING ON THE STREET (IN THE STREET) 1945 A 1994 visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. brought Bak face to face with a video of himself from 1945, painting in the Landsberg DP camp.

PARDES II 1994 Oil on canvas 51 x 77 inches BK311 In the study of Jewish mysticism, the four levels of interpretation of the Biblical text are represented by the Hebrew consonants PRDS.

ELEGY FOR A HOME 1995 Oil on canvas 39 3/8 x 32 inches BK360 STUDIES OF PILLOWS BY ALBRECHT DÜRER 1493 Albrecht Dürer’s drawings of pillows were curious to Bak and reminded him of when he was forced to discard his soaking pillow while en route to the Vilna Ghetto.

NUREMBERG ELEGIE 1994-1995 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 63 inches Melencolia is surrounded not by symbols of the Enlightenment but by references to the extermination of the Jews.

WARSAW GHETTO BOY 1943 The anonymous boy with hands raised in surrender in this poignant photograph of the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising became a symbol for the slaughter of innocent children.

APPRENTICESHIP 2008 Oil on canvas 18 1/8 x 18 1/8 inches BK1167 The Warsaw Ghetto Boy appears in various iterations in Bak’s work and he is often fused with references to the Crucifixion.

CROSSED OUT III 2008 Oil on canvas 18 x 14 inches BK1206

DEPOSITION 2008 Oil on canvas 40 1/8 x 30 inches BK1210 Bak has referred to the Warsaw Ghetto Boy as “this alter ego of mine.”

CREATION OF WARTIME III 1999-2000 Oil on canvas 50 x 75 inches BK1243 The series known as In a Different Light reenvisions stories from Genesis and iconic images of them, such as Michelangelo’s Creation from the Sistine Chapel.

BANISHMENT III 1999-2008 Oil on canvas 50 x 75 inches BK1244 Adam and Eve, made of pigment and stone, are expelled not from the idyllic Garden of Eden but from a decrepit corner of rubble where paint spills like blood.

ROOTS 2001 Oil on canvas 30 x 24 1/8 inches BK841 Thoughts of Vilna resurfaced in the early 2000s when Bak was invited to participate in a ceremony commemorating Righteous Christians.

UNDER THE TREES 2001 Oil on canvas 30 x 40 1/8 inches BK860 Bisected trees of the Ponary forest float above mass graves, reminding the viewer of what happened there many years ago.

BLIND ALLEY 2001 Oil on canvas 24 1/8 x 48 1/8 inches BK855 After 56 years, Bak returned to the city of his birth.

SOUTINE STREET 2001 Oil on canvas 24 1/8 x 24 1/8 inches BK838 Chaïm Soutine was a well-known French Expressionist Jewish painter who died in 1943 while hiding from the Nazis in Paris.

IN SEARCH OF TIKKUN 2000 Oil on canvas 18 1/8 x 14 inches BK749 Tikkun olam, Hebrew for repair of the world, is an important tenet for Bak in his life and work.

ADAM AND EVE AND THE GOOD OLD TIMES 2008 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches BK1368 A series on the Biblical couple depicts Adam and Eve as witnesses to the catastrophe of the mid-20th century.

FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION 1968-1996 Oil on linen 39 3/8 x 32 inches BK438 Three Hassidic men bless their descendants, each more diminished in size than the last.

MUSICIAN 1996 Black pencil and heightening on paper 24 3/4 x 19 inches Musicians appear often in Bak’s work, playing soundlessly amidst the destruction as a spiritual bulwark against the darkness.

9

THE MESSAGE IS UNIVERSAL

“Art derives from Art and so does my specific one. All the art that I have absorbed throughout the many years of my long life, lives on in me. It is the conscious layer of my work. Then, mixed with layers of my subconscious traumas, needs and aspirations, my feelings, thoughts, and beliefs—it engenders countless series of images: Visualizations that look for adequate downloads.”1 IRONY In the beginning was the gifted child. For little Samek, there was nothing but KUNST in capital letters. Then followed the cataclysm of the Shoah. Decades of training in the traditions and currents of art. A wandering the globe in search of roots and a settling into a life of creativity within the canon of modern art. The crystallization of a visual language in the idiom of the contemporary zeitgeist, determined to address the fundamental questions of humanity. Much has been written about the characteristics of Bak’s art,2 but one aspect stands out to this author that has perhaps been less scrutinized: irony. Bak’s art is an irony of idiosyncrasy, of fundamental ambiguity, of banality, of an iconoclastic desire to question given beliefs and truths, of cynicism and satire. Irony’s visual roots in modern art lie in Surrealism but Bak’s surrealism is not Dali’s playfully psychologizing automatism. It is closer, but not exactly akin to René Magritte’s parody. Its deep source is bitteres gelechter3—based on a pain from which it is forever attempting to distance itself (“Irony helps us to get a perspective of things”4). Competing layers in the substructure of Bak’s irony, germinated from early childhood, are evident even in his first exhibition in the Vilna Ghetto and later in his drawings in the Landsberg DP camp. Serious/ light, emotional/distant, and everything in between, covering the entire spectrum of humor, ridicule, mockery, cynicism, and satire appear through the devices of paradox and incongruity. It is Lady Justice taking a little nap under a buckling tree in Ponary, her Scales of Justice dangling down from an X-shaped support. It is the Chess Queen next to her King on their rocking horse. It is in titles like Well Informed,5 because the cluttered heaps of books that constitute the chess pieces in this painting have failed to teach mankind anything. Placed on the foreground of a “landscape of indifference,” a disarray of damaged volumes litters the picture plane. Overseen

by a fragmented King and Queen, whose carriage wheels have come off, a greenish-blue pawn with a damaged face is tied to a pile of books by a rope forming an X. We have seen that Bak rarely depicts his experiences literally, but instead uses substitution through tropes. This alone is a form of ironic distancing, demanding that the viewer enters a visual metaphor where books represent the people who read them, people who are no more. Any wisdom gleaned from the books could not save them, their learning came to nothing. The pawns of the world ended up dead, along with those in power who caused the cataclysm in the first place. But as always there is the other side, because, for Bak, “Books are life!”6 This conceptual painting, which concretizes the aftermath of destruction through phantoms of memory, is at the same time a post-modern masterpiece which encompasses the gamut of contemporary visual vernacular. It addresses an existential question, frozen in time.

THE MESSAGE IS UNIVERSAL For many years, Jewish historiography dissociated the Shoah from Jewish history because in its sheer enormity it endangered the sense of Jewish identity. Gradually, Holocaust history has achieved its present role as an integral part of Jewish history in general.7 Many historians today regard the Shoah as unique in the history of genocides for its scale and the industrial dimensions of its meticulous planning on a level the world had never seen before or since. Bak’s personal experience with an unprecedent moment in world history is the source of his art, and the artist’s trauma cannot be ignored, but there are other explanations for the powerful output, the variation of compositions and contexts in his oeuvre. The sources of the artist’s creativity seem to emerge, yes from personal experience and fate, but also from a fine-tuned sense of the injustices of the world. He is keenly aware of these, absorbing them like a radar station capturing the oscillations between the outside world and the unconscious, and juggling them into the exquisite fabric of his masterpieces. His visual testimony proves this by the universal resonance of his paintings, equal in their effect on Japanese 3rd generation survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and children of Mexican refugees to America. If, as he says, “we are consigned forever to live after a cataclysm,”8 his “we” at least encompasses the entire world, all its victims of violence, war, genocide, and injustice. In 2021-2022, Bak revisited the flattened surfaces and bright colors of Analytical Cubism. Human parts were assembled from fragmented splinters, propelled as if driven by a relentless machine. While his paintings were being prepared for his annual exhibition in the Pucker Gallery under the title Figuring Out, Russia invaded Ukraine. Another war of destruction and devastation on an unimaginable scale had begun.

The painting Helpers from that series is a prophetic vision of human suffering on repeat. A visionary group of blue figures, assemblages of flat fragments hammered into specter-like shapes, flee across a rough-hewn ground. Other figures, rendered realistically, aid in the endeavor by dragging and pushing them along. The lead figure on the left is pinned to the ground by a pole (or is it a rifle?). A monumental figure on the right (perhaps it is the Golem of memories) is riddled by bullets but aided in its flight towards safety by a live figure with a rope. Phantoms of foreboding, they retreat over and past broken hand carts whose wheels have come off. The painting conjures an eerily familiar sight, one that is being created anew in current events. The viewer is painfully aware of the likely outcome of their quest for help, but the figures do not give up or submit themselves to the fate of war. And in this eternal repetition of man’s inhumanity to man, where does the artist stand? Bak’s art does not offer solutions but asks questions. Can art be a bulwark against the forces of violence and the concomitant destruction of man and nature? Can it give birth to renewed life? He has shown that there can be no hope for the future of mankind without a reckoning with its past catastrophes. If the titans of violence and human destruction are chained in the dungeon of collective amnesia, they will only break their chains, and wreak havoc on humanity time and time again. The impulse towards tikkun olam begins with memory and requires the infinite interconnectedness of all things.

NAP 2015 Oil on canvas 48 x 36 inches BK1929 Lady Justice falls asleep on the job, her scales hanging from a tree that is dangerously close to crushing her while she rests.

WINGING 2020 Oil on canvas 30 x 24 inches BK2468 Bak uses hammers and nails to explore power abuse and destruction, but also to acknowledge how these tools can be used to rebuild.

HELPERS 2021 Oil on canvas 14 x 18 inches BK2654 Is human suffering on an endless loop, or can people work together to address the atrocities of the past?

QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME 1995 Oil on canvas 45 1/2 x 51 inches BK380 Art stubbornly emerges in defiance against, and as spiritual protection from, malevolent forces.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1 1. Samuel Bak, email to author, July 6, 2021. 2. Samuel Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2001). The book has been translated into four languages: German, Polish, Lithuanian, and Spanish. 3. For the meaning of the Hebrew name “Bak” see Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 127-130. 4. Ibid, 147. 5. Samuel Bak, Art—and how I tried to get what it was (Weston, MA: unpublished essay, 2020), 1. 6. Samuel Bak, interview with author, June 30, 2021. 7. Ibid. I am indebted to Samuel Bak for all other information on his earliest influences as an artist. 8. Bak, Art—and how I tried to get what it was, 2. 9. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 160. 10. Ibid, 171. 11. This affiliation got Chayim into trouble with the authorities as a young man, forcing him to flee to Paris. Chayim later returned to Vilna and opened a tailor shop. Rachel built a thriving business selling women’s lingerie. 12. Shifra, a remarkably far-sighted and enterprising businesswoman, attended synagogue and induced Khone to join her in worship. But he was more a lover of art and music, and “an inventor of an almost childlike imagination and unpractical honesty.” (Samuel Bak, email to author, July 7, 2021) He constructed a mousetrap in which the captured creature was not to suffer but to enjoy itself, and designed a knitting machine that could produce woollen winter socks (for which he received a prize but forgot to register the patent). 13. Exodus 20:4. 14. A pogrom is a state-sanctioned massacre of Jews. 15. See Chapter 8 for a description of the Warsaw Ghetto Boy motif. 16. Other Jewish pupils of the Vilna School of Drawing between the years 1909 and 1912 became internationally famous, among them Chaïm Soutine, Michel Kikoïne, Pinchas Krémègne, Léon Indenbaum, and Jacques Lipchitz. The Vilna School of Drawing was their launching pad to Paris, where they met up with Marc Chagall and were introduced to and became friends with the avant-garde artists of the École de Paris—Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani. 17. I am indebted to Samuel Bak for this information. 18. Bak, Art—and how I tried to get what it was, 2. 19. As part of their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland along the Bug River in September of 1939. Germany later occupied all of Poland when it invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. 20. Romanian-born poet Paul Celan mournfully coined this phrase in his poem “Death Fugue,” likely written around 1945 and first published in 1948. …. He calls jab deeper into the earth you there and you other men sing and play/He grabs the gun in his belt he draws it his eyes are blue/Jab deeper your spades you there and you other men continue to play for the dance/Black milk of dawn we drink you at night/We drink you at noon we drink you

evenings/We drink you and drink/A man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete/Your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes/He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland.... 21. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 276. 22. The author first heard the artist use the expression “landscape of indifference” during a walkabout of the exhibition Retrospective Journey into the Art of Samuel Bak, held in Cape Town at the South African Jewish Museum from November 6, 2013 to February 28, 2014. 23. For the story of Hanna Yochel, whose Christian name became Janina, see Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 240247. 24. Bak, Art—and how I tried to get what it was, 5. 25. Ibid. 26. Sutzkever later wrote a poem in honor of Mitsia. 27. Alfred Rosenberg’s proper title as head of the ERR, which essentially supervised Nazi plundering, was The Führer’s Representative for the Supervision of the Intellectual and Ideological Instruction of the National Socialist Party. Like many of leaders of the Nazi party, he carried a doctorate. 28. The story of the Pinkas in Bak’s life does not end in the ghetto and is continued in chapter 8. 29. Pasternak was a portrait and landscape artist who leaned towards a post-Impressionist style. He is also the father of the famous novelist Boris Pasternak. 30. Bak, Art—and how I tried to get what it was, 5. 31. Ibid. 32. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 32. 33. Ibid, 33. 34. Lawrence L. Langer: A Life in Testimony, directed by Shiva Kumar (2022; Yale, Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies). 35. Vince, Laima, Catharsis Through Memory, Samuel Bak: Painted in Words—A Memoir (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2021), 24. 36. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 85. 37. Samuel Bak, “Samuel Bak’s Disruption of Still Life: Past and Present.” Pucker Gallery, July 3, 2021, webinar, https://youtube.com/watch?v=EfWs-yyADiY. 38. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 85. 39. The Pinkas, which will eventually reappear in Bak’s life was found after Liberation by Shmerke Kaczerginski, who not long before and together with Avraham Sutzkever had joined the partisans. 40. See note 27. 41. Vince, Catharsis Through Memory, Samuel Bak: Painted in Words—A Memoir, 11-18, 22-35. 42. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 369. See also Samuel Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me (Weston, MA: unpublished essay, July 2021), 4. 43. Ibid. 44. Samuel Bak, “Samuel Bak’s Disruption of Still Life: Past and Present.” Pucker Gallery, July 3, 2021, webinar, Boston, https://youtube.com/watch?v=EfWs-yyADiY. 45. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 374. 46. Ibid, 372-373. 47. These works are now in the collection of the Samuel Bak Museum in Vilnius. 48. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 385. 49. Ibid, 381-389. 50. Ibid, 393. 51. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 7. 52. Ibid. 53. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 407.

CHAPTER 2 1. The subsequent American-run trials of guards at Dachau and Mauthausen, and the so-called Doctors’ Trial of 1946-47, did lead to the execution of many dozens of accused. 2. Philippe Sands, The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive (New York: Knopf, 2020). 3. Samuel Bak, Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary A. Philips, Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2017). 4. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 435. 5. Ibid. 6. von Stuck was a prominent member of the Munich Academy of Art and a founder-member of the Munich Secession. His paintings were popular because of his fin de siècle mystic symbolism and demonic eroticism under German Art Nouveau. He strove to pursue art as a Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work of Art) in the Wagnerian sense that prevailed at the time. 7. The Blocherer Art School was founded by Wilhelmine Boßhardt and in 1918, she and Blocherer became joint administrators. It exists to the present day. Built in a post-Bauhaus style, it offers classes in Communication Design and Interior Design. 8. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 8. 9. Ibid. 10. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 472. 11. Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg. His father, a goldsmith, had come to Germany from Hungary and conveyed to his son a stringent devotion to meticulous detail. Dürer was a formidable draftsman and a master painter and printmaker, elevating the techniques of woodcut and copper engraving to art forms in their own right. He strove towards immediacy of effect through meticulous craftsmanship. From an early age, Dürer was introduced to the intellectual world of humanism by his close friend Willibald Pirckheimer, whose features he brought to life with an utterly direct, starkly robust realism which became his distinctive style. Dürer lived during the Reformation, an era of transition from the Gothic to the Renaissance, from the absolute power of the church of Rome to its existential threat by a troublesome Augustinian monk. 12. Samuel Bak, in conversation with Evelina Kolchinsky and members of her Club E20 series, February 12, 2021 transcribed by Cecilia Witteveen, edited by Samuel Bak: https://www.kunst-archive.net/images/ BAKDialogCLUBE20-(9f9057c8-cd04-11eb-8a46-538333d081a4).pdf 13. Samuel Bak, email to author, August 18, 2021. 14. Samuel Bak and Evelina Kolchinsky. 15. See chapter 7. 16. In 1911, Corinth suffered a stroke. He lost the agility of his left side and developed a permanent tremor in both hands. This catastrophe led to a new beginning. After a year of recovery, he resumed painting with his lame hand and in the aftermath of the stroke created his best work, as his powerfully laborious brushstrokes crossed the border between Impressionism and Expressionism. 17. Ute Ben Yosef, Renewed Engagement: Chess in the Art of Samuel Bak (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2019), 1. 18. Ute Ben Yosef, Retrospective Journey into the art of Samuel Bak (Cape Town: The South African Jewish Museum, 2013), 10. 19. 92% of Hassidim perished in the genocide of the Jews of Eastern Europe. 20. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 434. 21. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel to the utter joy of Jews around the world. U.S. President Harry Truman recognized the new nation on the same day. At midnight, in haste and disarray, the Jewish state came into being. For Arabs, it was known as the Nakba, the Catastrophe, and it marked the onset of deadly rancor over the land that continues to this day. The following day, on May

15, the Arab countries of Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq, with their immensely superior militaries, invaded Israel. The War of Independence had begun, with eighteen months of spasmodic and ferocious fighting incurring terrible losses on both sides. During this fateful time, approximately 700,000 Jews immigrated from Europe to the stricken homeland, emptying the DP camps. Approximately one million Arabs were driven into exile and approximately one million Jews were driven from Arab countries. 22. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 432. 23. Ibid. 433.

CHAPTER 3 1. I am indebted to Samuel Bak for his comprehensive information about this phase of his life, told to me in interviews with the artist and via two unpublished manuscripts: Events and art teachers that shaped me (Weston, MA, unpublished essay, July 2021) and Israel Between 1948 and 1956 (Weston, MA, unpublished essay, October 2021). 2. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 440. 3. Ibid, 466. 4. Samuel Bak, “Samuel Bak’s Disruption of Still Life: Past and Present.” Pucker Gallery July 3, 2021, webinar, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfWs-yyADiY. 5. Later he was called Samuele. Today, he goes by Sam. 6. Shlomo Narinsky Naroni was born in Russia and arrived in Palestine via Paris. In mandate Palestine, he absorbed a post-Cubistic idiom concomitant with the Eretz Yisrael artistic style. 7. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 9. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Samuel Bak, “Samuel Bak’s Disruption of Still Life: Past and Present.” Pucker Gallery, July 3, 2021, webinar, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfWs-yyADiY. 11. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 9. 12. Bak, Israel Between 1948 and 1956, 3. 13. A person who entered Israel under an Oleh visa, or The Law of Return, passed in 1950, which states that “every Jew has the right to immigrate to this country” and request to become an Israeli citizen, assuming they pose no imminent danger to public health, state security, or the Jewish people. See https://archive.jewishagency.org/ first-steps/program/5131. 14. Yiddish for gossip commentator. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 4. 15. Erich Neumann, Art and the Creative Unconscious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 159. 16. Regarded as the best high school in Israel, Aleph Municipal High School shaped the minds of pupils in the humanities, sciences, economy, and the arts. Most teachers held a doctorate and only outstanding applicants were admitted to the school, which aimed to mold them—the “new Jews”—into the future leaders of the Jewish state. 17. Bak, Israel Between 1948 and 1956, 5. 18. Bak’s political leanings would cement during his friendship with Uri Avneri, the fierce provocateur and brilliant writer of the Israeli left who from 1951 to 1955 employed Sam as an anonymous illustrator for his weekly magazine HaOlam HaZeh. 19. Bak, Israel Between 1948 and 1956, 10. 20. Ibid, 9. 21. Ibid. 22. Born in Breslau (then Germany), Alex Aronson was a notable scholar who had fled the impending Holocaust to study English literature, first in France, then at the University of Cambridge. He arrived in Santiniketan, India in

1937 and there built and directed the archives of the Rabindranath Tagore University at Bhopal. He eventually settled in Haifa, joining the English department at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of numerous books and a three-volume autobiography. 23. Bak, Israel Between 1948 and 1956, 11. 24. Ibid. 25. Galician-born Arieh Allweil settled in mandate Palestine in 1920. Like Shlomo Naroni, Bak’s first teacher in Haifa, he belonged to the Eretz Yisrael movement, which in the tradition of Reuven Rubin and Nahum Gutman depicted the Jewish homeland as an earthly paradise, fusing orientalist romanticism with the Zionist ideal. 26. Samuel Bak, Lawrence L. Langer, Bernard H. Pucker, Margo Stern Strom, Illuminations: The Art of Samuel Bak (Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves, 2010). 27. Hailing from Bucharest, Marcel Janco was a noted representative of the European avant-garde. In 1916, he became a founder-member, together with Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara of Dadaism in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. He was part of the august circle of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jean Arp, Paul Klee and Giorgio de Chirico, great innovators of the modern movement. After the brief run of Dada’s anarchic cabaret performances, for which Janco fashioned the masks, he returned to Bucharest in 1919, where he created extraordinary architectural designs brilliantly combining functionalism and constructivism and consolidated the European art scene with his magazine Contemporanul. With the rise of fascism in Romania he experienced raw and rabid antisemitism. After the unspeakable horrors of the Bucharest pogrom in 1941, he left for Palestine via Syria and Iraq, where he received a hostile greeting from the British mandatory government and the Arab population. Settling down in this turmoil, Janco turned his sights back to Europe like a hypnotized mouse before a cobra and obsessively captured what he had witnessed happening to Jews under the notorious Iron Guard. In stark expressionist line drawings, he depicted the savagery of soldiers mockingly ripping off the beards of helpless Jewish men and scenes of taunting sadism with men being led to their execution by brutal thugs. His artist’s soul was damaged. After the Israeli War of Independence, he left this phase of visual testimony and turned to a lyrical style of semi-figurative, geometric abstraction influenced by Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah. 28. Bak, Illuminations: The Art of Samuel Bak. 29. Lebrecht, Norman, Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947 (New York: Scribner, 2019), 321. 30. Yosl Bergner was born in Vienna and grew up in Warsaw, where he experienced first-hand the onset of Nazi terror. His parents relocated to Melbourne, Australia in 1937, where he studied art at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School. After serving in the army, he became a leading painter of the Australian avant-garde Social Realist school. He identified with the plight of the underprivileged in Australia, especially the aborigines. In 1948, he and his wife, the artist Audrey Bergner, left Australia and travelled to the U.S., Canada, England, and France to exhibit their work, before settling in Safed, Israel in 1951. 31. Bak, Israel Between 1948 and 1956, 16. 32. Ibid, 19. 33. Ibid. 34. After Bergner settled in Israel, haunting images of the Shoah materialized in his work, and he used substitution and metaphor to visualize the unimaginable. Anthropomorphic kitchen tools, graters, tea kettles, pans, and sacred objects aimlessly trail in space expressing rootlessness and disorientation after the great catastrophe of his people and the absence of a godhead. Later, he painted figures with Ensor-like masks that express bitter irony about the everlasting, war-torn situation in the Promised Land. 35. Samuel Bak, email to the author, December 5, 2022. 36. Bak, Israel Between 1948 and 1956, 10. 37. Founded in 1906, the roots of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design reach back to Vilna, where the great sculptor Mark Antokolsky was born. He had long dreamed of a Jewish art school, a dream that was realized by his pupil Boris Schatz, who though a talented sculptor in his own right found his true vocation after meeting Theodor Herzl in 1903. Schatz became a passionate Zionist and was assigned by the movement to establish the Bezalel

Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem with the aim of reawakening a national consciousness through the revival of ancient Jewish crafts and symbols. Bezalel differed from Western art schools in that its students were instructed under the Zionist ideal to be of service to the Jewish homeland. Those who sought a more universal training, one that might for example include nude workshops (among them Reuven Rubin), left the institution to study in Paris. 38. Coffee with whipped cream and apple strudel cake. 39. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 11. 40. The fundamental ideologies of the Bauhaus were: to eradicate the traditional hierarchy between arts and crafts; to follow the dictate that “form follows function”; and to pursue the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work or Art), in which different art forms are combined to create a cohesive whole. The elementary class of the Weimar Bauhaus was taught by the Swiss artist Johannes Itten, who sought to liberate the intuitive forces of creativity which he believed lay dormant in his students. For this he applied methods inspired by Mazdaznanism, a Zoroastrian philosophy in which he believed uncompromisingly. Itten was unconventional but achieved results. He shaved his head and donned a long robe for his classes, which irritated the rational Martin Gropius. Itten was himself an accomplished artist. His geometrical abstractions, based on scientific color theory, have a profoundly mystical impact. Other teachers at the Bauhaus in Weimar included Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky. After the inevitable split with Martin Gropius, Itten left the institution and established a private art school in Berlin, recruiting Max Bronstein in 1929 as one of its teachers. 41. Away from the horrors unfolding in Europe, Ardon immersed himself in Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah. He translated the color symbolism he had learned under Johannes Itten into a mystical vision of the cosmic presence of the Shechinah (the “presence of God in the world as conceived in Jewish theology”). Concomitant with the Bauhaus ideal of combining art with its environment, Ardon sought to realize the ideal of art in service to the Jewish state. He played an important role as a representative of the art of Israel in its international relations. 42. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 10. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Steinhardt was born in Zerkow, Poland, then went to Berlin to study art under the renowned Hermann Struck, pupil of Jozef Israëls. The Dutch master Jozef Israëls taught Marc Chagall, Lesser Ury, Lovis Corinth, and Max Liebermann; he also taught intermittently at the Bezalel. Steinhardt had been a member of the Berlin Secession and had a strong leaning towards Expressionism. Together with Ludwig Meidner he founded an Expressionist art group known as Die Pathetiker (The Pathetic Ones), which rendered works with visions of fear and premonition before the Shoah. Like Ardon, Steinhardt managed to leave Germany in 1933. In 1949, he was appointed head of the Graphics Department at Bezalel as his main medium was woodcut. 46. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 10. 47. Bak, Israel Between 1948 and 1956, 2. 48. Ibid. 49. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 11. 50. Bak, Israel Between 1948 and 1956, 8. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. See description of Creation of Wartime in Chapter 8. 54. The Habima, which began in Russia in 1913, was one of the first Hebrew language theaters in the world. By 1918, it operated under the auspices of the Moscow Art Theater. Victim to persecution under the Soviet government and during the Russian Revolution, the theater left the Soviet Union in 1926 to tour abroad. In 1928, several members of the theater relocated to Mandate Palestine and in 1945 they built a theater in Tel Aviv. Habima rose to fame for its powerful repertoire, staging traditional plays in Hebrew such as The Dybbuk, The Golem, and Uriel Acosta and carrying riveted audiences into the depths of the Jewish soul. 55. Established in 1925 in Mandate Palestine, the Ohel was originally known as the Workers’ Theater of Palestine.

Its members attempted to combine acting with agricultural and industrial labor, though it eventually became clear that to reach any level of accomplishment, actors needed to devote themselves fully to the craft. 56. Peter Frye was born in Montreal and served in the Foreign Brigade of the Spanish Civil War, about which he was very proud. He worked as an actor and director in the United States until the McCarthy era, when the antisemitic American senator led a committee to identify alleged communists. Many prominent actors, film stars, artists, and writers lost their jobs; some committed suicide. In response to this persecution, Frye moved to Israel where he met his first wife, the actress and writer Batya Lancet, and began working as a producer and art designer for the Habima, the Ohel, and the Cameri theaters. 57. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 11. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Samuel Bak, interviews with author, June 30, 2021, and August 11, 2021. 62. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 11. 63. Bak. Painted in Words: A Memoir, 154. 64. Ibid, 293. 65. Ibid, 120. 66. Ibid. 67. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 4. See also chapter 1. 68. Samuel Bak, interview with author, November 8, 2021. The euphemism organizirt was used in the camps to refer to theft or illicit procurement. 69. Bak, Israel Between 1948 and 1956, 1. 70. Samuel Bak, interview with author, November 22, 2021.

CHAPTER 4 1. Communities of Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews have existed in France since the Middle Ages, all along exposed to discrimination and intolerance. After centuries of persecutions and various expulsions, an irony of the aftermath of the French Revolution was that the despotic Napoleon granted the Jews full citizenship. 2. In 1902, the art lover Alfred Boucher set up about 80 ateliers at La Ruche, charging the residents 50 francs per year. 3. Bohm-Duchen, Monica, “Art in Paris in the Early Twentieth Century: L’Ecole Juive,” Jewish Affairs, September 1987, 52-58. 4. By the outbreak of World War I, the École Juive had become an inherent part of French culture. Or so they felt. For Ossip Zadkine and Moïse Kisling it was natural to join the French army to defend the Motherland. But gradually a hostile atmosphere seeped into the French avant-garde scene, one that had always been lurking but was made more mainstream by the nationalist socialist impetus from Germany and Austria. It was expressed in newspaper articles and art magazines by critics such as Louis Vauxcelles and Camille Mauclair and played a dominant role in the shaping and marketing of art movements. A “foreign influence” was accused of undermining French national art and between the two World Wars it became increasingly difficult for a Jew to exhibit in Paris. See Charles Dellheim, Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2021), 418-421. 5. Chana Orloff returned to Paris after living in Palestine, feeling that the city was part of her creative essence. She visited Israel frequently, where her sculptures received warm recognition. 6. Kenneth E. Silver and Romy Golan, The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris 1905-1945 (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1985), 55. 7. Marc Chagall, who held an impressive exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum in the early 1950s, was much feted as the

greatest Jewish painter of all time. Ben-Gurion offered Chagall a house in the newborn state, but he graciously declined this welcoming gesture. By admitting that his heart belonged to Paris, he temporarily infuriated the Israeli press. He revisited Israel and made a significant contribution to Israel’s art treasures, notably by creating the stained glass windows for the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, and the impressive tapestries of the Knesset. 8. Varian Fry made it his mission to save leading European Jewish artists and intellectuals from the Nazi terror. See Andy Marino, A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Initially Lipchitz, unable to grasp the danger they were in even after fleeing with his wife and son to the south of France, rejected Fry’s offer to help. In the end, Fry managed to get the Lipchitz family on board a ship and they arrived in New York in 1941, penniless but warmly welcomed by the Americans and generously helped back on their feet. After the war, Lipchitz returned to France but donated a significant portion of his estate to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in the hope of creating a repository of his work comparable to the one that Rodin had in Paris. 9. For an historical overview see Julian Jackson, De Gaulle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 10. See György Litvan, ed. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt and Repression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 11. For and in-depth overview see David Charlwood, Suez Crisis 1956: End of Empire and the Reshaping of the Middle East (Cold War 1945-1991) (Barnsley, England: Pen and Sword Military, 2019). 12. Samuel Bak, email to author, December 23, 2021. 13. Painted after the ominous events of April 26, 1937, when a Basque village was bombed by Hitler’s air force in support of General Franco, Guernica soon became a universal icon against destruction and war. At the time, Bak found this highly revered painting slightly dated, though he has since revised this thought. 14. Bak, interview with author, November 22, 2021. 15. French for “incredible Slavic charm.” Ibid. 16. A painting technique that favored free stain-like brushstrokes and had fully embraced abstraction. 17. Samuel Bak, interview with author, August 12, 2021. 18. Samuel Bak, email to author, December 12, 2021. 19. Bak, interview with author, November 8, 2021. 20. The painting Remembrance from 1979 is a still life with pears (for Bak the fruit of life). One of them is incommensurably large and out of it steps a shtetl man, perhaps his father. Also in this painting are: the stones placed on Jewish graves for remembrance; the broken hand of Michelangelo’s Adam next to a small pear; an Israeli soldier (Bak’s fallen friend Adam?) holding a banner; a shroud (or perhaps a tablecloth) from grandmother Rachel’s living room containing a kiddush cup and wine bottle; a broken wooden rainbow, mended by nails; a man gazing at the viewer while behind him the shtetl man’s shadow observes; and a key that has fallen from its disparately tiny keyhole. 21. Samuel Bak, email to author, December 22, 2021. 22. Ibid. 23. Among them was the very helpful Harry Eglin. Bak, interview with author, November 24, 2021. 24. Many years later, Bak reconnected with Renée Poznanski in Boston, now a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, who was in Boston presenting a paper about the history of Jews in France under the Vichy regime. 25. Bak, interview with author, November 22, 2021. 26. Bak, email to author, December 12, 2021. Weltschmerz describes the feeling experienced by an individual who believes that reality never lives up to expectation, resulting in a sadness about life and an acute awareness of evil and suffering. 27. Samuel Bak and Paul Nagano, The Past Continues (Boston: David R. Godine, 1988). 28. Bak, interview with author, November 22, 2021. 29. Samuel Bak, interview with author, November 24, 2021. 30. Bak, The Past Continues. 31. Samuel Bak, interview with author, December 8, 2021. In this conversation, Bak specifically selected this drawing

as an illustration of his Paris phase. 32. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 12. 33. Ibid. 34. To learn more about Sartre’s reflections on antisemitism, see Jean-Paul Sartre, “Réflexions sur la question juive,” first published in December 1945 in Les temps modernes. 35. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 12. 36. Bak, interview with author, December 8, 2021. 37. Ibid. 38. Bak, interview with author, November 22, 2021. 39. Ibid. 40. Bak, interview with author, December 8, 2021. 41. Bak, Illuminations: The Art of Samuel Bak.

CHAPTER 5 1. I am indebted to Samuel Bak for his personal recollections of this period, from his essay Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome (Weston, MA: unpublished essay, 2022), and gleaned from an interview with him on January 26, 2022. 2. Nagano, The Past Continues. 3. Samuel Bak, interview with artist, January 26, 2022. 4. Ibid. 5. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome, 3. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid, 18. 8. In 1947, Levi submitted the manuscript to two major Italian publishers who rejected it. He then found a small publishing house in Turin called De Silva, who published it to no acclaim. It was soon forgotten. Only a decade later, when Einaudi (Italy’s most prominent publisher) reprinted it, did it gain almost instant praise. It was soon translated into many languages, including English. 9. The iconographic tradition of the horned Moses was the baffling result of a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for “rays” by St. Jerome in his translation of the Bible into Latin. It was further transmitted by images of Moses in medieval illuminated manuscripts. 10. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome, 2. 11. Art historian Eva Atlan recognized this in the essay she wrote for a 2006 exhibition of Bak’s work in Germany. See Eva Atlan, Samuel Bak: Metaphern des menschlichen Dramas im Holocaust (Heidelberg, Verlag GmbH, 2006). 12. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome, 9. 13. Paul Celan. “Death Fugue” Translated into English by Pierre Joris, https://poets.org/poem/death-fugue. 14. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome, 9. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid, 27. 20. Ibid, 18. 21. Ibid, 27. Washburn was a leading art curator at the time. 22. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome, 14. 23. Ibid, 17. 24. Ibid, 27.

25. Ibid, 20. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid, 28. 28. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 478. 29. Ibid. 30. I am indebted to Gwynne Robins Schrire for pointing out this event. 31. Samuel Bak, “Figuring Out: An Exploration of the Art of Samuel Bak and Tribute to Marc Skrvisky,” Facing History and Ourselves, March 19, 2022, panel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z0cC6qCZtw. 32. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome, 32. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid, 19. 35. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 472. 36. Ibid. 472-73. 37. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome, 41. 38. Bak, interview with author, January 26, 2022. 39. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 413. 40. Bak and Nagano, The Past Continues. 41. Still life in Italian is called natura morta and is therefore connected as much to death as to life. 42. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome, 20. 43. Pittura Metafisica, or Metaphysical Painting, was first developed in 1910 by Giorgio de Chirico. 44. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome, 21. 45. Ibid, 23. 46. Ibid, 50. 47. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959-1964 Created in Rome, 45. 48. Ibid, 34. 49. Ibid, 43. 50. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 477. 51. Ibid. 52. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959-1964 Created in Rome, 2. 53. Samuel Bak and Lawrence L. Langer, In a Different Light: Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2001), 43-44. 54. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome, 68. 55. The idea of the Shoah being ripped out of Jewish historical consciousness was addressed in-depth by Trudy Gold during her lecture entitled: “Hollywood and Leon Uris’ film Exodus Part 1,” December 14, 2021, Lockdown University lecture series, [email protected]. 56. Italian for “a life of self-indulgence.” Bak and Nagano, The Past Continues. 57. Italian for “a fine appearance.” Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome, 18 and Bak, interview with the author, January 26, 2022. 58. Bak, interview with author, January 26, 2022. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid.

CHAPTER 6 1. The personal material of this chapter is based on two recorded Skype conversations between Bak and the author on January 26 and February 23, 2022. The text of this chapter was read and revised by Bak in April 2022 and sent via email to the author on April 19, 2022. 2. Samuel Bak, interview with author, February 23, 2022.

3. Samuel Bak, email to author, April 19, 2022. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Bak tried to settle in Israel in 1964, but “That 1964 experiment had been disappointing. Although I had established a growing reputation as theater designer, my intense work with directors, actors, carpenters, electricians, dressmakers, and other members of the theater crowd had totally alienated me from my painting and made me quite unhappy. Returned to Italy and reimmersed in my art, I transformed my pictorial language in ways that were challenging and satisfying. But nostalgia for my country and my friends and a feeling of guilt about distancing Mother from her granddaughters led me to try a second return.” See Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 9-10. 8. Samuel Bak, “A Self-Portrait in Words,” in Samuel Bak Retrospektive 1946-1997 (Bad Frankenhausen, 1998), 61. 9. Bak, email to author, April 19, 2022. 10. Bak, interview with author, February 23, 2022. 11. The exhibition entitled Surrealism took place in the Pavilion Rubinstein of the Tel Aviv Museum from December 1966 to January 1967 and contained works by Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Arp, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, and many others. 12. Bak, interview with author, February 23, 2022. 13. Bak, email to author, April 19, 2022. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. The biblical quote is from the Book of Ecclesiastes 1:9. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Bak, The Past Continues. 19. Bak, interview with author, January 26, 2022. 20. Zew Hagana le Yisrael (Defense Army for Israel). 21. The gallery was owned by Efraim Ilin, an Israeli tycoon and securities expert. 22. “’Prophecy’ painting attracts crowds to Jaffa Gallery,” The Jerusalem Post (Jerusalem, Israel), Sep. 17, 1967. 23. Ezekiel 43:10-27. 24. Bak, email to author, April 19, 2022. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. Bak is referring to David Ben-Gurion’s famous words: “If I could choose between peace and all the territories which we conquered last year, I would prefer peace.” See Ben-Gurion’s interview in the Jerusalem Archive, https//www.timesofisrael.com. 29. Bak, email to author, April 19, 2022. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid 33. Ibid. 34. Bak, The Past Continues. 35. Bak, interview with author, January 26, 2022. 36. Exhibitions listed in https://museum.imj.org.il. 37. Bak, interview with the author, January 26, 2022. Haim Gamzu was director of the Tel Aviv Museum from 1962 to 1976. 38. Bak, The Past Continues. 39. When Bak moved to his new studio, he acquired a printing press for etchings, along with a collection of books

on this demanding technique. He undertook the self-study of etching, aided by his familiarity with the process of lithography. A good number of works that survived this phase were merely experimental and not intended for the creation of editions. But the experiment can sometimes create the most spontaneous, forthright document. 40. Bak, Events and art teachers that shaped me, 4. 41. Ibid. 42. Vince, Catharsis Through Memory, Samuel Bak: Painted in Words—A Memoir, 10. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid, 11. Reconfirmed in Samuel Bak, “The Journey Through Modern Times: The Art of Samuel Bak,” March 25, 2022, Pucker Gallery, webinar, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV1o7ad9Zpg. 45. Vince, Catharsis Through Memory, Samuel Bak: Painted in Words—A Memoir, 4. 46. Yizkor is a Jewish prayer for the dead. 47. Ute Ben Yosef, Renewed Engagement: Chess in the Art of Samuel Bak (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2019), 3. 48. A figure or object in the foreground of a painting used to increase the illusion of depth. 49. Samuel Bak, interview with Richard Raskin, February 17, 2003. See Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study on the Life of a Photo (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2004). 50. As in Genesis 3:19: “For dust you are/And to dust you shall return.” 51. Bak, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, 161-164. 52. Bak, interview with author, February 23, 2022. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Bak, Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959-1964 Created in Rome, 68. 57. Bak, interview with author, February 23, 2022. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Bak, email to author, April 19, 2022. 61. Avram Kampf, Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1984), 26. 62. The Eastern European prototype. 63. Joachim-Jean Aberbach, Bak: Oils/Watercolors/Drawings 1972-1974 (New York: Aberbach Fine Art, 1974). 64. Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Humanscape of Destruction in Samuel Bak’s Art,” The National Jewish Monthly (September 1974): 9. 65. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 9. 66. Samuel Bak, “Memory Matters: The Art of Samuel Bak,” March 1, 2022, Pucker Gallery, webinar, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Ij_eaoL3Sxl 67. After Haim Gamzu retired as the director of the Tel Aviv Museum in 1976, Bak’s paintings were relegated to a storeroom until many decades later when Cecilia Witteveen and Siegfried B. Schaefer visited the museum to look for his paintings as part of their project to compile a comprehensive catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work. 68. Avram Kampf was a professor of the history of modern art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a leading historian of Jewish art of the 20th century. He featured Bak’s work in two of his scholarly volumes, Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century and Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art, in which he refers to Bak as a “painter philosopher.” See Kampf, Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century, 126 and Avram Kampf, Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art (London: Lund Humphries, 1990), 96. 69. For more on this exhibition, see Avram Kampf, Samuel Bak Paintings 1946-1978 (Haifa, Israel: University of Haifa, 1978). 70. Bak, interview with author, January 23, 2022. Bak could not remember the name of the critic, and the critique could not be verified. 71. Jochai Rosen, email to author, May 31, 2022.

CHAPTER 7 1. I am indebted to Samuel Bak for carefully revising my original text for this chapter. 2. In 1974, 1975, and 1978. 3. An effect or expression of powerful will and immense angry force, it was the term used to describe Michelangelo’s scene of hell in the Sistine Chapel. 4. Irene Taylor, “Shards of Time: Samuel Bak and the Art of Memory,” In Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001 (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2002), 14. 5. Bak, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, 178-179. 6. Eva Atlan, “Samuel Bak. Aspekte zur künstlerischen Entwicklung und Ikonographie,” in Samuel Bak Retrospektive 1946-1997 (Bad Frankenhausen: Panorama Museum, June 13 to September 6, 1998), 40, note 29. 7. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 481. 8. Paul Celan. “Todesfuge” translated by John Felstiner. https://poethead.wordpress.com. 9. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 481. Bak disguised their meaning in titles such as Ancient Industries. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid, 481-482. 12. “In New York it became clear that life together was not simple.” Samuel Bak, Interview with author, January 16, 2022. 13. Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. 14. Kallenbach, Rolf, dir. Herbst der Welt. Samuel Bak—ein Maler aus Israel (Munich: INSEL-FILM, Produkstionsgesellschaft Norbert Handwerk + Partner, 1977). 15. Rolf Kallenbach, Monuments to our Dreams (Boston: Pucker Art Publications 2009). Originally published in French and German in Wiesbaden, Limes Verlag, 1977. 16. Though Kallenbach eventually became known as a gallerist, he continued to produce films on contemporary artists such as Hans Hartung and Karel Appel. 17. Bak, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, 272. 18. It was purchased in 1978 (Inventory Number 4170). From 2011-12, it was shown in the exhibition entitled Albrecht Dürer–Genius Marke Vorbild (Genius as Example) at der Galerie Stihl in Waiblingen, Germany. Hannes Schmidt (Curator of the art collection of the Dürer-Haus-Trust, Nuremberg) email to the author, August 24, 2021. 19. Bak, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, 272. 20. Michael Mathias Prechtl and Ernest Landau, Samuel Bak, Catalogue No. 37 (Albrecht Dürer Society. Germanisches Nationalmuseum [Germanic National Museum] Nuremberg, 27 November 1977 to 29 January 1978). 21. In the Esslinger Kunstverein and the Kurpfälzisches Museum, respectively. 22.Ernest Landau, Die zerbrechliche Welt des Samuel Bak (The fragile world of Samuel Bak) Catalogue No. 37 (Albrecht Dürer Society. Germanisches Nationalmuseum [Germanic National Museum] Nuremberg, 27 November 1977 to 29 January 1978). 23. Ibid. 24. Bak, Aus meinem Leben (From my life) Catalogue No. 37 (Albrecht Dürer Society. Germanisches Nationalmuseum [Germanic National Museum] Nuremberg, 27 November 1977 to 29 January 1978). 25. Barry Schwartz, Bak: Works of the Last Decade (Waltham, MA: Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, 1976). 26. Samuel Bak: Drawings and Prints. A Benefit Exhibition for the America-Israel Cultural Foundation (Pittsburgh, PA: Michael Berger Gallery, 1977). 27. Samuel Bak, email to author, June 30, 2022. 28. Erik Gustavson and Marin Sullivan, Regarding After: Art in a Post-Holocaust World (unpublished independent study, April 29, 2016), 12.

29. Hannes Schmidt, email to author, August 24, 2021. I am indebted to Schmidt, presently the curator of the art collection of the Dürer-Haus-Trust, Nuremberg, for information regarding the works of Samuel Bak in the Dürer Haus Museum. 30. Atlan, Samuel Bak Retrospektive 1946-1997, 34. 31. The terms “Apostles” and “Evangelists” are often interchanged. 32. The book Reflections was designed by Daniela Bak, now a graphic designer, and published by Mapa Editions in Tel Aviv. 33. Bak, interview with author, January 26, 2022. 34. Alain Bosquet, Samuel Bak–Oeuvres Récentes (Paris: Galerie Carpentier, 1988). 35. In the Galerie Marc Richard, Bleicherweg 18. 36. Siobhan Kattago, Ambiguous Memory: The Nazi Past and German National Identity (Westport: Praeger, 2001), 56–58. And Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), 430-432. 37. It was followed by an exhibition of the same name at the Pucker Gallery, with an introduction written by Lawrence L. Langer. 38. Eva Atlan, Samuel Bak: Landschaften Jüdischer Erfahrung (Frankfurt a.M., Frankfurter Jüdisches Museum, 1993). Atlan’s text also appeared in Samuel Bak Retrospektive 1946-1997, along with other essays compiled by Gerd Lindner for an exhibition in 1998 at the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen, Germany. 39. Gerd Lindner, Samuel Bak Retrospektive 1946-1997 (Bad Frankenhausen: Panorama Museum, June 13 to September 6, 1998), 130. 40. Ibid, 136. 41. Expounded by Gisela Dischner, “Zu den Gedichten von Nelly Sachs,” in Das Buch der Nelly Sachs (Frankfurt a.M: Bengt Holmquist, 1968), 311. 42. Lawrence L. Langer, “The Holocaust Themes in the Paintings of Samuel Bak,” in Samuel Bak Retrospektive 19461997 (Bad Frankenhausen: Panorama Museum, June 13 to September 6, 1998), 137. 43. Dischner, Das Buch der Nelly Sachs, 104, note 6. 44. Langer, Samuel Bak Retrospektive 1946-1997, 140. 45. For a full list of exhibitions see ttps://kunst-archive.net/en/wvz/samuel_bak/exhibitions

CHAPTER 8 1. Samuel Bak, email to author, July 13, 2022. 2. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 103. 3. Bak, email to author, July 13, 2022. 4. Bak, Samuel Bak Retrospektive 1946-1997, 66. 5. Ibid. 6. Samuel Bak, “Figuring Out: An Exploration of the Art of Samuel Bak and Tribute to Marc Skrvisky,” March 19, 2022, Facing History and Ourselves, panel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z0cC6qCZtw. 7. Ibid. 8. Bak, email to author, July 13, 2022. 9. Samuel Bak, “Memory Matters: The Art of Samuel Bak,” March 1, 2022, Pucker Gallery, webinar, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Ij_eaoL3Sxl. 10. Samuel Bak, email to the author, August 1, 2022. 11. Bak, email to author, July 13, 2022. 12. Ibid. 13. The story of the German Army officer Major Karl Plagge, who rescued Bak, his mother, and his father by establishing a special forced labor camp, is related in Chapter 1. 14. Bak, email to author, July 13, 2022.

15. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 246. 16. Not all Christian leaders were as guilty. While stationed in Turkey during World War II, the Papal Nuncio Angelo Roncalli saved thousands of Jewish lives. He later became Pope John XXIII. 17. Reproduced in Chapter 2. 18. Bak, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, 174. 19. Bak, email to author, July 13, 2022. 20. Psalm 130 from the Hebrew Bible: Ketuvim. 21. See Chapter 5. 22. Bak, email to author, July 13, 2022. 23. Other examples of Bak’s work using the pillow motif appear in chapter 1. 24. Bak, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, 272. 25. Compare to After Dürer (Melencolia), Bak’s first Melencolia motif painting, illustrated and discussed in Chapter 7. 26. See: Raskin, Richard, A Child at Gunpoint: A Case Study in the Life of a Photo (Arhaus, Denmark: Arhaus University Press, 2004). 27. Bak, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, 297. 28. To read more about the use of this icon in Bak’s paintings, see Danna Nolan Fewell and Gary Phillips, Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2009). 29. Even though In the New Testament, it is explicitly stated (Math. 27:2 and John 19:16) that Jesus of Nazareth was sentenced to death by the Romans under Pontius Pilate, who was the Roman governor of Judea. 30. Ziva Amishai-Maizels. “The Jewish Jesus.” Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982): 84-104. 31. A citrus fruit used by Jews during the holiday of Sukkot. 32. Uri Zvi Grinberg. An excerpt from the poem: “Uri Zvi before the Cross.” Translated by James Adam Redfield. https://ingeveb.org/people/uri-tsvi-grinberg. 33. For example, in Chagall’s The White Crucifixion, 1938, now at the Art Institute of Chicago, the figure of Jesus is in immense pain, nailed to the cross in a world of horror. Although painted in a Christian iconographic tradition, the image of Jesus here is not intended as a Christian motif. The scenes that surround the cross, the shattered village, and the burning synagogue are instead emblems of Jewish martyrology. 34. Bak, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, 298. 35. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 252. 36. Lawrence L Langer, Holocaust Testimonies. The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992), xv. 37. Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 22, 30. 38. Ibid, 2. 39. Ibid, 122. 40. Lawrence L. Langer, Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany; State University of New York, 1982), 129. 41. Ibid, 67. 42. Rolf Kallenbach, Ernest Landau, Klaus Henning, Lothar Honnef, Alain Bosquet, Pamela Wolfson, Mattias Mende, Jean Louis Cornuz, Eva Atlan, Linda Reisch, Georg Heuberger, Sylvia Nelson, Pamela Fletcher, Michael Fishbane, Jeanne Koles, among others. 43. Bak, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, 315. 44. Ibid. 45. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 105. 46. Amos Oz, Painted in Words: A Memoir (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2001), vii. 47. See Chapter 1 for the full story of the Pinkas, how it came to be in Bak’s possession, and what happened to it after the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto. 48. Bak, email to author, July 13, 2022. 49. Ibid. 50. For a reprint of the letter, originally sent to Rimantas Stankiewicz on September 13, 2000, see Bak, Painted in

Words: A Memoir, 492. 51. Bak, Painted in Words: A Memoir, 353-361. 52. See Chapter 1 to read about the series of memorial paintings Bak completed upon his return from Vilna in honor of these deceased relatives. 53. Bak, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, 335. 54. See Chapter 1. 55. Samuel Bak, email to author, August 1, 2022, written while editing this chapter. 56. Samuel Bak, Emanuelis Zingeris, Laima Lauckaite, Al Atzmy, Samuel Bak: Sugrizimas/Returning Home (Vilna, Lithuania: The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2001). 57. The monograph was edited by Irene Tayler, who also wrote the Foreword and co-authored, with Alicia Craig Faxon, the chapter entitled “Shards of Time: Samuel Bak and the Art of Memory.” Langer contributed the chapter “The Holocaust in Bak’s Art” and Saul Touster locates Bak’s oeuvre within the momentum of modern Western art in his chapter “In and Out of Surrealism: Placing Samuel Bak.” Pucker’s Afterword, entitled “A Letter to my Friend,” pays tribute to the profound relationship and boundless mutual respect between gallerist and artist. 58. Samuel Bak, Chaim Basok, Keren Katzir Stiebel, and Yehudit Shendar, An Arduous Road: Samuel Bak 60 Years of Creativity (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Art Museum, 2006). 59. See https://www.kunst-archive.net for a thorough view of Bak’s career, beginning with images of the Pinkas. 60. Reproduced in Chapter 1. 61. Adorno, Theodor W. “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949). Original translation in Weber, Samuel and Shierry Weber Nicholson, Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms: Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, March 29, 1983), 19. 62. Bak, email to author, July 13, 2022.

CHAPTER 9 1. Bak, email to author, July 13, 2022. 2. Notably summed up in Saul Touster’s chapter “In and Out of Surrealism: Placing Samuel Bak” in Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001 (Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2001) 37-51. 3. Yiddish for “bitter laughter.” 4. Samuel Bak, “Art, Memory, Music: A Conversation with Artist Samuel Bak & Conductor James Conlon.” March 14, 2022, Pucker Gallery, webinar, https://youtu.be/sKKMmNr_6R4. The webinar was held during Bak’s exhibition at the Pucker Gallery of that year, entitled Figuring Out. 5. Illustrated in Chapter 1. 6. Samuel Bak, email to author, August 31, 2022. 7. Trudy Gold, “The Jews in England’s Green and Pleasant Land.” November 9, 2021, Lockdown University lecture series. [email protected]. 8. Touster, Samuel Bak Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings from 1946 to 2001, 47.

AGE 2

WITH COUSIN TAMARA

VILNA, 1944 OR 1945

GRANDMOTHER SHIFRA, 1935

AUNT JANINA

AUNT YETTA, 1946

10 WILENSKA ST., VILNA

JONAS BAK, 1933

WITH GRANDFATHER KHONE

BENEDICTINE CONVENT OF ST. CATHERINE

GRANDMOTHER RACHEL, JONAS, AUNT TSILLA, AND GRANDFATHER CHAYIM, LATE 1920S

HKP 567 FORCED LABOR CAMP

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL, 1949

WITH MITSIA IN PARIS, 1957

ROME, 1959

SAVYON, ISRAEL, 1973

PARIS, 1983

WITH DANIELA, ILANA, MIKHAL, JOSÉE, AND RIMANTIS, IN VILNA, 2001

WESTON, MA, 2001

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA, OMAHA, 2023

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aberbach, Joachim-Jean and Samuel Bak. Bak: Oils/Watercolours/Drawings 1972-1974. New York: Aberbach Fine Art, 1974. Aberbach, Joachim-Jean and Samuel Bak. Bak: Oils and Drawings 1974-75. New York: Aberbach Fine Art, 1975. Aberbach, Joachim-Jean and Samuel Bak. BAK—paintings in the last decade. New York: Aberbach Fine Art, 1976. Aberbach, Joachim-Jean and Samuel Bak. Samuel Bak: Landscapes of Jewish History. New York: Aberbach Fine Art, 1978. Andrijauskas, Antanas. “Litvak Art in the Context of them “École de Paris.”” Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts and Sciences, 58, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 9-28, 87. Atlan, Eva, Samuel Bak, Lawrence L. Langer, and Gerd Linder. Samuel Bak Retrospektive 1946-1997. Bad Frankenhausen, Germany: Panorama Museum, 1998. Atlan, Eva, Samuel Bak, and Georg Heuberger. Ewiges Licht: Samuel Bak, eine Kindheit im Schatten des Holocaust. Frankfurt a.M., Germany, Schriftenreihe des Jüdisches Museum, 1996. Bak, Samuel. Painted in Words: A Memoir. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2001. Bak, Samuel. Art—and how I tried to get what it was. Unpublished manuscript, Weston, MA, 2020. Bak, Samuel. Events and art teachers that shaped me. Unpublished manuscript, Weston, MA, 2021. Bak, Samuel. Israel Between 1948 and 1956. Unpublished manuscript, Weston, MA, 2021. Bak, Samuel. “Art, Memory, and Music.” A conversation with James Conlon and Bernard H. Pucker, Pucker Gallery. Boston, MA, March 14, 2022. Bak Samuel. “Figuring Out: An Exploration of the Art of Samuel Bak and tribute to Marc Skirvsky.” Facing History and Ourselves, Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, March 19, 2022. Bak, Samuel. “Samuel Bak and the Art of Remembrance.” Conversation with Kurt Steinberg, Montserrat School of Art, Beverly, MA, February 3, 2022. Bak, Samuel. “Journey Through Modern Times: The Art of Samuel Bak.” Conversation with Gary A. Phillips, Amy

Eisner, and Bernard H. Pucker, Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, March 25, 2022. Bak Samuel. “Commencement Address.” Montserrat College of Art, Beverly. MA, April 2022. Bak, Samuel. “Memory Matters.” Conversation with Mark Celinscak and Bernard H. Pucker, Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA, April 3, 2022 Bak, Samuel. “Illuminations: The Art of Samuel Bak.” Facing History and Ourselves, Boston, MA, August 31, 2022. Bak, Samuel. Random Thoughts on Paintings 1959–1964 Created in Rome. Unpublished manuscript, Weston, MA, 2022. Bak, Samuel, Klaus Honnef and Rolf Kallenbach. Samuel Bak. Braunschweig: Kunstverein Braunschweig e.V., 1978. Bak, Samuel and Avram Kampf. Samuel Bak: Paintings 1946-1978. Haifa: University of Haifa, 1978. Bak, Samuel, Paul T. Nagano and Bernard H. Pucker. The Past Continues. Boston: Godine and Pucker Safrai Gallery, 1988 Bak, Samuel and Pamela M. Fletcher. The Fruit of Knowledge. Boston: Pucker Gallery, 1995. Bak, Samuel, Alicia Craig Faxon, Lawrence L. Langer, Bernard H. Pucker, Irene Tayler, and Saul Touster. Between Worlds: Paintings and Drawings of Samuel Bak from 1946 to 2001. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2002. Bak, Samuel, Andrew Meyers, and Bernard H. Pucker “Samuel Bak’s Disruption of Still Life: Past and Present.” Webinar, Pucker Gallery, Boston, March 7, 2021. Bak, Samuel, Anne Eisner, Gary A. Phillips and Samuel Bak. “A Journey through Modern Times.” Webinar, Pucker Gallery and the JCC of Greater Boston, March 22, 2022. Bak, Samuel and Bernard H. Pucker. “Ever Present: Candles and Chance in the Art of Samuel Bak.” Lecture, Florida Holocaust Museum, October 2, 2022. Bashevis Singer, Isaac. “The Humanscape of Destruction in Samuel Bak’s Art.” The National Jewish Monthly, September, 1974: 9. Bassani, Giorgio, trans. Isabel Quigly. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. London: Faber and Faber, 1965. Ben-Ari, Raikin. Habima. New York: American Book, 1957. Ben Yosef, Ute. Renewed Engagement: Chess in the Art of Samuel Bak. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2019. Bohm-Duchen, Monica. “Art in Paris in the Early Twentieth Century: l’école juive.” Jewish Affairs (September 1987): 52-58. Bosquet, Alain. Samuel Bak—Ouevres Récentes. Paris: Galerie Carpentier, 1988. Cornuz, Jean Louis. Chess as Metaphor in The Art of Samuel Bak. Boston and Montreux: Pucker Safrai Gallery and

C.A. Olsommer, 1991. Dellheim, Charles. Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2021. Deppner, Martin Roman. “The Hidden Trace: Jewish Paths Through Modernity.” Die Verborgene Spur. Osnabrück: Felix Nussbaum Haus, 2008. Deppner, Martin Roman. Jewish Paths Through Modernity. Osnabrück: Felix Nussbaum Haus, 2008. Elon, Amos. The Israelis: Founders and Sons. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971. Fewell, Danna Nolan and Gary A. Phillips. Icon of Loss: The Haunting Child of Samuel Bak. Boston: Pucker Art Publicatioms, 2009. Fishbane, Michael. Bak, Myth, Midrash, and Mysticism: Paintings. Boston: Pucker Gallery, 1995. Fletcher, Pamela and Bernard H. Pucker. Samuel Bak: Landscapes of Jewish Experience II. Boston: Pucker Gallery, 1996. Gantz, Jeffrey. Dice: New Paintings by Samuel Bak. Boston: Pucker Gallery, 2017. Gelber, Mark H., Kirsten Wagner and Milly Heyd. Osnabrück, Felix-Nussbaum Haus, [1908]. Gombrich, Ernst H. Jüdische Identität und Jüdisches Schicksal. Vienna: Eine Diskussionsbemerkung, 1997. Gustafson, Erik and Maria Sullivan. “Regarding After: Art in a Post-Holocaust World.” Publication, April 29, 2016. Haftmann, Werner. Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert 1: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte mit über 500 Künstlerbiographien. Munich: Prestel, 1987. Hahnefeld, Joachim. Bak: Denkmäler unserer Träume. Hamburg: Pierot Galerie, 1987. Henning, Klaus. Die unabweisbare Modernität von Samuel Bak. Braunschweig: Kunstverein, 1978. Honnef, Lothar. Samuel Bak, Gemälde 1965-1987. Bamberg: Stadtgalerie Bamberg, 1988. Kallenbach, Rolf. Denkmäler unserer Träume. Munich: Limes Verlag, 1977. Kallenbach, Rolf. Herbst der Welt. Die philosophischen Bilder des Samuel Bak. Munich: Limes Verlag, 1978. Kallenbach, Rolf. Denkmäler unserer Träume. Begegnungen mit dem Maler Samuel Bak in Skizzen, Briefen, Aufzeichnungen. Wiesbaden, Limes Verlag, 1977. Kampf, Avram. Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art. London: Lund Humphries, 1990. Kampf, Avram. Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1984. Kohansky, Mendel. The Hebrew Theatre: Its First Fifty Years. Jerusalem: Israel University Press, 1969.

Koles, Jeanne. Ongoing Conversation: Birds in the Art of Samuel Bak. Boston: Pucker Gallery, June/July 2020. Landau, Ernest. Die zerbrechliche Welt des Samuel Bak. Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1977. Langer, Lawrence L. Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings by Samuel Bak. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 1997. Langer, Lawrence L. In A Different Light: The Book of Genesis in the Art of Samuel Bak. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2001. Langer, Lawrence L. Samuel Bak: Return to Vilna. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2002. Langer, Lawrence L. Using and Abusing the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Langer, Lawrence L and Andrew Meyers. Figuring Out: Paintings by Samuel Bak 2017–2022. Boston: Pucker Art Publications, 2022. Langer, Lawrence L. A Life in Testimony. New Haven: Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies, 2022. Lebrecht, Norman. Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World 1874-1947. London: Oneworld, 2019. Levy, Emanuel. The Habima—Israel’s National Theater 1917-1977: A Study of Cultural Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Marino, Andy. American Pimpernel: The Man Who Saved the Artists on Hitler’s Death List. London: Random House, 1999. Mende, Matthias: Bak und Dürer. Nuremberg: Dürer-Haus, 1990. Nelson, Sylvia and Bernard H. Pucker. Samuel Bak: A Retrospective Journey. Boston: Pucker Gallery, 1994. Neumann, Erich. Art and the Creative Unconscious. New York: Bollington Foundation, 1959. Prechtl, Michael Matthias and Ernest Landau. Samuel Bak: Ausstellung der Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft im Germanisches Nationalmuseum. Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1977. Pucker, Bernard H. Chess as Metaphor in the Art of Samuel Bak. New York: Soufer Gallery, 1992. Pucker, Bernard H. Landscapes of Jewish Experience. Boston: Pucker Gallery, 1993. Reisch, Linda, Georg Heuberger, Amos Oz, Eva Atlan and Samuel Bak. Landschaften Jüdischer Erfahrung. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdisches Museum, 1993. Schaefer, Siegfried B. and Cecilia A.M. Witteveen. “Samuel Bak Catalogue raisonné.” Art Archives. https://www. kunst-archive.net/en/wvz/samuel_bak/vita Silver, Kenneth E. and Romy Golan. The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris 1905-1945. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1985.

Vinca, Laima. Catharsis Through Memory Samuel Bak: Painted in Words—A Memoir. Boston, Pucker Art Publications, 2021. Wolfson, Pamela. Samuel Bak: Still Life and Beyond. Boston: Pucker Safrai Gallery, 1989. Zimmermann, Monika. “Denkmäler unserer Träume.” Goettinger Tageblatt, March 26/27, 1978.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ute Ben Yosef is a Namibian-born art historian who studied Art History and Librarianship at the University of Pretoria, South Africa and the Free University of Berlin, Germany, where she earned her PhD in History of Art (magna cum laude). Formerly a Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Pretoria, she has published books on African art, a monograph on the Lithuanian-born sculptor Moses Kottler, research papers on artists who survived the Shoah, and exhibition catalogues and art reviews in Swiss newspapers. She first met Samuel Bak while living in Switzerland and coming face to face with his paintings had a tremendous impact on her. Returning to Cape Town, she held the post of head Librarian of the Jacob Gitlin Library and lectured in her field of Art History. She came into contact with Bernie and Sue Pucker, whose regular donations of Bak’s exhibition catalogues at the Pucker Gallery established the basis for the enthusiastic reception of his art in South Africa. She wrote the catalogue essay for Retrospective Journey into the Art of Samuel Bak for the South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town (2013) and has subsequently written for several Pucker Gallery exhibition catalogues. Through this continued contact, her perception of Bak’s artistic evolution—with its remarkable duality, irony, satire, paradox, and metaphorical power—resulted in the writing of this monograph in collaboration with the artist, whose entire œuvre draws from the experience as a child of the Holocaust and is inextricably linked with the contemporary European art canon.

STUDY FOR ALONE—H 2021 Oil on canvas 14 x 18 1/8 inches BK2788

FOR A COMPLETE BIOGRAPHY AND CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF WORK BY SAMUEL BAK, PLEASE VISIT:

https://www.kunst-archive.net/en/wvz/samuel-bak/vita