Jerusalem Post–Aug. 27 Sharon Poliakine’s studio in Rishpon, not far from her home in Ra’anana, has all the markings of a still-life painting – tubes of paint, water bottles, knives, gloves and plastic sandwich bags stained with a black residue of paint form a series of scattered mounds in the wide open space.

This is not a place to “sit and talk,” Poliakine warns me on the phone before I arrive on a recent Wednesday morning. It is where she goes to work, which these days is far from regular – she squeezes it in between being a mother, teaching and running the University of Haifa’s art department.

Though the space is rugged and has been flooded by rain, her current studio is the workspace she “loves most.”

“It’s like a landscape – I am working in the territory,” says Poliakine, who often paints on large canvases that require a fair amount of space and physical labor. “When I wanted to organize the studio this morning before you came, I decided to do it halfway because I wanted to keep the landscape as it is.”

Over the last few years this landscape has begun to serve as fodder for her work – scattered bottles of paint, brushes and some of her handmade tools have become props for her painting. She began drawing the objects in her studio for a series of still-lifes that reflect a recent transition toward figurativity. If her earlier works were characterized by textured abstractions in which paint was used to cover up drawings, her recent paintings no longer feel the need to cover up.

This shift in style is reflective of an overall transformation in Poliakine’s life; she is reveling in a period of rebirth both personally and professionally. It’s been a gradual process, but reached a high point this past year when a number of “good things” coincided: She was made the head of the art department at the University of Haifa, she moved to a new gallery (Gordon Gallery) where she had a very successful exhibit in February and, after a long, somewhat scandalous courtship, she moved in with her partner, Osnat Zukerman Rechter.

POLIAKINE, 44, sees this recent flowering as part of “growing older” and becoming more comfortable with herself. “I didn’t want to cover up anymore,” she says. “Maybe it’s a matter of age, of saying ‘that’s what I do, that’s what I am.’”

She is referring both to her personal life – moving in with a woman – and her artistic persona. Poliakine has been exhibiting her paintings since the late ’90s, but it is only in the last few years that she began to foreground drawing in her paintings.

“Because of my interest in line, I was always a good drawer, but I had an idea that you are either a drawer or a painter,” she says. “I was always drawing, but covered it up with layers of paint so you only saw hints of what was underneath. Then at a certain point I decided that no matter what, even if my drawings are really bad, I will show them, bring them to the front line.”

What has emerged through this process are hints of her past and her artistic beginnings. During her first year at Bezalel, Poliakine fell in love with the process of etching, and went on to run the Jerusalem Print Workshop, where she instructed many of the country’s best-known artists in the process of printmaking, for 15 years.

On the side she always painted. But it wasn’t until the late ’90s that she started to exhibit what she calls her “pure” paintings.

“I think my first painting was an attempt to imitate covering a metal plate with an oily liquid that drips down, like the process of printmaking; that was 20 years ago,” Poliakine says.

Today, she is largely a painter, but many of her paintings feature printmaking in one form or another: Some are direct homages, and others are characterized by thick lines that are reminiscent of etching.

“I don’t think it’s a question of what I am more, painter or printmaker, there is no difference,” says Poliakine. “I came to art through printing. I gained some themes from printing and adjust them to painting, not one instead of the other.”

Over the last three years, Poliakine’s work has undergone a dramatic transformation. Her paintings have shifted from abstract to figurative. This shift emerged out of a growing interest in still-life, and her growing role as a teacher (she teaches painting at Haifa and printmaking at Shenkar).

“The question of seeing bothered me a lot,” she says. “I see young students drawing from ‘imagination.’ What is that? In the end, you can’t do anything that doesn’t exist in the world. Imagination is just an excuse for not looking, not practicing the connection between seeing and the hand.”

THIS TRANSITION dates back to shortly before the Second Lebanon War, when she began a series of war images based on paintings by the Old Masters. In ink on paper Poliakine drew reproductions of battle paintings by Paolo Ucello, Piero della Francesca, Rembrandt and others. Then she photocopied them onto transparencies and projected the images onto canvases which she painted in oil. The process is a play on traditional still-life painting. Here the still-life is a painting by an Old Master that Poliakine takes apart and rebuilds, a process of deconstruction that eventually results in an original image.

She was looking for a way to create lines in her paintings that resemble etching. To do so, she created her own tools, among them her “Nicols” – plastic sandwich bags (“the kind kids take to school with them”) that she fills with paint and squirts through a hole in the corner. The result is a thick line that appears in most of her figurative paintings.

“This is not a gimmick, I was looking for a line that has no trace of a brush stroke. Because of my history with etching, I am very sensitive to lines. The line is a physical thing that is scratched in metal and filled with ink – lines get body.”

The result was paintings that in both form and content are homages to printmaking. Rain and Wind, a large oil painting that the artist affectionately refers to as “female printmaker,” features a 16th-century print workshop based on an old engraving. The painting is covered with black diagonal lines of rain that end in a halo-like circle surrounding the head of the printmaker. The other, a hectic, busy painting titled An Image I Have Gained Honestly is a close-up of the former, and zooms in on the lower body of the “female printmaker.”

Poliakine points to the thick and muscular hands of the printmaker in the paintings, which she identifies with her own. “These are self-portraits; they are really expressing, defining quite clearly the place I’m working from. The workshop is a place inside me, my entire body language is influenced by that profession.”

Poliakine’s battle paintings, which have evocative titles such as Surrender and Empty Skies, eventually gave way to a series of slightly more personal still-lifes. This group, based on drawings she did of rotting cyclamens, were a tribute to artist Moshe Gershuni, who painted the Mediterranean flower in a series during the 1980s. “It was a way to close the circle with one of my fathers,” she says.

LIKE MANY of her paintings, Poliakine’s cyclamens explore themes of life and death, both on a personal and national level, and sexual identity and are recognizable by her signature style – thick lines that provide an outline, a kind of skeletal sketch. These distinct lines leave open the question of what lies between them: Is the space empty or full? Dead or alive? The questions resonate on a number of levels.

Beginning in the winter of 2007, Poliakine kept pots of cyclamens on the table in her home in Ra’anana where she does most of her drawing (she paints in her studio in Rishpon). She continued to draw them that summer, and then the following winter. But by the time that second winter rolled around, the flowers had withered and their heads began to droop. Poliakine drew the dead flowers, and turned them upside down. “They looked much more erect than when they were alive, like soldiers with swords,” she says.

She sees her dead cyclamens as her personal Vanitas paintings, which, like the originals from the 16th and 17th centuries, serve as symbols of life’s transience.

“Painting always has to do with death,” Poliakine explains. “All you can do is get close to it, or far from it, and there are many moments in the act of creation that you play with the distance. When you paint and it works well and you are really into it you get the feeling of fullness, like a bubble that floats. But then it will explode and that is also a kind of death.”n

Sharon Poliakine’s work is being shown at Kupferman’s House at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot. (04) 993-3792/869, alongside work by Moshe Kupferman and Ido Barel.

Jerusalem Post–July 17, 2009
“It’s a kind of a dance,” says Michal Bassad. The designer is perched on a table next to her sewing machine. Her studio, which also serves as her store, has only a few racks of clothing, reflective of her artistic approach to fashion.

Though the space is minimal, its energetic, loud music streams though a laptop computer, and the teal walls serve as an impromptu chalkboard. “Anger is energy” is scrawled in white beside the makeshift dressing room of little more than a corner partitioned by paper patterns hanging from a steel rack. Her clothes are as dynamic as the environment they are created in.

“My clothes are very organic in that manner, they are not planned, they are intuitive,” Bassad says. This approach explains why no two pieces are identical. “Each is one. It’s like days,” says Michal. “No day is the same, no day repeats itself.”

While each piece is distinct, they are all reflective of Bassad’s unique vision – part punk rock, part recycled, entirely fanciful.

Though her style has evolved over the nine years she has been making clothes, it is rooted in her first strokes. She began after “a beautiful, handsome man” broke her heart. Left with empty time and a lot of large T-shirts, she started sewing. “I started making them into other shirts, much more fitted, much more elegant,” she recalls.

Working as a fashion photographer at the time, she made these early pieces for herself and friends. “I didn’t think about turning it into something big. It just grew,” says Bassad. “I had a sale… and I sold all [the shirts] but one. I realized that there must be something there I should explore.”

After this early success, she managed to place some of her clothing in what she refers to as “the right boutiques.” But eventually she struck out on her own, becoming one of the first designers to open shop in Gan Hahashmal in South Tel Aviv – a neighborhood that simmers with young designers. “I was living in the neighborhood when it was only foreign workers – it was cheap, and I thought it was smart to start here,” Bassad says.

HER STORY is one of adaptability. Bassad began working with used cotton T-shirts out of necessity, but gradually turned it into an aesthetic. Echoing one of her influences, John Galiano, her work is feminine and edgy.

On the day we interview her, Bassad is wearing a loose one-shoulder halter top that she has revamped from many shirts into one. Though faded, the word Venezuela cuts diagonally across the torso, leaving the viewer to guess about the previous lives of the shirt.

A customer tries on a form-fitting, vivid blue dress. Bassad has treated the fabric a bit like a canvas – she began with white cotton, dyed it a subtle gray, and then painted it with uneven strokes that create a suggestion of water.

The customer looks at herself in the mirror. “It’s like wearing a spring,” Bassad comments. This dress, like her other pieces, is at once playful and dramatic, reflecting her outlook on life, “Every day should be a celebration.”

The bias cut of the fabric ensures a fluid fit that traces the lines of the customer’s body. “The material gives me an idea of what to do with it… the material reacts.”

But this approach isn’t limited to her use of fabric alone. “Real fashion designers communicate with things around them, and my clothes respond to everything I care about.”

Three years ago, during the Second Lebanon War, Bassad made T-shirts that simply said “Run.” Others implored “Don’t Shoot,” with one word on each side of the shirt.

“So many people don’t understand why they are working, what they are trying to say… But I believe because everything was hard for me I had to find a different way of doing things, my own language, a language that comes out of life.”

“I’m a black North African – my father is from Libya and my mother from Tunisia,” Bassad says. A first-generation Israeli, she grew up in Azarya, a village not far from Tel Aviv. “I had a very normal, quiet village life, but in my teens I found it boring, and I couldn’t find anything to relate to,” she recalls.

Her parents hoped she would become a white-collar professional, but Bassad gravitated naturally toward the arts, beginning with music in her mid-teens. “I studied classical singing, that’s why I moved to Jerusalem, but then I discovered rock and roll… I wanted to be in a band, but I couldn’t, I was too embarrassed. So instead I started taking photographs of rock bands.”

ONE THING led to the next, and Bassad eased into the fashion world via photography. She never studied design formally – she enrolled in art school but quickly dropped out. She spent several years in Europe, but despite the vibrant fashion scene there, it wasn’t until her return to Tel Aviv that she began to explore the industry herself.

From the start, it was apparent that her approach was less than traditional and that her vision – which hearkens to the innovative, sometimes eccentric work of Belgian designer Martin Margiela – was unique. Some of her early designs included external seams, which designers from Shenkar told her were “against the rules.”

“‘What rules?’ I asked them. ‘Is there some kind of fashion rule book that says what is allowed, and what isn’t?’”

What some might consider flawed fabric destined for the garbage, Bassad sees as opportunity. She shows us an older piece, one that’s not for sale. It serves as a testament, of sorts, to her past. She began with a shirt so worn out it was riddled with holes. She carefully stitched around each opening to reinforce and preserve the ragged look, then draped the reinforced fabric over a vintage punk rock shirt – leaving the word “vicious” visible through a gaping hole.

It’s a high-fashion twist on punk – taken off the street and turned into art.

Holding the shirt before her, Bassad reflects on its history and her own. “It has to do with your surroundings – when it’s hard core, the clothes are too. My design has become softer over the years… it’s not only about aesthetics, it’s about philosophy and life.”

Haaretz–July 4, 2009

“Le Chante des Mariees” (“The Wedding Song”), directed by Karin Albou

Two young girls dressed up as brides are playing outside their home in Tunis in the years leading up to the German occupation. One sings to the other a haunting song: “The bride has blackened her eyelashes, made up her lips … hennaed her hair, she has put on her most beautiful dress and all her bracelets … but she is still missing something.”

We don’t find out until the end of French filmmaker Karin Albou’s latest feature film “Le Chante des Mariees” (“The Wedding Song”) — which will be shown as part of the Jerusalem International Film Festival, opening July 9 — what the bride is missing. But the song leaves us with an eerie premonition of  the heartbraking scenes  to follow in this movie about female intimacy, betrayal and the very personal costs of war.

Set in Tunis on the cusp of World War II, Albou’s second full-length feature zooms in on a sisterly friendship between two adolescent girls — Nour (Olympe Borval), a Muslim, and Myriam (Lizzie Brochere), a Jew — who struggle to maintain their closeness as war unexpectedly disrupts their lives. Nour and Myriam, who have grown up living side by side, share an intimacy that is rarely shown in such explicit terms. They bathe together in the hamam,  the communal bath house, caress each other, and sometimes share a bed. The relationship is not sexual, but more physical than Western viewers may be accustomed to, as physical contact often comes in place of words. “In the Orient, body language is very active, and especially when it comes to political issues, they don’t talk,” says Albou from her home in Paris. Highlighting the central tension of the film, she notes: “Myriam knows that if they talk about it [politics], it will be end of their friendship.” Jews and Muslims often found themselves on opposite sides during Germany’s occupation of Tunisia.

We are led to believe that the intimacy between the women stems in part from growing up in a repressive, patriarchal society, where contact between the sexes is often limited and men call the shots. Nour and Myriam, who are 16 and negotiating their fast-approaching adulthood, cling to each other for emotional support. They are excited but scared by the changes that are overcoming them rapidly (sometimes too much so). When Nour kisses her fiancé (and first cousin) for the first time, she rushes to divulge what it felt like to her sisterly comrade. Later on they are each other’s witnesses to their respective defloration scenes. Nour sneaks off to the roof to have sex using the night as cover, as Myriam watches from the side. Myriam undergoes an experience that is equally, if not more, transformative (and disturbing). As per her fiance’s request, Myriam has her pubic hair depilated. Albou purposefully films the moment in real time, making us willing or unwilling witnesses to a moment that is hard to bear. “It was very important to keep the real length of the scene in order that the audience feels the pain for the same pace and for the same length of time as Myriam,” says Albou.

The film’s historical context is Germany’s six-month occupation, in 1942, of Tunisia, the only Arab country to suffer that fate. Albou chose this period after discovering by chance that her grandfather, an Algerian Jew who served as a physician in the French army, had been a POW in Germany. That sparked Albou’s interest in the fate of the Jews of the Maghreb during World War II.

“I thought the Jews from North Africa were protected from all that happened in Europe during that time,” says Albou, who learned the Algerian Jews who had their French citizenship revoked (including her grandmother) were not allowed to work. Initially the Jews in the states that were under France’s patronage hoped to get its protection. But after that country’s 1940 defeat and the extension of Vichy rule to North Africa, the situation of the Jews in Tunisia and Algeria deteriorated. “I chose this (aspect of the) war because nobody knows about it, and because it’s very interesting to talk about the relation between Arabs and Jews,” says Albou. In both Tunisia and Algeria Jews were stripped of their citizenship and forbidden to work in a wide range of jobs. IN November 1942 the Germans took control of Tunisia, established a local Judenrat, took hostages and confiscated the property of the Jews.

Though Tunis was by no means a paradise in the years leading up to the German invasion, clusters of Jews and Muslims lived together peacefully.  Such is the case for Nour and Myriam, who grew up in the same courtyard in a poor section of the city. Religion doesn’t seem to come in the way of their friendship, though it does account for differences between the two: Nour is betrothed by her parents to a cousin, and never has the opportunity to attend school, whereas Myriam is educated; and while Nour must cover her head, Myriam is free to walk the streets with her head bare. But the two women share a deep understanding of one another. They look to each other for female solidarity, covering for each other as each tries to find ways around the restrictive society in which they live.

The German invasion changes all that. Fed anti-Semitic propaganda by the Germans, the country’s Muslims become increasingly suspicious of the Jews, and the girls’ friendship becomes strained. Many Muslims support or even collaborate with the Germans, who promise them independence from France, and we are left to wonder how much longer the two women will be able to remain friends.

The invasion also reverses their situations. In order to avoid deportation of herself and her daughter, Myriam’s mother marries her off to a wealthy, older doctor Raoul (Simon Abkarian) who can afford to pay a ransom to the Germans. The marriage crushes Myriam’s hope of finding someone she loves. Nour’s wedding, on the other hand, is delayed because her fiancé, Khaled (Najib Oudghiri), has yet to find a job, a condition her father sets. Khaled eventually finds work with the Germans and turns increasingly radical. In one scene he accompanies a group of German soldiers as they force their way into Myriam’s home and hurt her mother, and later he forbids Nour from all contact with her Jewish friend.

But in Albou’s movie, the war is largely a means of telling a much more personal story.  “My first idea was to portray a friendship of two girls, one Jewish, one Muslim, when they are teenagers,” says Albou. “It’s a very special period of life, and the feelings are very unique. Even the most intimate things you share, even defloration.”

She started work on the film 10 years ago, but suspended the project when she failed to raise sufficient funds. But after the success of “La Petite Jerusalem” (“Little Jerusalem,” 2005) — her first feature film, about women living in an Orthodox enclave in the suburbs of Paris, which won the prize for best screenplay at Cannes in 2006 — Albou decided to return to her abandoned script.

Albou found herself not only directing the film, but also starring in one of the main roles. She plays Tita, Myriam’s somewhat unlikable, but distinctly multi-dimensional, mother. Albou unexpectedly took on the role when she couldn’t find an actress to do the part justice, she says.

“I wanted the audience to feel Tita suffered a lot, because she herself was married young to an old man,” says Albou.  “In a traditional culture, mothers always transfer what they suffered onto their daughters.”

Today Albou acknowledges that playing Tita had deeper personal resonance. Her Algerian Jewish grandmother dreamed of becoming an actress. Just before World War II, she was hired to play an Egyptian woman in a French movie, but the project was called off due to the war. “All these years, my grandmother still held on to the contract,” says Albou. “I realized afterwards that playing Tita was a way of paying tribute to her, a way to make her alive through the movie.”

This is the third film by Albou to be centered in Tunis, where she lived for a while during her early 20s. One was  a documentary and her second short film, the 1999 “Aid el Kebir” is a love story that takes place in Algeria but was shot in Tunisia. “I wanted to live my North African roots, but to live them in Algeria was difficult because of the war,” says Albou, referring to the civil war that raged there through most of the 1990s. “In Tunisia there is a little Jewish community, and I got very linked to that country.”

That’s in part why Albou decided to show Tunisia in a different light, literally. She opted not to film the country in the warm colors we are used to associating with the Orient. Instead, the film is shot, from beginning to end, in a dark shade of blue. “I wanted to shoot Tunisia in the winter, which is very special in North Africa, with its pale white skies, and I decided to recreate that winter ambiance, which is more interesting and less of a cliche.”

Her familiarity with the place made the process of filming this somewhat controversial film easier. “Most of my team was very behind me,” says Albou. But one incident took her by surprise.

After filming one of the final scenes of the movie, which takes place in the basement of a school, Albou learned that 30 to 40 students had gathered upstairs to protest the “film about Jews.” Her crew had seen the protesters, but kept their presence from Albou so she could finish filming the scene in peace. She says she was “in shock” when she learned about the demonstrators.

The “Wedding Song” has not yet been screened in Tunisia, though Albou hopes to show it there. Meanwhile she will be attending the Jerusalem Film Festival together with Borval, the actress who plays Nour. Albou’s plans for the future include a film based on her adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ book “La Douleur” (“The War: A Memoir”), though she is skeptical that the project will come to fruition. “And,” she adds somewhat wistfully, “I would also like to make a movie in Israel.”

Lilith–Spring 2009

All of the characters in the connected stories by Danit Brown in Ask for a Convertible (Pantheon Books, $22.95) struggle to find an identity and a home for themselves. Chief among them is Osnat Greenberg, a hybrid Israeli-American whose dry and often hilarious voice guides us through most of this debut collection.

Osnat is 13 when her Israeli mother and American father move her from the shores of Tel Aviv to the suburbs of Michigan, where compared to her “pasty-white” American classmates, she feels “small, brown and fragile,” and her name sounds too much like another word for mucus. Osnat’s estrangement deepens with each story, and is never really put to rest even when she returns to Israel, which turns out not to be the paradise she has imagined. The book follows her through two decades, but the reader gets the sense that Osnat won’t be feeling like an insider, anywhere, any time soon.

This is not entirely surprising given that her father, Marvin, hated living in Israel just about as much as her mother, Efrat, hates being in America—not an easy combination for a child to negotiate. When Efrat isn’t on the phone with her sister in Israel, she walks around in a perpetual state of despair. The threat of her returning home casts a dark shadow over the first half of these stories, and it is Osnat who ends up suffering. Her ears are always turned in the direction of her parents’ bedroom where she overhears her mother crying or fighting with her father.

How much of Osnat’s inability to integrate into American life stems from her own longing for her birthplace, and how much from her eagerness to identify with her mother’s pain? Brown’s insightful portrait of a mother-daughter relationship bruised by a difficult move is one of several sophisticated threads that make this book more than just another immigrant narrative.

Osnat tries to carve out her own path—she moves away from home, dates a series of men named Chris, participates in Hands Across America–but succeeding may mean losing the singular bond she shares with her mother who she fears will “accuse her of becoming one of them.”

These stories’ strength and originality lie in Brown’s ability to capture the specifics and the nuances of the Israeli immigrant experience, which is so often qualified by a sense of impermanence. Brown perceptively shows how a child can inherit her parents’ ambivalence, even mistaking it for her own.

Osnat is not the only one in these stories who struggles to fit in. Harriet, an American from Indiana, spends her childhood trying to prepare for a second Holocaust, and her 20s looking for an Israeli husband to taker her to Israel. But Brown doesn’t manage to muster the same energy for these characters as she does for her protagonist—who is the book’s heart and soul. Having said that, this cast of equally lost characters, each struggling to find his or her place in the world, serve to convince us, to quote Efrat’s words to her daughter,  that “home isn’t just about place.”

Haaretz–June 5, 2009
The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven (translated from the Hebrew, “She’ahava Nafshi,” by Dalya Bilu)
Melville House Publishing, 331 pages, $16.95 (paperback)

For the narrator and protagonist of Israeli writer Gail Hareven’s novel “The Confessions of Noa Weber,” life begins at 17. Her childhood, she tells us in the first pages, is “too boring” to say anything about. And more important, from her point of view, it fails to explain the central story she wants to tell — how she wound up hopelessly in love with a man who offers neither partnership nor any semblance of love in return. This is hardly the kind of relationship one might have expected for Noa, a respected feminist and author of a series of novels that star a gun-wielding, crime-fighting private investigator — who, in an apparent homage to Rex Stout’s creation, PI Nero Wolfe, is named Nira Wolfe.

When Alek, a soulful Russian immigrant to Israel, beckons to the 17-year-old Noa from across the room of his student apartment in Jerusalem, she is entranced. Now, 30 years later and no less enthralled with Alek, though she is one of many women he is involved with, she finds herself trying to come to terms with her feelings — but they cannot be explained by reason or psychology. Her love for Alek is “beyond time and space,” a “disease” that even now, after all this time, she hasn’t quite managed to understand, nor reconcile with her public persona. “The problem isn’t that he’s unworthy, but that perhaps it isn’t worthy to love anyone the way I love him,” Noa explains.

That feeling is in part what compels Noa to keep her love a secret from most of the world for three decades. During that time she dashes off to see him in Moscow (where he travels often as a reporter), and sneaks him into her apartment in Israel when he visits. Their affair is conducted in a world set apart from their real lives,  away from the gaze of potential critics, including the people closest to her. For Noa this means having to negotiate two parallel and conflicting existences — one public, the other solitary and private; one based on principles and ethics, the other driven by emotional desire and longing.

At the age of 47, Noa decides to finally expose her private self in a written confession — the book we have before us. Through words, she hopes to expel her love from her system and free herself from her life-long obsession. If she is not quite successful in taming her feelings, which in fact only grow deeper as she writes, Noa does manage to define them both for herself and for us.

“The Confessions of Noa Weber” is the first of Hareven’s books to be translated into English; she has previously written several novels, short stories and plays. Winner of the prestigious Sapir Prize in Israel when it was originally published, in 2000, Hareven’s novel gives us an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between our private selves and our public identities, love, and religious yearning within a secular Israeli context. In other hands, this material might feel trite, but Hareven has managed to write an original love story, as told by a fresh, provocative character who one grows to care for increasingly.

‘Beckoned with two fingers’

When Noa meets Alek, she is just a few months shy of being conscripted. It is 1972, and Alek is a university student who spends his evenings hosting activists at his apartment, where they passionately debate the role of the Organization of African Unity, as the smell of patchouli wafts through the air. Though she arrives with another man, by the end of the night she is won over by Alek, who beckons her with two fingers from across the room. It’s the kind of gesture suited to calling a child, or a waitress, Noa admits, but that doesn’t stop her from succumbing. “Is the girl not aware of this?” Noa asks, referring to herself in the third person. “And how she is. And nevertheless — oh, the shame of it — she gets up.” These conflicting voices never subside, which makes her love all the more tragic.

The rest of the plot, and there isn’t much, happens fast — Noa moves in with Alek, they get married as a formality to free her from her army service, and then she gets pregnant. Though she understands that Alek doesn’t love her, Noa decides to keep the baby — in large part because she thinks it will be a way to strengthen her hold on the peripatetic Alek, who is already antsy. By the time Noa returns home from the hospital, however, Alek is already on his way to Heidelberg — he ends up moving to Germany and then France, without even sticking around to meet his daughter, Hagar.

It’s not that Alek is uncaring. He simply is not cut out for a conventional relationship, or fatherhood. Alex visits sporadically and develops a distant relationship with Hagar, but he and Noa, though they never divorce, live separate lives. He drops in when he pleases, and she never refuses him, because as much as her feminist values — not to mention common sense — rejects such an obsession for a man, her soul can’t help it. Love, Noa explains early on, can be thought of as compulsive thinking: “The thought buzzes and buzzes like an insect stuck to a wet picture.”

Hareven’s characters are multi-dimensional, and that’s what makes this bizarre love story at least somewhat believable. And yet, at times I still found myself searching for a more rounded explanation of Noa’s love. But she isn’t interested in understanding her feelings so much as in expressing them — she chooses confession over therapy, dismisses psychology, and wants to situate her love outside time and space.  It may be that Noa simply isn’t capable of understanding herself, or that Hareven is trying to suggest that love, no matter how normal it seems, is ultimately inexplicable. But Noa’s love isn’t normal, and I found myself wanting precisely what Noa (and maybe Hareven as well) rejects so adamantly: an attempt to understand what compels a woman to spend her life devoted to a man who is barely present. Instead, Noa simply admits her deeds as if there were no other way, as if there were nothing that could shed light on her choices, as if fate or God were guiding her hands. Whether this is the character’s limitation or the author’s is hard to tell, but either way, the book feels weaker for it.

‘Deaf to God’

The novel’s original title, “She’ahava Nafshi” (“Whom my soul loves,” a phrase from Song of Songs), hints at the kind of love Noa is talking about, and why it proves so hard to manage. Hareven uses this love story in part to paint a picture of contemporary, secular Israel, with all the ironies and contradictions that have emerged over the last few decades. There are the Russian immigrants of mixed heritage. There are the Hagars, who seek spiritual sustenance and optimism — and move to New York to find them (she goes there to become a rabbi). And then there’s Noa, who claims to have been born “deaf to God” but finds herself hanging out in churches in the Old City and listening to Gregorian chants during sex, though she views them as dissociated from religion. Her spiritual longing is repressed and gets channeled through her relationship with Alek. Her love verges on religious devotion, and her spiritual yearnings are bound up with her love. During sex with Alex “it seemed that [heaven] had opened and that lux, lux, lux perpetua was illuminating my soul, whose dubious existence I don’t admit to either.”

In this pseudo-religious context, it isn’t surprising that Noa chooses confession over therapy. One confesses in order to purge oneself of sin. And as secular as Noa is, and she is adamantly so, she sees her feelings for Alek as a kind of sin. Not because they violate a religious code, but because they imply an emotional dependence that undermines her feminist principles.

Noa’s love is a double-edged sword — she simultaneously wants to and doesn’t want to hold on to it. On the one hand, she is enslaved by it, but at the same time, it sustains her and frees her from being dependent on other men, from having to live in the world as other women do. Though she develops a reputation for being “a tramp,” she never becomes emotionally attached to another man. “The paradox of love is that it enslaves you to one person, and by so doing, liberates you from other things,” says Noa. “It liberates you to the point of indifference, and that is the only true liberty.”

What Noa can’t be, she projects onto her fictional detective, the supremely independent feminist lawyer who takes on the plight of Palestinians and the trafficking of women alike. Nira Wolfe “has no longings for children, and, needless to say, for a husband either,” and so doesn’t feel conflicted living a life dictated by her principles. But for Noa, real life is more demanding — her ideas take her in one direction and her emotions in another.

In public, Noa Weber appears to live the most independent of lives, free of attachments. But her private self is another matter — a secret, solitary life of hopeless devotion. Both are equally authentic. The book is successful in part because Hareven refuses to simplify matters; she refuses to elevate one part of Noa over another, or to force her to choose. Being human is complicated — our desires are often contradictory — and the way we reconcile our beliefs with our emotional needs is inevitably a dirty business. Though the story is at times extreme, and not always entirely convincing, Hareven does a good job exposing our impurity without succumbing to the need to save her protagonist — from love, or from her principles.

The Forward–April 23, 2009

Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman likes to refer to his art as “offerings” — works that people can choose to accept or not. He doesn’t believe in forcing anything on anyone, and especially not art.

“It’s an attitude to life,” he said in an interview in his Ramat Hasharon studio, which is neatly packed with models of his sculptures, some dating back decades.

The 69-year-old artist will receive the prestigious Israel Prize which will be awarded on Israel Independence Day, April 29, and signals, more than any other prize, his place in the pantheon of great Israeli artists.

“The Israel Prize is a beautiful recognition of my place by the professionals, which I’m very happy to get,” Ullman said. “Now, I’m looking for the people.”

The sculptor says he has yet to become popular with the masses. “I don’t make it easy, I know, but that’s the way I think and behave,” he said. “I will not start shouting.”

Ullman’s quiet and thoughtful manner is echoed in his subterranean sculptures, which often barely protrude from the ground, making them easy to miss if one isn’t actively looking. But their physical depth — extending deep into the soil — hint at the layers of meaning that he brings to his work.

For more than 40 years, Ullman has been exploring the surface of the ground and, in many cases, what lies beneath it in works that are at once particular to Israel and universal in their scope. They touch on the meaning of place and home, absence and emptiness; they are at once celestial and earthbound, metaphysical but sensual and tactile. He manages all this with a subtle and quiet voice that is at times at odds with the culture of his homeland.

“I am not a star, or popular among the people,” said Ullman, who has gray eyes that focus intently from behind semi-frameless glasses. But among professionals it’s a different story. Ullman has been appreciated since early in his career both in Israel and abroad, particularly in Germany. His sculptures are part of numerous museum collections, including those in Israel, Germany, Japan and Australia.

“Many artists in Israel see Micha as a pillar of Israeli art who has had so much influence on generations of Israeli artists,” said Amitai Mendelsohn, curator of Israeli art at the Israel Museum. “There has always been some resistance in the past to dealing with Jewish issues, but Micha’s work succeeds in bridging these contrasts between Jewish, Israeli and the universal, and that’s one of the things that makes him a great artist.”

Ullman’s first major piece “Messer/Metzer,” from 1972, was a symbolic exchange of soil between an Arab village and a Jewish kibbutz that are separated by 2 kilometers and a border. In an attempt to unite in some way the warring places, Ullman dug a pit in each place and filled it with soil from the other. On the surface, almost nothing was visible.

“By a simple act, I tried to touch meaningful energies in a site — not just forms, also in this case sociological/political tensions,” Ullman said.

The pit came to be his main form, which he uses to different effects in almost all his sculptures.

“I am a frustrated farmer,” said Ullman, who lives and works not far from where he grew up, in an area rich in agriculture. Ullman, whose parents came to Palestine in 1933 from Germany, grew up at a time when the Israeli ethos revolved around working the land. For Jews and Israelis alike, digging has many associations: searching for one’s roots, for sources, for meaning and for death.

“He’s an interesting combination of artist and archeologist,” Mendelsohn said. “The way he thinks, he is trying to symbolically unearth, or dig inside the very fragile Israeli soil.”

Though Ullman eventually chose art over farming, his early inclinations to work the soil have been a constant driving force in his work. “From that time, I stayed with the same basic approach — a process of endless discovery of new aspects using the same materials: soil and sand,” he said. “Pit sculptures are a form that ties its fate to a place. By digging, I am naturally relating to the place.”

Ullman is also speaking from his own place, a country where land is a central part of the national narrative. “Land is such an important part of our existence here, for good and bad, but his dealings with this are not obvious,” Mendelsohn said. “They are more meditative works that give a lot of space for the imagination and are very much open to different interpretations. That’s one of the things that make him a great artist, that his works are so broad in their messages.”

Beginning in 1987, Ullman began making trips to Germany, where he would end up creating many sculptures.

Ullman created his first German “pit” as part of the Documenta 8 (1987), an important contemporary art exhibition held every five years in Kassel.  Hovering above the pit are two containers filled with soil from the pit, with an interval separating the two containers, a kind of empty space. That interval, the meeting point of the two containers, has the form of a missing chair, which hovers above a missing floor, and forms a structure that looks like an upside down house. But when seen from above all that meets the eye is grass, which Ullman suggests “means that everything is ok on the surface.”
“I try to develop a good question—as good as possible– normally about what happens underneath, what we don’t see,” says Ullman.
“For me working in Germany was a very strange experience because that’s where my family comes from, and it touches in a way this very painful element, almost like opening a wound.”

The piece, he says, has symbolic power “especially when I deal with missing forms like a chair or floor.”

“It’s open to the imagination of the spectator, I just give some direction,” he explains.

To describe his artistic language, Ullman uses the Hebrew word “remez,” which literally means hint, or clue, but refers to the second, in a four-tiered approach to interpreting Torah otherwise known by the acronym P(a).R.D(e).S., where each letter stands for a different level of interpretation. In Hebrew the acronym has an added symbolism, because the word “pardes” also means orchard.
“You don’t see too much in my pieces which means an invitation to use your imagination,” he says.

This is particularly true of Ullman’s best known work, “Library,” a powerful Holocaust memorial he created in 1995 in Bebelplatz, on one of Berlin’s main thoroughfares. It is at the spot where, on May 10, 1933, Nazis burned 20,000 books by authors considered enemies of the Third Reich.

The only thing visible from the square is a glass window in the ground. Below is an empty white library of four walls built deep into the soil. Printed four times across the square is the fortuitous line by the 19th-century Jewish poet Heinrich Heine: “Where books are burned, in the end people will burn.”

The glass, which during the day reflects the sky and the spectator looking down, is like a mirror, Ullman said: “You can see what you want to see.”

“I am using a language of hints,” Ullman said. “It’s not there, and it is there. You don’t have to look, only if you want to, and here that’s especially important, because the measure of evil is the highest in human history.”

Ullman points out that the evening of the book burning was itself no more than a hint. “The book burning was a hint for the burning of people, and at the time the signal wasn’t so clear,” says Ullman.
“My parents understood in time, but we know that many didn’t understand.”

The memorial is considered to be one of the most successful of its kind. Ullman himself is surprised by his sculpture’s ability to “fulfill its task.” For a memorial to be successful, he says, the art must be independently good. “It must stand on its own, not only serve a purpose,” Ullman said. “I believe that a good question mark has the potential for moving people.”

Despite a lot of resistance both from Ullman and other, in 2001 the Germans approved plans to build an underground parking lot that brushes up against Ullman’s memorial. “They built it against my will but it too became part of the history of the place,” says Ullman. “For me it’s like an operation. As it happens with operations you lose organs. In my case they took my soil from my grave library.”
But even so, Ullman suggests the piece has grown stronger. Today, he sees the parking lot as “an echo that enlarges the energies” of the memorial he built.
“For me the library is a parking place for books– books come and go. So too, cars come from a huge distance—they stay for some time, and then they are replaced. But I’m sure it was not in the good will of the investors who were looking for comfort and money as always.”

These days, Ullman is working on a new project, for the sculpture garden of the Israel Museum. It combines the natural cycle, light and dark, and Jewish tradition, which hovers in the background as an indirect influence.

The Hebrew title is “Yom Hashivion,” which means “Day of the Equinox.” But in Hebrew, the word for equinox, “shivion,” also means “equality,” giving the title an added layer of meaning.

This structure is a bench made of thick glass. When you look inside, you realize you are sitting on top of an underground white room with a seemingly endless corridor to the south, which looks black. The sun creates a light exhibition on the different walls, depending on the time of day and the season. But twice a year, at noon during the day of the spring and fall equinoxs, when the length of the day equals the length of the night, light entering the space will create the appearance of a light door on the north wall, which will be equal in size to the dark entrance opposite it.

“It’s about equality, which in this case is based on light and nature, but you can’t see the light without seeing your own shadow,” Ullman said. “I’m dealing with the most remote and abstract and then the closest and most real — always these contrasts.”

He continued the thought: “Again we see here the tension between two contrasts which symbolically go quite far — light and dark. In Jerusalem there is a question mark: What do we choose?”

And here, as in almost all his works, Ullman’s sculpture is a kind of offering. But in the end, it is up to the people whether and what they choose to see.

Haaretz–March 6, 2009
Crossing the Hudson
by Peter Stephan Jungk (translated from the German by David Dollenmayer)
Handsel Books, 219 pages, $14.95 (paperback)

Picture an overbearing Jewish mother screaming at the guy behind the counter of a car rental agency at Kennedy Airport in New York, while her embarrassed son cowers at her side. We’ve read scenarios like this in countless novels, seen it in films and perhaps even experienced it in our own lives, and it serves to foreshadow what follows in “Crossing the Hudson,” the latest novel by Peter Stephan Jungk. The story that unfolds has its fair share of Borscht Belt humor, but that’s counterbalanced by a hefty dose of European heaviness.

Much like his latest protagonist, Jungk, the author of eight books, including the acclaimed biography “Franz Werfel: A Life from Prague to Hollywood” (1990), was born in the United States in 1952 to Jewish immigrants, but raised in several European cities. Not surprisingly, this book’s sensibility straddles both continents. There are coincidental encounters that seem possible only in American fiction (or cinema) as well as existential ruminations more typical of the Germanic tradition. Jungk, who lives in Paris, seems equally comfortable with both, and has skillfully woven together an original, if at times excessively understated, tale.

When it opens, Mother, as she is referred to throughout the book, is busy explaining to the rental agent that her middle-aged son hasn’t slept for 29 hours, as their flight from Austria had an unplanned emergency landing in Reykjavik. She is hoping to get someone’s attention, but the agent is preoccupied with a ballpoint pen, which he is rolling back and forth on the surface of the counter. “It doesn’t get dark there, and he left his sleeping mask at home,” she explains emphatically.

The son, Gustav Rubin, a fur dealer who lives in Austria, is 45 years old. But judging from the opening, and several scenes that follow, one would never know it. One imagines Gustav, the book’s protagonist, as a young child, and as the book progresses we gradually come to understand that on the emotional level, that’s what he is. Not that he can’t take care of himself — back in Austria, he is a responsible husband and father of two — but he has never really managed to break free of his immigrant parents’ loving, if ultimately suffocating, embrace and become his own man, hardly an outlandish premise for a novel about a Jewish family.

Jungk returns in this latest novel to questions of existence and what it means to be one’s own person, themes he explored in his previous book, “The Perfect American” (2004), a fictional biography of Walt Disney, which the New York City Opera later asked composer Philip Glass to adapt for the operatic stage. There, Jungk established himself as a writer of books propelled more by the inner world and fantasy than by action-driven narrative. The novel purported to be a confession, written in prison, by Wilhelm Dantine, a fictional Austrian-born cartoonist whose slavish obsession with Disney, his employer, is at once his life force and the cause of his downfall. One reviewer urged readers to “Proceed with caution into Jungkland,” a world where fact and fantasy are impossible to distinguish, but where insights are “true — and troubling.”

With “Crossing the Hudson,” Jungk has turned from obsession to another kind of overpowering loss of self in a book that is no less turned inward, and no less fantastical. At first one expects the existential drama to revolve around Gustav’s relationship with his mother, who takes every opportunity to infantilize her son. But Jungk surprises us with a book that focuses instead on the relationship between Gustav and his late father, one that proves equally complicated, if less susceptible to mockery.

Insatiable appetite

Ludwig Rubin was a well-known public intellectual who was recognized by strangers on the street. His was the kind of unrelenting ego that swallows up everybody in sight, including the hundreds of women with whom he had affairs, relating to them as nourishment for his insatiable appetite. This isn’t to say Ludwig wasn’t well-meaning — he was simply unaware of the shadows he cast. The one who suffered most from him was his son, who simply could not compete with his father’s vitality, and so didn’t event attempt to do so. Gustav’s “inferiority seemed a natural state and he accepted it,” we are told. When he realizes that such acceptance goes against the very nature of becoming a man, it is already too late–his father has died and Gustav is set in his ways.

The story unfolds as mother and son are caught in an epic traffic jam while crossing the Hudson River. While Gustav’s wife and children anxiously await his arrival at their summer home north of New York City, Gustav finds himself questioning his love for his wife, a symptom, it seems, of his overall inability to assert his own desires, and the first inkling of what is yet to emerge. What starts out as an almost slapstick exchange between mother and son shifts gears and becomes a reflective meditation on life and childhood interspersed with some bizarre, almost surreal, encounters.

Most of this imaginative, if somewhat tepid book, then, takes place on the Tappan Zee Bridge, where Gustav and his mother end up sitting for hours. This conceit, though sometimes limiting, is ripe with symbolism. Crossing the river becomes a metaphor for Gustav’s internal journey, and potential transformation. “All bridges…they all caused a slight quickening of his pulse, grounded him in the here and now, while giving him a presentiment of ineffable, intangible things.” Plus it’s Friday afternoon, and Gustav has recently turned Orthodox. The approaching Sabbath — which marks the transition between mundane and holy — heightens the tenor of this journey, adding a spiritual dimension to an otherwise mundane task.

It gradually becomes clear that a truck transporting toxic chemicals has turned over, causing traffic in both directions to come to a standstill. A traffic jam is an obvious tool — it slows down the narrative to allow for Gustav’s personal musings — but the author manages to make it resonate in deeper ways. Like the traffic, Gustav is stuck: He feels indifference to his profession, and equally ambivalent about his marriage. But most of all he is paralyzed by his father’s overreaching presence, which continues from the grave to prevent him from finding his own way. Crossing the river holds the promise of breaking loose of his father’s hold and leaving childhood behind.

Largely unfazed by the traffic jam or by his mother’s ongoing critiquing of him — this calm is part of his rather unshakeable persona — Gustav falls into a meditative reflection about his father, a nuclear researcher who died 11 months earlier.

In a twist reminiscent of Kafka as well as Woody Allen, both Gustav and his mother see Ludwig’s body — “the colossal, golem-like fatherbody” — floating nude in the river below. Traffic comes to a halt, men and women mingle on the bridge, and mother and son try to determine whether Ludwig’s body is real or a figment of their shared imagination (she reads his mind on several occasions).

Either way, it doesn’t really matter. For Jungk, fantasy and reality are often one and the same, and he is skilled at capturing the absurdity of the situation while making it entirely believable as well. The body’s largeness may be another way of symbolically suggesting that Gustav is still a child who imagines his father to be larger than life, and whose presence continues to hold too much power over him.

All of this makes for a potentially compelling book, and yet “Crossing the Hudson” struggles to completely live up to that promise. In part it lacks emotional resonance, a shortcoming that mirrors the protagonist’s own failings. Gustav struggles to feel much of anything, including ambition, for himself or those around him.

We are meant to believe that much of Gustav’s passivity has to do with growing up in the shadow of his father’s success, though the picture Jungk paints of Ludwig as a father leaves a lot to be desired. It weighs heavy on idiosyncratic details about Gustav’s childhood and his parents, often at the expense of emotional force. The reader is forced to connect the dots and imagine the emotional consequences of Gustav’s upbringing in an often unsatisfying manner.

The best explanation we are given for Gustav’s inability to cut the umbilical cord is his parents’ background: They came to America as refugees from Austria during World War II, but in the decades that followed, moved back and forth between Europe and America, all the while keeping their only child tightly clutched to themselves. “I’m sorry, but you’ll just have to accept that we’re more attached to you than normal parents,” Gustav recalls his father telling him. “We are one flesh united, a unit of Rubinflesh.”

Siamese triplets

This attachment has some especially bizarre manifestations, such as his parents’ insistence on waking around the house nude and having Gustav bathe with them until midway through his adolescence. Gustav imagines the threesome as “Siamese triplets attached at the head and genitals.” But what is missing from Jungk’s portrait is how Gustav felt growing up under such circumstances.

Looking back from the bridge, Gustav recognizes that to become a man requires struggling against one’s father. “Whoever hasn’t slugged it out with his father, whoever has failed to defend himself will feel weak, incomplete, unmanly for the rest of his life,” Gustav says.

But like many of the insights scattered throughout this book, Gustav’s newfound understanding seems destined to remain an intellectual realization alone, one that hasn’t quite penetrated. As a result, Gustav comes across as a distant observer of his own life, and the reader too has trouble feeling much for this shadow of a man.

That’s in part why the last 20 pages of the book come as something of a surprise. Without giving too much away, it can be said that Gustav makes a final attempt to confront his deceased father. It is a gesture that ends up causing him to risk his own life, but Gustav recognizes that without it he would remain only half a man. Gustav’s climactic moment coincides with both the clearing of the traffic jam and sundown.

“Twilight began to fall. It was the moment when Shabbat began, the high point of creation.” It is the high point of the novel as well, a moment we have, in a way, been waiting for. But given the tone of most of the book, it’s hard to tell what impact it will end up having on Gustav’s life, and whether it will be enough to turn him into his own man. One certainly hopes so.

The book cover suggests Kafkaesque themes, such as the blurring of fantasy and reality, and the story’s fable-like quality. But Ludwig’s body, which stretches a mile down the Hudson, reminded me more of the 1989 Woody Allen short “Oedipus Wrecks,” about a New York lawyer whose overly critical mother disappears in a magic show, only to reappear like a Freudian phantom hovering like a giant cloud above the city. Here, though, Jungk tackles the other side of the Freudian triangle — complexes that involve fathers and sons, which can be equally complicated, though perhaps less humorous. While Jungk’s book has many redeeming qualities, originality being chief among them, his tale is also frustratingly muted.

The Forward-Feb. 17, 2009

Haifa — Following the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was caught musing that the event was “the greatest work of art that is possible,” a statement that provoked widespread outrage and led to the cancellation of several concerts of his work. Though New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini, among others, perceived Stockhausen’s words as “an affront,” they continue to reverberate, as critics, curators and artists weigh in on the complicated relationship between aesthetics and violence.

In the wake of 9/11 and of Stockhausen’s comments and Damien Hirst’s echoes of those comments, thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek (in his book “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”) and Paul Virilio (in his book “Art and Fear”) have tried to unravel our fascination with the violent “spectacle” — arguing that violence is sometimes also aesthetic, as uncomfortable as that may be.

It is this exploration that Israeli curators Tami Katz-Freiman and Hadas Maor tapped when they began organizing an ambitious and wide-ranging cluster of exhibits on violence, on display at the Haifa Museum of Art. Israel, no stranger to violence, offers the perfect, if unfortunate, backdrop for art that seeks to deal with the subject of violence and its ability — or inability — to represent it.

Leading Israeli artists, including Sigalit Landau, Gilad Efrat, Michal Heiman and Yael Bartana, as well as such renowned international artists as Norbert Bisky (Germany), Ernesto Neto (Brazil), Lida Abdul (Afghanistan) and Biljana Durdevic (Serbia), explore violence and the different responses to it in a series of eight exhibitions that take up the entire three-floor museum — including the stairwell and the entranceway. The implication is that there is no way to escape: Violence is everywhere.

The ubiquity of violence did, in part, inspire the series, but among the range of complex political, philosophical and psychological contexts, you will find no straightforwardly documentary approaches.

“We made a decision to create distance, to understand the filters artists are using to represent violence,” said Katz-Freiman, chief curator. “We see violence everywhere; it overwhelms our existence. But I was interested in what happens when you turn this into art, and how artists respond to the spectacle of violence.”

Ironically, violence weighed heavily on the process of curating the current exhibits. The project is the brainchild of Katz-Freiman, who has been working on it for the past two years. It was delayed because of significant budget cuts following the Second Lebanon War, which reduced the number of new exhibits the museum could afford. In a further irony, the display opened on January 24, one week after the operation in Gaza ended, with the sounds of rockets and bombs still reverberating in the Israeli psyche.

But the recent war did more than simply provide an unfortunate context altering not only how the exhibit would be viewed, but also what would be seen. Viewers cannot miss an empty black room where a video of Artur Zmijewski, considered to be one of the most prominent, radical figures on the Polish art scene, was supposed to be. It took almost two years to acquire Zmijewski’s “Them,” a piece that looks at ideological fanaticism, for the exhibit. Katz-Freiman told the Forward that she saw it as a central building block of the exhibit, and so she scheduled significant educational programming around it.

But a week before the opening, Zmijewski, who is currently an artist in residence at the Digital Art Lab in Holon, Israel, wrote an e-mail stating that in light of the operation in Gaza, he did not want his video to be exhibited, as it is no longer “relevant.” He offered instead a video piece based on an anti-war protest that took place in Tel Aviv one day before the cease-fire. “Although we freaked out, we said we are open to see his other work,” Katz-Freiman explained. “We are liberal and open-minded.” But after seeing the video two days before the opening, the curators decided against it. “We thought it was a very simplistic art work which doesn’t have the layers and artistic depth we are looking for,” Katz-Freiman said.

This year has been designated Polish Year in Israel, and despite Zmijewski’s withdrawal, Poland is represented by Power Games, an exhibit co-organized in Warsaw by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. The exhibit comprises a range of works created by six prominent visual artists currently working in Poland, and features members of three different generations. Despite their obvious differences, contemporary Polish and Israeli artists seem to share a preoccupation with victimhood, history, nationality and memory. Katz-Freiman, who visited Warsaw and Gdansk in December 2006, was struck by an overwhelming concern with the trauma of World War II. “It seems that the War has become a central component of the search for identity undertaken by many Polish artists,” Katz-Freiman writes in her introduction, showing that while the artistic response to violence is personal, violence is — like political power — centralized and vested in the state.

One painting that is especially representative of the exhibit’s themes is by Bisky, a young German artist whose work is one of three solo exhibitions that are part of the exhibit Aesthetics of Violence. “Schwarzmaler” (“Painter of Darkness”), painted in bright colors reminiscent of neo-pop images, features an artist painting a flame from a black cloud of smoke that seems to be erupting out of the blue sky. Bisky captures a moment of strange duality: the artist who creates catastrophe while contemplating aesthetic nuances, such as color and form. His work seizes the uncomfortable affinity between beauty and horror, what Zizek calls our simultaneous attraction to, and repulsion of, violence. But it also touches on the larger themes of translation — turning violence into art, or seeing aesthetics in violence.

“Last Riot,” another multilayered and impressive piece in the same exhibit, by AES+F, one of Russia’s most prominent contemporary art groups, features a video animation of an androgynous mixed-gender group in which the members battle each other in a meticulously choreographed dance. Shown at the 2007 Venice Biennale, it received international attention and has been called “a requiem for the modern world.” Set against a synthetic landscape “devoid of history, identity or temporal specificity,” as the exhibit notes say, the group depicted seems to be caught in a battle where victim and aggressor, victor and defeated, are impossible to distinguish. The fighters/dancers have no apparent end in mind; they are engaged in aggression for aggression’s sake. Violence has become ritual; there is no blood, and no trace of fear or pain. Instead, it is ripe with erotic undertones: Violence is erotic, and many of the battle scenes could easily be mistaken for sexual orgies.

From the erotic to the morbid and beyond, these exhibits include no shortage of disturbing work. Among them are Sigalit Landau’s “Eat as Much as You Can’t I-V,” a graphic installation of bodies that look like their skin has been stripped, and Polish artist Zuzanna Janin’s “I’ve Seen My Death, Ceremony/Games.” Janin’s work is a staging of her own funeral, which became the subject of intense criticism in Poland after she placed ads in several newspapers, announcing her death.

But one of the most disturbing pieces is also one of the most understated. A video by Israeli artist Lea Goldman Holterman shows a 12-year-old boy, with bright blue eyes and a serious gaze well beyond his years, describing his deep commitment to the State of Israel, his longing to serve in a combat unit in the Israeli army and his willingness to die for his country. Though intent, the boy speaks in a monotonous, ghostlike voice, as if part of him has already been killed on the battlefield. The video’s title, “Sacrifice,” brings to mind a host of provocative questions: Is the child choosing to sacrifice himself? What kind of free will does a child of 12 have? And as such, is the state sacrificing him, and at what price?

“This gives me goose bumps every time I walk by,” Katz-Freiman said of Holterman’s video.

The allusion to the biblical story of the Akedah — the sacrifice of Isaac — lends an added layer of meaning to this already suggestive piece. Conspicuously missing from the video are the respective killer and savior, the father and the angel. It is unclear who is doing the sacrificing, and whether there will be a redeemer who jumps in at the last minute to save the child from the sword. It doesn’t appear so.

This video, like many of the pieces in this exhibit, is its own type of “affront,” to use Tommasini’s words again. It exposes us to deeply disturbing images and stirs in us uncomfortable feelings, but in the end it gets us to think about the often contradictory relationship we have to violence and its increasing presence in our lives. The pieces disturb us in a different way than the terror attacks of 9/11, and that’s in part the point of the exhibits, which offer the most compelling response to Stockhausen’s provocative but mistaken remarks.

The terror attacks were a real event, unmediated and raw, while art is, by definition, one step removed from reality. And while it, too, may affront us, it does so with a different end in mind. Two wall paintings by Hubert Czerepok, a young Polish artist, are a perfect demonstration of art’s transformative power. From his series “Séance” both wall drawings are re-creations of documentary photographs — one of the Madrid bombings, the other of a figure surrounded by skulls. The transformation was a process of emptying out the images so that what remains is a minimalist sketch with a lot of white space. Though inspired by photographs of terror, the effect is entirely different. Here, one becomes aware of the skeletons — both literal and figurative — that terror leaves in its wake, as empty, hollow space.

That awareness is what art, and these exhibitions, aim for.

Nextbook–February 10, 2009

Rarely do secular Jews picture the ultra-Orthodox building a snowman, sprawled piss-drunk across a table, or half-naked and covered in mud at the Dead Sea. But Israeli photographer Menahem Kahana’s exhibition of provocative, often humorous photographs—on display at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv through June 30—reveals a side of this community rarely seen. His lens takes us behind tightly guarded walls, revealing a cohort that is at once more like us than we tend to think, and more “other” than one might imagine.

The exhibit is the culmination of 12 years of work, during which Kahana gradually inched his way into the protective community, capturing moments that most outsiders never witness. Included here are images of weddings, circumcision ceremonies, funerals, political demonstrations, holidays, and routines of day-to-day life, which Kahana has captured with a sensitive, often light-hearted, touch. “The community, which to the outside spectator seems monotonous and rigid, opens up before us in all its glory and beauty, albeit with all its weaknesses too,” writes the exhibit’s curator, Alex Levac.

A photographer for the Agence France-Presse since 1987, and a secular Israeli born in Ashkelon in 1958, Kahana’s eye-opening moment with the Haredim happened in 1995, when he was taking a walk around a natural spring on the outskirts of Jerusalem and saw Haredim immersing themselves. His curiosity piqued, he began to wonder about the lives of ultra-Orthodox Jews outside the circumstances in which they are most often seen by outsiders—poring over religious texts, wrapped in prayer shawls, and (more recently) protesting. The more time he spent in the community, the more he gained its members’ trust, and the deeper he was allowed into their lives. One photograph depicts a little-known ritual—the redemption of the first-born donkey. An elaborately adorned donkey is led onto a raised platform, while hundreds of men look on. Like the Haredim surrounding it, the donkey has a black hat on its head. “It’s like they are saying, ‘We are all donkeys,’” suggests Kahana.

Other photographs capture a man spitting fire in a synagogue, little girls peeking under a bridal gown, and a group of men baring their alabaster bodies as they enter a natural spring. While many are set in Jerusalem, others were taken at Joseph’s tomb in Nablus, and during a pilgrimage to Uman, Ukraine, where thousands of Jews flock every Rosh Hashanah to visit the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. It was on this trip that Kahana took one of his most uncanny photographs. In it, a Haredi man sits draped in a fuscia smock featuring a comic book-style illustration of a woman. He is getting his head shaved, and smiles widely at the camera, the shiny new knife in his hand inadvertently resting at the illustrated woman’s throat.

Like many of Kahana’s photographs, this one captures the uneasy and often absurd ways that the ultra-Orthodox brush up against the modern world. His pictures also expose more explicitly controversial aspects of ultra-Orthodox life: Haredim burning the Israeli flag, visiting gravesites, and clashing with police. Demonstration, which shows a Haredi protestor being thrown to the ground by a mounted policeman, was chosen by Helmut Newton as the best photo of the 20th century for Time magazine’s millennium issue. In instances like these, Kahana’s empathetic approach to his subjects saves his pictures from being exploitative. The result is a body of work that seeks to lower the barrier that separates secular Jews from the ultra-Orthodox, if only by showing the former what they’re missing.

January 30, 2009–The Jerusalem Post

As I sit in the studio of photographer Roi Kuper, he reads aloud from “It’s the Dream,” a poem by Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge: “It’s the dream we carry/that something wondrous will happen… that one morning we’ll quietly drift/into a harbor we didn’t know was there.”

“His poem says what I think photography and art should do,” explains Kuper, sitting at his desk in his modest but impeccable studio on Sderot Har Zion in South Tel Aviv.

Kuper reads a lot, and especially poetry. For many years he was engrossed in 20th-century German writers – Brecht, Frisch, Grass – but more recently he has moved on to Scandinavians, among them Hauge and the Finnish poet Sirka Turka. It isn’t surprising that Kuper, a heavy set man who exudes an internal heaviness, is drawn to poets like Hauge, who spent most of his life isolated in his hometown of Ulvik. Though Kuper grew up in Ashdod, a far cry from Hauge’s hometown, his serial landscapes are often stark, even cold, desolate photos that are almost always without people. He is drawn to open, empty spaces – especially the sea – where, as he says, “everything is possible.”

Kuper began taking photos in the 1980s, quiet, meditative landscapes that reveal what has always been there, but which most of the time we fail to notice. Placing almost identical photographs side by side, he shifts our attention to the subtle variations between them and teaches us to see drama where we least expect it.

“You cannot step into the same river twice,” Heraclitus said. The phrase was the inspiration behind Kuper’s series “Like Stars in the Water” (2005), but serves as the photographer’s overall guiding philosophy. No two landscapes are exactly alike, and Kuper uses his camera to prove this time and again. “It is not the landscape that interests me, but the small movements between them,” he says. “It matters to me where I take the picture. I have a connection, maybe even a feeling for that place. It moves me, but it’s only a starting point.”

Kuper shows me a group of four almost identical photographs of the sea that were part of his series “No Escape from the Past” (2002). Subtle variations in the waves take center stage and alter the way we are accustomed to looking at and thinking about landscapes. Meaning is revealed, just as the poem suggests, by drifting into “the harbor” – or in this case by drifting back and forth between the photos like a pendulum. The movement is slow, and one needs time to get there.

Kuper, 52, has a quiet air about him. He is soft-spoken and doesn’t seem to be in a rush to go anywhere. It has been eight months since he touched his camera – the first time he has taken a break since he began photographing more than 25 years ago. For almost as long Kuper has been teaching photography and has exhibited widely both here and abroad. His work appears in several museums, including the Tate Modern, the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, as well as many private collections.

Kuper is comfortable, even content with silence, but something lurks behind his calm exterior. The same can be said of his photographs – they are quiet but unnerving. Kuper’s use of repetition is extreme, and his photos tend to arouse extreme reactions.

He recalls an exhibition of his work at Tel Aviv’s Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art in 2007, the year he completed his ambitious trilogy “To Eat of the Leviathan Flesh” (2008). The title comes from a phrase in the Gemara which says that the righteous will enter paradise and “eat from the flesh of the Leviathan.” All three parts – Atlantis, The White Cliffs of Dover and To Those Who Were Supposed to Be With Us – touch on human aspiration, the need to believe “that something good will happen.” During the exhibition, the stark white room of the Noga Gallery was covered wall to wall with 23 almost identical photos of the ocean off the coast of south Portugal that make up “Atlantis,” named after the legendary island that sank. “I wanted it to be very white, and very clean, nothing disturbing.”

Some people entered the gallery, took one look and walked out, while others sat down in the middle of the floor and stayed for hours, Kuper recalls. “This is Atlantis – to live in a room like this,” he says. “To wake up every morning in that room and notice something different, is heaven for me.”

What interests Kuper, some critics have called “boring.” That doesn’t bother him. For Kuper “boredom” is not a bad thing. Quite the opposite, he tries to bore the viewer. The tactic is similar to hypnosis, he explains – “to make the viewer fall asleep and then to open him to a different experience.”

Early in the interview, Kuper suggests to me that spending a whole hour in silence would likely be more interesting than having a conversation, “but we have developed a way of communicating through images and words.” In the two hours I spend with him, there are long moments of silence and Kuper takes to them well – silence interests him, and his photos are evidence of this.

Recently a man requested to visit Kuper’s studio. He was interested in a photograph from his 2002 series “No Escape from the Past” that was hanging on the wall. The man came in and sat in front of the 126 cm. x 126 cm. color print of a woman closing her eyes without saying a word, Kuper recalls. After an hour in silence the man got up, bought the photo and left.

“When you look at the woman for a long time, there is something disturbing,” says Kuper.

During the 2002 exhibit of “No Escape from the Past,” the photograph of the woman with her eyes closed, one of the few portraits Kuper has taken, was hung opposite images of the sea. The placement wasn’t accidental. Starting from the age of six Kuper used to sit in front of the sea for “hours, days, years” at a time watching and waiting.

“Sitting in front of the horizon of the sea is like waiting for hope – everything is possible,” says Kuper. “The woman is closing her eyes to the past and to hope, but you can’t escape from either.”

Growing up in Ashdod, Kuper had little exposure to art. Becoming an artist never crossed his mind. First he wanted to be a sailor and later a physicist. “I started taking photos by mistake,” he says. He spent a year as a sailor on commercial ships before he joined the navy, which “killed all my wishes to be a professional sailor.” After his military service, Kuper traveled extensively in the US and Europe. When he returned, he rented an apartment in Jerusalem near Hadassah College. With no definitive plan in mind, Kuper enrolled in a photography class. He was 20 before he entered his first museum.

“I remember the day, it was a Saturday in the winter and there was an exhibit of Impressionists at the Israel Museum,” Kuper recalls. “I couldn’t speak the whole day after.”

Almost all of Kuper’s landscapes beginning with “Necropolis” (1996-2000), in which he explored deserted areas in the South alongside local military semi-archeological remains, through his most recent trilogy are beautifully layered. He uses the natural landscape to create crisp, clean horizontal lines that build one upon the next in an orderly fashion.

We are looking through his book No Escape from the Past, a collection of his photographs from the 2002 series of the same name, when I ask Kuper about his attention to horizontal lines.

“Like Rothko,” Kuper says. And he gestures towards a book of Mark Rothko’s paintings sitting on his book shelf. “I was studying him a lot.” The resemblance is noticeable. But where Rothko’s lines are fuzzy at the edges, Kuper’s are clean and stark. They create distance, where Rothko’s paintings pull you closer and threaten to swallow you up.

“It’s me,” Kuper says of the photos. “I am very organized.” Kuper points to his studio as proof. The space is immaculate. “I didn’t clean up for you,” he says.

There are freshly cut flowers in a vase; a black leather couch which has been the recent setting of paintings by Jan Rauchwerger; a red bike leans against a wall; a bowl piled high with tangerines which have been carefully ordered into a pyramid-like structure – nothing seems out of place.

Kuper is hesitant to say anything about his childhood, he calls such talking gossip, but lets one thought slip past his censors: “In my childhood, I was always waiting for something to happen. I thought that if things were more organized, I would have a better chance that something good would come.”