The Yiddish Life of Chaim Soutine (1893-1943): New Materials
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The Yiddish Life of Chaim Soutine (1893-1943): New Materials Introduction and translations by Ofer Dynes In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (April 2020) For the online version of this article: [http://ingeveb.org/texts-and-translations/life-of-soutine] In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies April (2020) The Yiddish Life of Chaim Soutine (1893-1943): New Materials Ofer Dynes Most biographies of Chaim Soutine comment at some point on how impossible it is to write a biography of Chaim Soutine: “What sources do we have for writing about Soutine?” mused Michel LeBrun-Franzaroli ruefully, after decades of meticulous research following the footsteps of Soutine across France: “Leopold Zborowski, his art dealer… didn’t leave any archive, any financial account, any catalogue… Soutine himself hardly spoke, practically never wrote, and at any rate, didn’t say anything about his art.” The preface to the biographical note in Soutine’s Catalogue Raisonné conveys the same sense of frustration, albeit much more succinctly: “The artist left few personal papers and 1 no records.” The few letters of Soutine that have survived are prosaic in their content and laconic in their style. In 1964, Harvard University was able to purchase one of the most extensive collections of Soutine’s correspondence. The hopes were high: the collection contained 37 letters of Soutine, no less, addressed to Henri Sérouya (born Aharon Tsruya, 1895-1968), a renowned Kabbalah scholar who had claimed that Soutine’s paintings are troubling because they “are permeated with the vehemence of Jewish 2 mysticism.” One cannot help wondering: Did Soutine agree with this statement? What kind of conversations did he and Sérouya hold on the subjects of Jewish Mysticism or French Modernism, considering that Sérouya was an expert on both? Disappointingly, the letters do not provide any clues. “Brief notes chiefly concerned with making or 1 This article is part of a larger series entitled “Yiddish Montparnasse.” See: Michel LeBrun-Franzaroli, Soutine l’homme et le peintre (Concremiers : Michel LeBrun-Franzaroli, 2015), 3. Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow, Klaus Perls, (1993). Chaim Soutine (1893-1943): Catalogue raisonné = Werkverzeichnis (Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1993), 9. Köln : Benedikt Taschen Verlag, [1993] 2 Henri Sérouya, Initiation à la philosophie contemporaine (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1933), 167. Sérouya published a book on Soutine in 1967, Soutine (Paris: Hachette, 1967). 1 In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies April (2020) cancelling visits … most contain only a few lines” – this is how the dispirited Harvard 3 cataloger described the content of the collection. “Soutine’s life was hard, but his posterity has been almost as tragic,” wrote Maurice Tuchman, referring to the relative dearth of serious scholarship on the artist’s paintings. It appears that this statement extends to the scarcity of sources on Soutine’s 4 life as well. Due to the lack of virtually anything written by Soutine that would shed light on his art, scholars have resorted to memoirs about Soutine. For instance, to explain Soutine’s obsession with painting dead animals, scholars routinely cited Soutine’s famous childhood recollection of witnessing the slaughter of goose, which the slaughterer conducted according to the Jewish ritual laws: Once I saw a slaughterer cut the throat of a goose and bleed it out. I wanted to cry out, but his look of joy caught the cry in my throat. I always feel it there… It 5 was this cry that I was trying to free. I never could. I will return to the content of this citation later in this introductory essay. At this point, I want to draw attention to its focalization. Contrary to the way in which this quote is presented in some of Soutine’s biographies, this is not Soutine’s voice. Rather, this is how Soutine’s friend, Emile Szittya, reported a conversation that had transpired decades earlier, in his 1955 memoire Soutine and his Time [Soutine et son temps]. In other words, all the citations scholars draw on when interpreting Soutine’s work are second and sometimes third-hand recollections of conversations he held with his friends. “Friends? He had no friends!” replied his daughter, Aimée, when a group of Soutine enthusiasts tried to form a Society of Friends after the war. She herself hardly knew her father, and her mother, Vera Debora Melnik, the only woman Soutine had ever legally wed, did not write about their marriage. This demonstrates how scarce and how 6 valuable these personal recollections are of conversations with Soutine. Luckily, some of this precious information about Soutine is hidden in plain sight. Since Yiddish was Soutine’s best language, as well as the best language of most of his Jewish friends and acquaintances in Paris, it is not surprising that some of these friends 3 Parke-Bernet Galleries, Autographs & Documents: Anthony Wayne & Zachary Taylor letters, an important Susan B. Anthony archive, correspondence of Soutine and Chagall, American printed broadsides, newspapers, music & memorabilia, mostly from the Civil War: [property of] various owners, including the estate of the late Philip H. Ward, Jr. ... Henri Sérouya ... Public Auction, Tuesday, September 22 [1964] ... (New York: Parke-Bernet Galleries, 1964). The letters were published in: Sophie Krebs, Henriette Mentha, and Nina Zimmer, Soutine und die Moderne = Soutine and Modernism, (Basel: Köln: Kunstmuseum Basel, 2008), 234-235. 4 Maurice Tuchman, “What is a Catalogue Raisonné?” Art International,18:1 (1974), 12. 5 The translation is cited from Klaus H. Carl, Chaïm Soutine (New York: Parkstone International, 2015), 79. Stanley Meisler presents this as Soutine’s actual quote. See: Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the outsiders of Montparnasse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 91. 6 Aimée Soutine, “Soutine. mon père,” in: L' Amateur d’Art Nr. / no. 517. Beiheft / Supplement. (May - September 1973):13-16 and her short column in Paris-Match 3 (1966): 19. 2 In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies April (2020) wrote notes and memoires in Yiddish, and occasionally also in Hebrew. It is surprising, 7 though, that none of these sources have found their way to the scholarship on Soutine. 8 As Leo Koenig argued as early as 1954, the relative lack of accounts on Soutine’s life from a Jewish perspective has created an imbalance as to how scholars understand the artist’s personal history. As a result, the biographies of Soutine overemphasize his relation with a circle of non-Jewish patrons, and have relatively less to say on Soutine’s relationship with his intimate circle of Paris-based Jewish painters. Moreover, the biographers who reached out to Soutine’s fellow Jewish artists often did so decades after these artists had shared their memories of Soutine in Yiddish and Hebrew publications. Some particularly unfortunate mistranslations of Yiddish idioms only highlight the different levels of cultural intimacy between the Yiddish and the French, and also how 9 much was lost in translation. My goal is to showcase how vital Yiddish is for our understanding of Chaim Soutine’s biography as well as for our interpretation of his art. In what follows, I provide a translation of three Yiddish documents: The first is an account written by Noah Pryłucki, a Jewish journalist and intellectual, of a meeting with Soutine in Paris in 1924, printed in the Warsaw Yiddish daily Der Moment in 1930. The second is a letter that Etel Tzukerman, Soutine’s sister, wrote to her brother around 1935. The third document, an unpublished manuscript, contains the memoirs of Soutine’s childhood friend, Nochum Gelfand (1952), which was preserved at the YIVO archives. These sources represent only a small portion of the materials on Soutine available in Yiddish publications. In this respect, this article is also an invitation for an expansion of the 10 dialogue between Yiddish scholars and art historians. These Yiddish sources validate the scholarly consensus concerning Soutine’s indifference towards Jewish art. Soutine was invested in maintaining social relations with Jewish artists. At the same time, he did not partake in any creative collaboration under the banner of what might be called “Jewish Art.” At the La Roche studios for artists in Paris, for example, Soutine was known to sing a Yiddish melody, as a way to 11 signal his Jewish identity to other Jewish artists, to encourage them to approach him. He made meaningful relations with painters from Israel, and sent some of his paintings 7 Compare for example Meisler’s Shocking Paris as well as Nadine Nieszawer’s Artistes Juifs et l'École de Paris, (Paris: Somogy, 2016). Despite focusing on the Eastern European Jewish aspect of the Paris School, neither work contains a single Yiddish source. 8 Leo Koenig, Yehudim ba-omanut ha-ḥadashah, (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1962), 149-162. 9 Pierre Courthion, in his Soutine peintre du déchirant, based his account on conversations he had held with M. Faibisch Zafrin (Shraga Faibush Zarfin). Zarfin typified Soutine as a typical litvak, using the phrase a tseylem kop (literally: cross-head) to indicate “a rational mind.” Courthion explained this Yiddish idiom as an expression of the ethnic diversity in the Lithuanian lands. See: Soutine, peintre du déchirant (Lausanne: Edita, 1972), 11. To be sure, other scholars were significantly more sensitive to Jewish testimonies. For example, as early as 1945, Raymond Cogniat published a letter of Michel Kikoine on his friendship with Soutine, stressing the importance of citing Kikoine’s letter in its entirety. See: Soutine (Paris: Editions du Chêne, 1945), 29. 10 For a lengthy collection of Jewish anecdotes on Soutine, which, to the best of my knowledge, was not included in any of the scholarly publications on Soutine, see: Chil Aronson, Bilder un geshtaltn fun monparnas (Paris: [s.n.], 1963), particularly 128-148.