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146 Book Reviews Batia Donner, Nathan Rapoport: a Jewish

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146 Book Reviews Batia Donner, Nathan Rapoport: a Jewish 146 book reviews Batia Donner, Nathan Rapoport: A Jewish Artist. Jerusalem: Yad Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi and Givat Haviva: Yad Yaari, 2014. Hebrew, 448pp., $58.90. The park near the intersection of Zamenhofa and reveal a large rubble-filled plain, with no buildings Anielewicza in downtown Warsaw has become a or visible landmarks in sight.4 This iconic figurative focal point for tourists.1 At the heart of a major world sculpture, based on both the art of Rodin and the style capital, the streets bordering the park are named, of the Baroque period, serves as the backdrop for many somewhat ironically, after two Polish Jews whose lives Holocaust commemoration ceremonies, held by both represented the extremes of twentieth-century Jewish Jewish and non-Jewish groups. The copy of the work at existence: one a universalist and the other the leader Yad Vashem, dedicated in 1976, frames the annual Yom of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.2 In this park, the new HaShoah ceremony broadcast live on Israeli television. Jewish museum of Warsaw, POLIN, the Museum of A book on Rapoport has been a desideratum for the History of the Polish Jews, opened its doors in many years. Best known for the Warsaw Ghetto Monu- 2013. The site was chosen in no small part because ment, Rapoport’s sculptural legacy has left its mark on Nathan Rapoport’s Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Israel’s landscape, with the Negba Monument (fig. 1), Uprising, 1948, was already in place there.3 Rapoport and The Scroll of Fire (fig. 2), and his last work, Libera- (1911–1987), like Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculp- tion, has particular significance in the United States. tor of the Statue of Liberty, had a moment of grace in In the book, Nathan Rapoport: A Jewish Artist, Batia the choice of the location for his work—in this case Donner has committed herself to the service of wading locating his memorial near the ruins of the uprising’s through Rapoport’s papers in his archives in the Yad bunker, now the park. Photographs from the period Yaari Research and Documentation Center of Kibbutz Fig. 1. Nathan Rapoport, Negba Memorial (detail), dedicated 1953, Fig. 2. Nathan Rapoport, The Scroll of Fire (detail), dedicated 1972, Kibbutz Negba, Israel, bronze. Photograph by Susan Nashman Kisalon Forest, Israel, bronze. Photograph by Susan Nashman Fraiman. Fraiman. 1 Batia Donner, Nathan Rapoport: A Jewish Artist, (Jerusalem: February 2, 2016, http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/ Yad Yitzhak Ben-Tzvi and Givat Haviva: Yad Yaari, 2014), 79. All Microsoft%20Word%20-%205739.pdf. references to Donner are in the book being reviewed. 3 Proposals for the new museum had to take this work into Pre-war Gęsia street was renamed in memory of Mordechai account, (165–166). Anielewicz (1919–1943) in 1946. 4 For more on Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, see E. Benezit, 2 Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof (1859–1917) was the creator of Espe- Dictionnnaire critique et documentaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, ranto. He is buried in Warsaw. Encyclopedia Judaica, (Jerusalem: Dessinateurs et Graveurs (Paris: Librairie Gründ, 1966), Vol. I, 428; Keter, 1972), vol. 16, cols. 925–926. Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Anielewicz was the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: ibid., Künstler (Leipzig: E.A. Seeman, 1908), Vol II, 549–550; Saur, Allge- vol. 2, cols. 2–3; “Anielewicz, Mordecai [sic]” Yad Vashem, accessed meines Künstler Lexikon (Munchen: Saur, 1993) Vol 7, 236–238. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2017 IMAGES DOI: 10.1163/18718000-12340068 book reviews 147 Givat Haviva and HaShomer HaTzair. Donner also uses enabled him to eventually conceive of the Warsaw Nina Rapoport’s, the artists’s daughter, collection to Ghetto masterpiece, which would not be created until piece these documents together into a readable narra- after the war. tive. Apart from the archival material in Israel, Poland, Donner’s book is the first in-depth account of the and France, she also consulted books and articles in artist and his works. The author recounts in painstak- Polish, Hebrew, and English. This thorough research ing detail the circumstances of the commissioning enabled her to tell Rapoport’s remarkable story in and making of the works, including new information great detail. Moreover, the text brings together not garnered from previously unpublished sources, and only photographs of his works that have survived, but incorporates original visual and theoretical analyses archival images of nearly all of the lost works as well. that cite Freud, Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jabès, and Nathan Rapoport’s personal history made him Nora, to name a few. Her major innovation is her de- especially suited to the role he later took on as the tailed exposition of Rapoport’s life and the historical commemorator of heroism on a monumental scale. The and political circumstances surrounding his various eldest son in a traditional and very poor Jewish family commissions. This material not only highlights the in Warsaw, he left school at age 12 to help support the artist’s initiative and creative drive, but also underlines family. As a teenager he joined HaShomer HaTzair. In the desire of Jews in post-war Poland to participate 1930, he was awarded a scholarship to the Warsaw in the rebuilding of Warsaw and the organization they Academy of Art and earned various prizes along the created in order to do so. Donner reveals that the credit way. One of them was for a work named the Tennis for the choice of the location for the Warsaw Ghetto Player, made for an exhibit entitled “Wystawa Sport w Memorial was taken not only by Rapoport, but by at Sztuce,” (Sport in Art) 1936 (46–47). When the Polish least three other figures as well (87). government wanted to send the sculpture to the 1936 Donner’s book has unfortunate problems. It opens Munich Olympics, Rapoport refused. His strong ideo- with a defensive introduction about Rapoport’s art logical bent was already apparent. After September 1, in general, which perhaps could have been saved 1939, Rapoport answered the call to join the struggling for the conclusion. The defensive stance here is also Polish army in the East, leaving his wife and daughter emblematic of why Rapoport has never really been in Warsaw, but his wish to serve was thwarted by the written about in Israel: his dedication to figurative art invading Russians. He got as far as Bialystok in the in the post-war climate of abstract expressionism in the Soviet-occupied area, where a group of artists was United States and New Horizons in Israel made him a working under Soviet protection to promulgate a pariah on the local Israeli art scene.5 Rapoport divided communist agenda (56). There, Rapoport was singled his time between Israel and Paris during the 1950s, but out and sent to Minsk to sculpt. This fortuitous event moved to the United States in 1959, where he was able led him to meet Mikhail Kulagin, head of the Minsk to create more freely in the more open, freewheeling art committee and second secretary of the Central American milieu, as opposed to the doctrinaire artistic Communist Party. Kulagin liked Rapoport’s work and climate that characterized Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. helped him (58). Rapoport’s style suited the Soviets— Certain significant biographical facts are missing: larger than life figures that were always muscular and Rapoport saw himself as a witness, as emphasized by styled to convey a feeling of strength and determina- Donner, but in no place does she tell us exactly which tion. The demise of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact led of his family members perished in the Holocaust. Fur- to Rapoport’s family’s flight to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan ther, Rapoport’s wife, Sima, who supposedly served as and his ultimate incarceration in a forced labor camp his model for the woman in the Warsaw memorial, in Siberia. As luck would have it, Kulagin was also there and daughter, Nina, appear only sporadically in the and immediately arranged for Rapoport’s release from narrative and in the 100 plus pages describing this forced labor and provided him with a studio where specific memorial. he was to work portraying Soviet war heroes (59–60). The book lacks editing. The narrative jumps around Representing heroic figures during the war trained and chronologically and thematically. Just one example is in 5 A monograph was published in 1958: Zvi Zohar, ed., Nathan Shulamith Shaked, Nathan Rapoport (1911–1987) Exhibit of Works Rapoport: Monuments and Sculptures (Merhavia: Sifirat Poalim, (Tel Aviv: Eretz Yisrael Museum, 1991) (Hebrew). It is only in the 1958) (Hebrew). There was a photographic exhibit in 1991 in the last two decades that scholars have related to Rapoport’s works, Eretz Yisrael Museum, which is not listed in Donner’s bibliography: generally from a sociological point of view. See note 8 below..
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