CARVING THE SHTETL
Influential Russian- Jewish artist Solomon Yudovin offers a link to a lost world.
When 20 year old Solomon Yudovin took a job as a photographer on a 1912 ethnographic expedition into the heart of the Jewish Ukraine, he probably wasn’t aware that his work would not only comprise some of the first visual documentation of the Jewish shtetl and some of the only photographs of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, but that they would also become some of the most evocative and emblematic images of a world that has long since vanished.
Yudovin, who was born in 1892 in a village near Vitebsk ( now in Belarus), was trained as an artist by Yehuda Pen, the same teacher who taught Marc Chagall. In his late teens, he was asked to join a now famed expedition led by author and ethnographer, Sh. Ansky, the purpose of which was to document the nature of Jewish life in the small towns and villages that dotted eastern European lands. Armed with a camera, he set his sights on the denizens of these farflung locales, and produced some of the first images of shtetl life, a world that has become representative of Jewish existence in Eastern Europe. The author of
The Dybbuk and a seminal intellectual figure in eastern European Jewish culture, Ansky’s influence on Yudovin as a photographer and an artist was significant.
Their research focused on the aspects of Jewish life – the children, the laborers, the merchants, the religious figures, and the schools, among others – that have become so familiar to historians and distant viewers of this world. Although he was young and relatively new to photography, Yudovin’s eye caught much that was unique about the world of the Jewish shtetl, capturing moments in Jewish life that were already disappearing by that time.
“Yudovin’s work functions as a link between authentic ethnographic research and its very real influence on eastern European Jewish artists and writers, many of whom had become estranged from tradition,” said Lyudmila Sholokhova, YIVO’s chief archivist and librarian.
It was the intricate woodcuts he created in the 1920s and 1930s that brought him the most fame. Often basing his woodcuts directly on his earlier photography, Yudovin brought the cloistered world of the shtetl to life in the pages of stories written by renowned Yiddish authors like Mendele Moykher Sforim and Dovid Bergelson.
The Russian American Foundation in cooperation with YIVO and the Russian Ethnographic Museum will be presenting a new exhibition of these unique works created by Solomon Yudovin. Depicting a vibrant shtetl life in its various forms, YIVO’s holdings include woodcuts and photographs of a wide variety of street scenes, humble thatched huts, synagogues, churches, as well as portraits of everyday laborers in the shtetl including tailors, shoemakers, women carrying water pails, rabbis, children and much more.
Curated in conjunction with the Russian Museum of Ethnography in St. Petersburg, this exhibit will include reproductions of works in their collection as well. “I am sure that visitors to the exhibit,” said its director, Dr. Vladimir Grusman, “will find themselves looking at these ethnographic images with the curious eyes of a child born in a small Jewish town, thanks to the talent of this incredible artist.”