324 book reviews

Joseph P. Ansell, Arthur Szyk. Artist, Jew, Pole (Oxford and Portland: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004), 332 pp., color illustra- tions, ISBN: 978-18-74-77494-5.

Arthur Szyk (born Lodz, Russian Poland 1894, died New Canaan, Connecticut, 1951) was in his time a well-known illuminator, min- iaturist, caricaturist and cartoonist. He used his remarkable artistic gifts to express his love of his native Poland; his support for the Allies during World War II and his involvement in the Jewish cause in general and in the Zionist movement in particular were notable. After his death his fame diminished, but there has been a revival of interest. Two important books have been published about him in recent years, the one under review and a volume by Steven Luckert, which is devoted to Szyk’s retrospective exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2002.1 Both are illustrated, but Luckert’s book has the advantage of integrating the images into the text, while in Ansell’s biography the reader must search in special sections of the book for the images under discussion. In the context of twentieth century art, Szyk was highly unusual, if not unique. At a time when European art was headed in new directions (expressionism, cubism, abstraction, and so forth), Szyk made what might be termed a reactionary choice to base his artistic language on the traditions of Oriental (especially Persian) miniatur- ism and medieval European illumination of manuscripts. This unusual choice was, in my opinion, responsible for blunting the emotional impact of his stylized images, but served him well as an artist with various political agendas. At first Szyk worked chiefly as an illustrator and illuminator of books and historical documents of particular meaning for him; later, during the Second World War, he achieved renown as a political cartoonist and caricaturist. The new interest in his career is linked to the growing scholarly concern with modern Jewish art, however it may be defined, and with the Holocaust. Unlike many other artists of Jewish origin, Szyk worked on explicitly Jewish themes, making it easy to define him as a “Jewish artist,” and his oeuvre is also of interest to those who study the reaction of Jewish creative artists to the Holocaust and to the birth of the State of Israel.

1 Steven Luckert, The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk ( Washington, D.C.: University of Washington Press, 2002). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 EJJS 4.2 Also available online – brill.nl/ejjs DOI: 10.1163/102599911X573404 book reviews 325

A very interesting aspect of Szyk’s life, which Ansell deals with at some length but not always in a completely convincing way, was his willingness to serve the Polish cause during the entire interwar period. Szyk’s admiration for and identification with Poland was character- istic of a small but important stratum of secularized Polish Jews who knew and loved Polish culture and revered the heroic Polish campaign for independence, eventually achieved after World War I. The belief that Jewish and Christian Poles should fight together for freedom against Poland’s enemies, in particular Russia and Germany, was a well-known theme in the work and thought of both Jewish and non- Jewish Polish intellectuals and artists. Szyk beautifully expressed this idea in one of his most important early projects, his illustrations to the text of the “Statute of Kalisz,” a privilege issued to the Jews of Poland in the 13th century. The statute, and later documents based on it, granted Jews in the medieval Polish state the right to live, work, and maintain religious autonomy, at a time when they were being severely persecuted in the West. Szyk’s ambitious work presents not only an illuminated text of the privilege itself, but also a special version of Jewish-Polish historiography, a Jewish-Polish narrative which highlights the various examples over the centuries of heroic Jewish-Polish cooperation in the struggle for Polish independence— starting with the Polish uprisings against Russian rule in the nine- teenth century and ending with the final victory in late 1918. Szyk also includes illustrations dealing with the joint Jewish and Christian Polish struggle for better social conditions (as during the Russian Revolution of 1905), and with the contribution of Jewish merchants and artisans to economic life in the Polish lands. Ansell gives his readers only two illustrations from the “Statute”—given its impor- tance as an example not only of Szyk’s brilliant but idiosyncratic artistic language but also of one aspect of his world outlook, he really should have been more generous. Szyk’s benign reading of Jewish history in Poland, and his evident Polish patriotism, were considered useful by the beleaguered Polish state of the 1930s; it supported his work and helped the artist to display his “Statute of Kalisz” in Poland and abroad. Remarkably enough, Szyk agreed to accept the aid of the state not only in the years of Joseph Pilsudski’s ascendency (1926–1935), but even in the period after the death of this relatively moderate Polish leader, when the leadership of Poland fell into the hands of a band of ultra- nationalists and convinced anti-Semites, and when the economic and