Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888–1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was murdered in the Holocaust, she was all but lost to history, and most of her paintings have been destroyed or gone missing. Highly regarded by art historians and critics, she made a name for herself with soulful, sometimes humorous illustrations of Jewish and world literature by Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Moykher Sforim, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and others. She published her work in the mainstream German and Jewish press, and she ran in artists’ and queer circles in Weimar Berlin and in 1930s Paris. Szalit’s fascinating life demonstrates how women artists gained access to Jewish and avant-garde movements by experimenting with different media and genres. This talk focuses on the process of rediscovering Szalit and offers a close look at her art.
Bio: Kerry Wallach is Associate Professor and Chair of German Studies and an affiliate of the Jewish Studies Program at Gettysburg College. She is the author of Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit (Penn State University Press, 2024) and Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (2017), and co-editor (with Aya Elyada) of German-Jewish Studies: Next Generations. She is also a co-editor of “German Jewish Cultures,” a book series published by Indiana University Press.
shal welcome I’m Lisa Newman the yish book Center’s director of publishing and public programs it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the yish book Center’s virtual theater for this evening’s program traces of Jewish artist The Lost life and work of Rael Shalit with Carrie wallik before we get started a few housekeeping things your video will be off and your audio will be muted throughout the program you may send us your questions via the question panel at the lower right of your screen we ask that you keep questions short and that you refrain from comments so that we can try to get to everyone’s questions this evening I’m delighted to introduce this evening’s presenter Carrie wallik Carrie is professor and chair of German studies and an affiliate of the Jewish studies program at Gettysburg College she is the author of traces of a Jewish artist The Lost life and work of Raquel Shalit and passing Illusions Jewish visibility in Yar rip Germany and co-editor with AIA Ela of German Jewish studies next Generations she’s also a co-editor of German Jewish cultures a book series published by Indiana University press welcome Carrie thank you so much Lisa I’m so delighted to be here this evening and to share my research with everyone great to have you and I’ll turn the mic over to you okay thank you I’m gonna go ahead and share my screen so you can see some wonderful images so I’m really excited to share this project with with all of you and to introduce you to a forgotten artist raal shal is someone who I discovered about more than 15 years ago while I was conducting dissertation research and I was reading through the German Jewish press from the 1920s and I just found her name again and again but when I went to go find more information when I wanted to go look for her and and learn more I couldn’t find that information no one had written anything about her and I realized um soon that simply by looking through these primary sources I was the one who was slowly becoming an expert on her and I I soon knew more about her than anyone else and I decided I really wanted to write a book about her so that I could bring her to light again sort of resuscitate her um bring her back to into the known um rewrite her into history uh and Jewish art history in particular which um doesn’t include so many European uh Jewish women artists from the early 19 uh from the early early 20th century so this book was a bit of a challenge to WR partly because I didn’t have the usual sources that one has when one’s writing a biography I didn’t have any Memoir or diary um that was left behind much of shal’s work um was destroyed including most of her paintings they were either destroyed or they went missing um but she was also an illustrator so we have a lot of her illustrations um and I found a lot of images of her work uh in in the press as well so my sources were limited and and writing this book was a little bit like solving a mystery putting together the pieces of a puzzle um and perhaps we can talk more in the Q&A about the the process um I’m really happy to to share all kinds of different things um that I did in order to sort of put together enough material um to have a book about raal shal but uh what I’m going to do is is introduce you to this artist through her art and um and hopefully that’ll give you also something wonderful to look at so raali was a really prominent Jewish artist in viar Germany before the Nazis came to power um she was a Jewish artist on two levels both in terms of her back her background and her upbringing she was born and raised in Eastern Europe um Lithuania Poland she was a native Yiddish speaker um uh and she also made art with Jewish subjects and you can see here on the right um one illustration with a very overtly Jewish subject um and this led critics by the middle of the 1920s to call her quite simply the best modern female illustrator and the first female illustrator of Jewish literature so she was very acclaimed in her day um she was best known in the beginning of her career for her illustrations most of which were lithographs the two you see here are examples of that um but she also worked in pen and ink in pencil pastel chalk oil um and watercolors um and she was also a cartoonist so she had a very um she was very talented in different ways worked with different mediums um and you’ll see in both of these images that women featured prominently in many of sh’s Works she often centered women by emphasizing the role of female characters in The Works that she Illustrated um and in my talk today I’m really going to focus as much as I can on sh’s Jewish illustrations in art and especially the Yiddish contexts of her work and here you can see the um only known photograph that we have of rul Shalit is on the left and some of her different signatures um her maiden name was Marcos uh but all of her work that we know of is either signed um ra Shalit or Shalit Marcos um she started using the shorter name of Shalit around 1923 24 just about a hundred years ago um and that was uh that was the the name that she she ended up using um and that’s that’s why I’ve sort of shortened her name for the purposes of Simplicity um but sh’s story teaches us that exceptional women artists at this time gained access to both mainstream art movements and the Jewish Renaissance in Germany by engaging with different media and genres she followed broader cultural Trends to meet artistic demands so she started out working with um lithographic prints and print making um and worked her way up through portraiture and later became better known as a painter um here’s just an overview of the book itself if you’re interested it kind of shows you how her life is organized and how this talk is organized as well um starting out with her origins in Eastern Europe um moving to Germany uh she moved to Germany for the first time in 1910 and then to Berlin um around 1916 but what we’ve got here is sort of a periodization of her work where we um can look at most of her illustrations from the early 1920s think about some of her other contributions um and after 1933 she was forced to flee gery and go into Exile in Paris so we’ll look at all of that um and geographically in case you in case you want an overview of sort of all of the different contexts that her life spans um this is a a nice map for that so again um shid was born and what is today Lithuania what at the time was the Russian Empire in a small town called t or um pelai and at some point in her childhood her family moved to woj in Poland um which at that time was also the Russian Empire uh and she did learn polish um but German wasn’t even stronger language for her in 1910 she heads to Munich um to study painting to study to be an artist uh when World War I breaks out she flees to Vienna she’s forced to leave Germany as an enemy alien spends a few years there um heads back to Berlin in 1916 which she’s able to do because of her marriage to someone who’s an Austrian Citizen and is in Berlin uh for the most part until 1933 when she heads to Paris um toward the end of her life so we’ve got Lithuania Poland Germany Austria France as the sort of countries in which she lived and the borders that she um that her life spanned so to begin part one thinking about how her small town Jewish life um in Eastern Europe influenced and also um led her inspired her to do work that depicts um East European Jews for uh Western audiences um and here you see a couple of different images that all depict stle or small town Jewish life um the image on the left is one of her one of only three known paintings of hers that still exists today the town musicians dor musak kanton in German and um in the middle we see an image of an annual fair and on the write a photograph of a lost painting um that was actually published in an American Magazine in 1930 titled Jewish neighborhood um and all of these images uh give us this sort of sense of clusters of houses with slanted roofs wooden fences and quirky inhabitants of small East European towns we see women in the foreground of several of these images um and the painting on the left is one that for example we can bring into conversation with Mark shagal Fiddler and think about some of the different ways in which different artists depicted um East European Jewish musicians uh from sort of the same background but in different ways shot’s work in some of these cases follows expressionist Styles um you can see the different angles and the sort of disorienting decentering imagery but we also see this Eastern Jewish folkloric Motif um being carried through her work in different ways sometimes with a sense of melancholy not quite as light-hearted or Airy or quirky as some of the works we might associate with shagal or other artists and in 1930 uh sh wrote in response to a survey of Jewish artists she really described herself as a Jewish woman she said I love my people I an Eastern Jewish woman I feel closest to Eastern Jews um she continue to sort of identify as this Eastern Jewish in this case Insider someone who has access to the right to depict um Eastern Jews um even through a critical lens uh and not as someone who is an outside Observer of them who might be depicting Eastern Jews um pejoratively or in a negative way in 1910 um shalid arrived from woj and you can see here her sort of police registry card listing woj as her um home Community even though it’s not where she was born and in Poland um but you also see her her birth registry at the top of the screen um her birth record which shows that she was born in t in 1888 in um and this record gives us this information in in Russian and Hebrew so all kinds of different languages bringing her story to light shalid married um ra ra Marcos married Julius shalid um an actor in uh 1915 in Vienna um she knew him before Vienna U they met in Munich originally and he’s a pretty interesting character um we know that he also spoke polish and translated from polish into German um and he was very ambitious and wrapped up in his career uh one of the things that I’ve speculated is that they got married on a Friday afternoon according to the marriage record and I’ve speculated that he even rushed off to perform in the play that he was starring in that weekend even that same evening that on the day he got married um because of his sort of dedication and Devotion to his career Above All Above All Else the marriage was shortlived largely because uh well the two became estranged even before his death but he died by suicide in 1919 um so was a very kind of dramatic relationship um the interesting thing is that she chose to keep his name Julio Shalit um and Shalit is a name then that that went with her um and and the one that she chose to use as her main artist name um even after her marriage ended and and perhaps as a token of memory to him so um that name shal the spelling that he CHS the SZ lit T also uh marks a departure from his original name you can see on their marriage record s c h a l i t perhaps that Slavic flavor that East European um stylization of the name so in 1916 shal the two Shalit moved to um moved to Berlin and this is where R made her home until uh 1933 she lived in Berlin Shar which is a neighborhood where many Jews lived in Berlin at the time um her studio apartment that she lived in starting at least in 1921 located just around the corner from BHA plats um and what we what we can see from the periodicals of this time is that Shalit was um giving lessons for painting and drawing especially to the Jewish Community that’s where we found um that’s where I found the lessons advertised um and she also was perhaps giving lessons in fencing all of that was to make a living because she didn’t necessarily have um the income to support herself otherwise these were also very tough years the years sort of immediately following the first World War um and I’ll get to some of her uh I’ll get to some of her images in a moment it’s worth pointing out that she spent time in Berlin in the romanas cafe which was also a center of um cultural life for um German Jewish writers and artists also East European uh writers gathered there and artists as well um so it’s a place where she might even have heard yish spoken and it’s the place where she was sort of rumored to have first dug into the yish literature that she later Illustrated um Berlin at this time had um by by the middle of the 1920s a quarter of Berlin’s Jews um and there were about 175,000 Jews in Berlin at the time so about 40,000 of them were uh immigrants most of them were from Eastern Europe uh resulting in a sort of Yiddish M cultural microcosmos um that shalot was part of in a way and again giving her that sort of Insider advantage in depicting East European world and here’s a couple of examples of her images in the postwar years that show the sort of hardship that people were undergoing these were the years of inflation and hyperinflation scarcity hunger shortages um and screenwriter Sala fto reme remembered hunger most from these years but sh Builds on the sort of hunger and cold that others remember shal’s images depict someone a woman standing in the cold another woman who’s just lost her job as well as Berlin Street Scenes that sort of Mark her as a Berlin artist at this time so now I’m coming to the part where I want to talk about shal’s illustrations um and and I’m going to talk about her Jewish illustrations first and and focus on that for a while so due to inflation and hyperinflation um lith lithography and print portfolios um and also limited edition books gained in popularity during this time they were something that held on to the value even as the currency was devalued so it’s a time when both art and books were prized for their ability to retain value in tumultuous markets um the interesting thing now to think about also why was sh able to illustrate Yiddish literature um in Berlin in the 1920s uh both Yiddish and Hebrew publishing companies moved to Berlin during the inflation period because they were financed with foreign currency and they were only located in Berlin because of inflation so sh’s print portfolio illustrating sholom alim’s model the caner son and you see a couple images of that in front of you um is the one that she’s best known for partly because there seem to be many surviving copies of this work um and it was also the one that was preserved um and written about by several critics but this was printed by the CL prog the yish Publishing House in Berlin in in 1922 and and had 16 illustrations of of Shalom alim’s work Matel the caner son um and it also included an introduction by Bal movas the pen name of Isidor elev so shal’s really engaging with these uh yish literary circles and is really involved in them um and was chosen to be an illustrator for Shalom um in Berlin and here we see that her her scenes themselves were titled menus end scenes and they show us the family of young Matel a young boy who they start out in a sort of fictional Shadle Village of kaseva and they make their way over to America slowly they sort of move um move westward in a away as as shal did herself um though they eventually do make it to America and shal herself never did the images that we see in much of shal’s illustrations show us um in very VI imagery the pain and discomfort sometimes the extreme poverty and Misfortune sometimes even disability all of that are they become sites for envisioning the Eastern Jewish experience which in shal’s rendering is a story of um suffering and resilience her images walk the line between humor and caricature and sometimes uh and sometimes also reproduce stereotypes here we even see some exaggerated and grotesque features that make jewishness legible this is one of my favorite images this is a a a scheme that model invents to to earn money it’s ostensibly a scheme to drive away rats but really it’s fake rat poison and when the sack of fake rat poison bursts open it’s actually sneezing powder and everyone responds to the sneezing powder and that’s what we see in this scene a street sneezes we see at least four people sneezing simultaneously and shy depicts them mid sneeze um we see their animalistic howls their faces are contorted their bodies are stooped and bent and out of control um French critic jacqu binki later understood and described shal’s characters as outwardly grotesque but inwardly moving these visions of ghettos where grimaces distort faces but not souls and we also can see this as an example of what shal wrote about herself a phrase often associated with Shalom of course this idea of laughter through tears thinking about how humor could be a form of self-preservation something that combined um this history of Affliction with the with a focus on the comical or absurd moments that lightened the mood and made everything seem a bit more bearable even in the darkest of times the other well-known work of Yiddish literature that shal Illustrated is fish by um Mandela moim the pen name of s y Abramovich the interesting thing about this is that it wasn’t printed by a Yiddish Publishing House even though was yish literature it was printed in a portfolio again not really designed for reading more a container of the illustrations a sort of bound version of the illustrations um another version of with 16 lithographs um and this one was printed in German by uh the German Publishing House prop and fog uh with an introduction and plot summary by the art historian Julius Elias um we see Fish fishka here on the left in shal’s rendering um looking rather apish or animal likee fishka is of course a beggar described as a simple-minded with crooked yellow teeth a hunchback a bad limp shal’s illustrations provide an expressionist Counterpoint to abramovich’s more realistic ones she visually elongates enlarges and magnifies Jewish difference and here we see a couple of dark haunting scenes of fenced in wooden houses that serve as a backdrop for these ghostlike figures and also some unsafe Y characters some Beggars from the Jewish underworld shalot was also involved uh with some Hebrew literary projects while she was living in Berlin in January 1923 uh the Hebrew writer bik celebrated his 50th birthday in Berlin he was also the chief Hebrew editor at the colif log excuse me and um it was actually the remon publishing company that published the children’s book that shalot was involved with and here you can see the book is called kinao and the title can be translated in a number of different ways but Sly did only two lithographic illustrations for this book and you can see both of her illustrations here the book itself is about a kind of Tom Thumb like character like a thumb-sized boy who um goes on all these different adventures with sort of bug bug-sized figures and and Friends uh and Shelley didn’t exactly depict that she sort of deviated from The Narrative and it’s unclear if that was sort of her artistic license or if perhaps she didn’t understand or didn’t want to depict uh a thumb-sized character the amazing thing about this book is that it was a collaboration and it represents a a true collaboration um by by several different artists um calligrapher Francisco baruk was involved in doing the Hebrew lettering uh on the cover and painter and Professor arst boom did the sort of colored uh Whimsical illustrations on the cover and on the inside Pages as well and here you can see that you may recognize or or recall some of their work already um because it’s bar and boom who are also collaborators on the covers of the magazine mil GR and its Hebrew counterpart remon um which they were supervised in those cover cover design um contributions by Art editor raish nit barstein so bar and boom we know also through their work on the yish periodical milk gr which is of course well known to many but it’s really interesting if we Jax suppose these covers and we see the kind of book projects that were related to mil crime that were coming out of Berlin at this time mgy the magazine did a couple um mention sh in a couple of different issues and in one issue um included a whole article on lithography that pitched or styled raal shalid as an air to the masters of liography such as Goya and tomier um and and really featured ralit as a modern contemporary lithographer and here you can see two images of shalik that appeared in milro um one in the immigration office on the left is actually another illustration from the model portfolio um and here you see the female clerk giving a terrible Grimace smile um and her compassion for the distraught looking immigrant woman and child is really distorted through this sort of trauma of upheaval of Eastern Jews trying to immigrate the image on the right shows us a drive to the rabbi and here we see um the mum article describes the parched horse who also hovers like a shadow the Jewish horse skin and bones this is a collective scene with a national scope posos expressed with a Jewish folk character a yishan folk character so if we think about this image as somehow being representative of what shot was trying to depict and Conjuring up that Eastern Jewish milia um that’s how it was read and understood by mme in 1922 um so if we think about 1923 as Hebrew as shalot year of Hebrew poetry when she Illustrated both bolik and Hinrich hin hus Hebrew Melodies um we start to see the wide scope of what her work was um able to include and in 1923 when she did these illustrations of Hinrich H’s uh Hebrew Melodies she was illustrating all of the different poems in this poetry cycle from 1851 um the the ones that look like the most familiar scenes of Jewish life to us are the ones that come from her come from the poem princess Sabbath including the havdala scene here on the left the one in the middle illustrates the poem Yehuda Ben halvi and the one on the right the poem called disputation and if we look carefully we can perhaps see some visual similarities between the 14th century Spanish Queen shal depicts here on the right and shik’s im images of women in other mainstream literature who look different than the Jewish women she Illustrated and here I’m just giving you a broad overview of some of the other illustrations of world literature that she did not not Jewish literature but mainstream literature um she Illustrated Doki is the crocodile too is the CER Sonata uh several stories by Dickens and tier’s my uncle Benjamin so here we see some of these different forms of exaggeration that played out in other illustrations sh was not only an illustrator uh in the middle of the 1920s as lithography sort of started to fall out of favor she shifted to doing portraits um which are often drawings here you see a couple portraits that she did of prominent cultural figures in Germany including the playright belel BR theater critic about earring um and that brings us to the third part of my talk um where I want to look at some of her contributions to mainstream culture and also to other kinds of work uh that she did and we haven’t yet had a chance to talk about her focus on animals which is part of the reason for titling this the wild sides of viar um she did many different illustrations of animals um you can see a couple images here from doeski is the crocodile but she also frequented the Berlin Zoo Zoo you can see some of these images of of elephants getting pedicures and um giraffes also being taken care of uh by Zoo caregivers um but also so the personification of these animals is what’s interesting and we see that recurring again and again in her work um here are images taken from some Jewish periodicals that she Illustrated and uh one of which I read about in the introduction to the book um It’s actually an illustration to a short Story by Shalom Alim you can see it right in the center here um sh writes about uh the ritual of korus the sort of transferring of sins to a chicken uh as part of the Yum kapor holiday she writes she writes about that from the perspective of the chicken and we actually see chickens coming up again and again in her work as a sort of humorous um punchline um sort of punctuating the stories that she’s telling and and bringing humor to the table again and again but here we can see she’s also illustrating different Jewish holidays and and providing also adornments for Jewish periodicals especially the UDA which was a Zionist periodical in um in Berlin she wrote a couple of her own stories uh and I’ve translated them in the book as well um she wrote them in German uh but they’re clearly focused on East European towns and sort of bring Eastern Jewish characters to life um for them in the small small town making matah in the small town um and I really like the story The Passover story that shal wrote where um Gita who’s a matah baker a woman trying to make her living and feed all of our hungry children by um by baking matah as as a sort of career that keeps her family afloat um she’s shut down at one point by the mayor and told she’s not allowed to bake matah and she goes to negotiate with the mayor and she says you are the master of the city but I am the master of my oven and the mayor is so struck by this that he allows her to reopen her ovens to continue baking matah um but of course at one point her matah baking is disrupted by the drunk chickens and you can see those Illustrated here on the right as well um there’s this rumor that the AOK has gotten into the chickens and they’re disrupting everything but it turns out they’re just drunk they’ve gotten into some meat in the cellar and um are are just a little bit uh disruptive because of that also in the late 1920s sh um Illustrated continued to illustrate and put forward um strong female characters here just some of those characters one of the choices that she made uh was to illustrate a story by Tomas man that later became part of Joseph and his brothers and this is is a biblical story man’s story was based on the biblical story of Dena and uh it’s one of course that allowed sh to Envision and depict a strong uh female Jewish character uh and she did this all in these very interesting publication contexts um her illustrations and man’s story were all published in the periodical called the enlightenment the um which was co-edited by sexologist Magnus HB who was involved um he founded the institute for sexual science in Berlin in 1919 and um spoke openly about homosexuality and helped to sort of make room for it in German culture and shot’s involvement and engagement in queer circles um is sort of made clear uh by her publication of these illustrations in this magazine uh and it’s very interesting that this is also another sort of intersection of Jewish and queer contexts um shie herself had relationships uh with both men and women which we also know from one of her letters um and it’s just very interesting to sort of think about how that all fit into the Public Image that she projected and contributed in 1929 shal’s um painting The Immigrant woman as bid won a prize in the exhibition called the woman of today def ho this exhibition showcased the talents of 65 women artists all portraits of women by women and here you can see a stylish Modern Woman serving cocktails and Pub Fair uh and this painting made quite a splash it was even picked up by the Yiddish press in Wars as far away as Warsaw and cus Lithuania and several reviews talked about the Fate that emerged from it others mistakenly read it as a Russian immigrant woman as barid um certainly the word Russian is not part of the original title but certainly it’s an image of an immigrant who was left a place of origin but who is still in transit and must work and there is also it’s worth noting a striking similarity between this woman um who is not Rahal shalid it is not a self-portrait and this image of her on the lower right that is a self-portrait and it’s actually called um the fencer self-portrait and shy did that just probably just about the same year maybe maybe the year after um we come back to the fact that shot was a fencer and she wrote about fencing you can see an article that she wrote and Illustrated for the bow House Magazine Dino Alia here on the left um but shal’s Sleek sort of self-portrait as a fencer I I read as a a really important intervention into the woman as artist self-portrait genre she’s not holding a a paintbrush or a pallet she’s not standing at an easel instead she’s um depicting herself here as an athlete who’s ready to rise to engage herself uh to engage her opponent and to prove herself so even as shalid star was Rising even as she found so much success in Germany in the early 1930s it was exactly at this moment when she was forced to flee to Paris um Paris was sort of her second choice not as good as Berlin but um not so bad either uh until it until it wasn’t a great second choice um in the 1940s but she took up residence in Monas and here you can see the her her studio um where she worked for several years on the left and then her last known address here on the right um and she fit right into What’s called the school of Paris or E de par which included many artists with East European backgrounds including shagal sutin lipshits man cats and many of the refugees in 1930 30s parents were gathering at cafes like lome Cafe dome in mon Paras along with many other foreign artists and um sh didn’t have it easy at this time she wrote in a letter in 1934 I keep painting but so what I have an atier full of paintings but no one to buy them she had a little bit of trouble kind of getting her footing finding her place and as a refugee living on savings and meager earnings she never had much money to spend she sat she rarely was able to sit at a table at the Dome Cafe but instead stood around and schmoozed with friends and acquaintances that she encountered there so she was part of the scene but perhaps a little bit on the margins she did find some degree of success in Paris you can see here in 1935 she had a solo Exhibition at the gallery borovski which was um connected partly also through the sort of Paris polish circles she joined the German uh the free artists league in 1930 which I read is an act of resistance um and she was even involved in a 19 19 39 exhibition of Jewish art in June 1939 which really showcased the sort of vibrant Jewish cultural life that still existed in Paris on the eve of World War II and it sort of international nature um but of course that that world soon Came Crashing Down um I do want to show just a couple of more images here these are illustrations that she did in Paris in the 1930s I believe um they sort of update some of her earlier renderings um with a slightly different style um and those were published in a magazine in Paris in 1935 but I want to end my talk today by coming um coming back to a Yiddish source and actually one that is in the Yiddish Book Center collection and that is um H fenster’s Memorial book um from 1951 called un to Kin for our martyred artists and this book you can see images of from it here um compiles testim monies about uh and also artwork by uh 84 different Jewish artists who were living in France but who died in the early 1940s um shalot was one of many uh there were over 13,000 foreign Jews in Paris who were rounded up on the day that shalot was arrested in July 1942 in the valiv Roundup um shalot spent about five weeks in the interment camp at John C uh and then was deported to aitz and and either died on route or was murdered on arrival at um so many many of Jewish many of the Jewish artists living in France um met a similar fate and um H fenster’s Memorial volume he was sort of the only one who had the foresight to um collect testimonies and bring together all the information that he could find about these different artists uh and it really is one of the richest biographical sources that we have on shalid from the time my my my guess is that fer didn’t know shalik personally but rather knew people who knew her um the testimony is Rich enough um and the level of details great enough that that’s seems to be a reasonable guess to me um but this is what sort of wrote her into some history why one of the reasons why she hasn’t been more forgotten uh and of course was only available in Yiddish until it was recently translated into French um but didn’t necessarily bring her uh to to everyone who might have wanted to know about her uh for for that linguistic reason and one of the questions that I ask in the epilogue to my book is who will claim this artist who will claim ra shalan her Legacy who will remember her and it’s such an interesting case because she’s she really slips between the cracks of different countries um different languages different Traditions uh and I’m so glad that the yish book centor has agreed to sort of claim her and and Host this talk on her today um because she was indeed someone who came from from yish Worlds and someone who um perhaps I hope is of interest to to those who are interested in the yish book Center so I’m really looking forward to um answering your questions and to some discussion now I’m gonna stop sharing my screen many thanks car fascinating um you can see why you went on the the discovery path with all of this um in the ensuing book so couple of questions to uh pepper you with um first is she or her work part of the collection of the Jewish Museum in Berlin uh that’s a great question and and one that has a complicated answer because the Jewish Museum in Berlin today of course um is only sort of a continuation of the Jewish Museum that opened in 1933 um so the long version of this answer is sh’s work was actually collected by the Jewish Museum before there was a Jewish Museum um by Art historian Carl Schwarz who started collecting artwork from Jewish artists in Berlin um her work was collect Ed as early as 1927 um and she’s really one of the only women artists included in that collection which I think is really telling and really interesting um I’m not sure if her work was on display when the Jewish Museum first opened but only one week before Hitler came to power in 1933 um but it may have been some of her lithographs may have been included in that collection in any case the collection did include her works and actually those Works migrated some of the men’s it up in Warsaw um today the Jewish Museum Berlin holds a couple of her lithographic prints um but doesn’t have any of her any of her larger works and again um it Bears repeating that there are only three known paintings of hers that have survived so those are not yet um located in prominent museums um did she have much contact you know with the B house school or artists it’s a the fact that she contributed to a b House Magazine means that there’s some contact um but it’s but it’s more limited I believe um I do know that she got to know a number of women artists who had stronger and greater connections to the B house um through her involvement in an organization called the the the association of women artists syin so um kind of more by association than directly is my guess and how I would answer that but um she’s certainly active at the same time as the bow house and and I don’t know about greatly influenced by but certainly in broader conversation with broader dialogue with B house style um how hard uh I’m sorry I have to read off a different script here um how hard was it for women and especially when she was born to have pursued an education in art would that have been a challenge for her yes absolutely and and that I think um we can understand also through the lens of why she came to Germany she was um she was raised or coming of age in in woj as a young woman and didn’t necessarily you know prior to 1910 didn’t necessarily find the opportunity she was seeking to study art and get involved with art there and she had heard of that Munich was a big International Gathering Place for artists um around 1910 it really there wasn’t a bigger sort of International location in Central Europe um and she made her way there because of the opportunities she knew she would find what’s interesting and this is where we get into sort of the details and the the veracity of um all of the different accounts of her life um some accounts say that she was that she was matriculated into the damond academy the women’s Academy to study art in Munich but their matricula their matriculation records don’t reflect that um so it becomes kind of this thing where sh created her own story she created her own narrative perhaps she didn’t have the tuition fees which for women were quite steep to enroll in the same sort of prestigious aies where many middle class women artists were enrolling in Munich for example she also says she studied art in Paris and London but she wasn’t actually necessarily officially enrolled in anymy there either so she was there she went there she encountered people she learned something um but perhaps she studied independently took private lessons in studios perhaps she was self-taught um it’s hard to know so yes as a woman artist from Eastern Europe faced um challenges in in getting and acquiring a formal education and then when she was located in cities where it would have been possible at that time she didn’t have the money to pay for it um so it’s it’s a little bit complicated but somehow she got the training she needed and and the skills she wanted um and applied them yeah it sounds like she was a formidable and ambitious and successful in her pursuit of passion um for painting or artwork uh asking uh we saw two birth dates 1988 and 18 sorry 1888 and 1894 which do you think is accurate um there are many many different birth dates for her circulating and um one speculation that I have is that perhaps she didn’t even know the year that she was actually born um but the birth records that I found from the Lithuanian State archives from 1888 say that she was born in 1888 so I’m pretty much going with 1888 as the accurate year of her birth um there many reasons why she might have changed her birth year in other records again maybe she didn’t know maybe she wanted to make herself younger many women at uh sort of from her generation made themselves younger by a few years um but it is kind of funny to read in her own handwriting um letters that she wrote where she claims to have been born in all kinds of different years uh but for her also it wasn’t necessarily important right um they didn’t always record uh women’s births out of superstition to sort of trick the evil why in one article she wrote I was born in Lithuania many years ago does it really matter how long ago doesn’t really matter do you know much about how um unusual or was it normal or the norm uh for a woman artist to have as many commissions as she did for Publishers that’s a great question um I think it was a little bit unusual uh there are some other women illustrators who who made a name for themselves at this time in Germany um but certainly not so many with a connection to Eastern Europe and that’s really I think that the role that she was sort of slotted into by Publishers that’s I think her Eastern European background is why she was chosen originally to illustrate dvi’s H story for example right she has this connection to Russia Russian Empire even if she’s not a Russian speaker um but some of the other Jewish women illustrators uh did illustrations sort of of their own poition of their own choosing and those illustrations weren’t all necessarily um able to be printed so um she was not the only illustrator but um still it was it was something special to to be in 1921 sort of receiving those commissions yeah um and also and also commissions for portraits as well um do you know did she create any City Landscapes um or artwork of Berlin yes and I showed um one small image early early in the presentation um and there are a couple of others but again these are sort of reproductions of paintings that uh they’re from a magazine in 1920 and and the images aren’t great so do we know what those artworks actually look like we’re we’re sort of guessing um but yes we know people have written about also that she she depicted many Berlin City scenes so we can say with certainty that she depicted both East Europeans stle scenes and also uh Berlin City scenes um did she acknowledge any artistic influences on her work her figures look remarkably like works by Marie lorensen that’s an interesting comparison um I know that she uh for example Marie LA son um exhibited also as sort of a guest artist in the exhibition the woman of today from 1929 in which shalid won won a prize um laurenson was probably someone who would have been known to shalid um but I have never seen a more I’ve never seen a specific or concrete reference uh I think that her influences we can speculate about them she doesn’t there’s no paragraph where says I’m sort of I’m in conversation with or my work is inspired by so it’s all um more sort of inference um she was friends with and and in the circles of ludic mner and ycob steinhardt so if we’re trying to place her in terms of um artists in Germany who were depicting Jews that’s that’s an easy one she really is sort of in a dialogue with them and conversation with them um she most certainly was inspired by K kovitz the print maker lithographer um sculptor uh who’s very well known today and um even in the states uh kovitz was a generation older than her or at least half a generation older and um there’s some evidence that kovitz was at least at least a little bit of a supporter of shal’s work um so I think it’s easy to see a strong connection there um but in terms of other women artists we know that she knew uh painter juli V T who’s kind of experiencing a moment of rediscovery at the moment um and and she knew many other artists involved in the association of women artists that’s sort of where we can go to find definite connections and ties um but in terms of actual Inspirations it’s we can read the images and we can infer um yeah that’s a great question um along the same lines which you have known Gabriela monter I looked into that pretty carefully um and I don’t have any evidence that she knew her but she did live in Munich at the same time that monter was there with keninsky and monter um and kinsky were also fleeing Munich when World War I broke out in 1914 um not headed to the same place necessarily I think she would have known and admired Mon’s work from afar but I did um do a little bit of digging and couldn’t find this is one of the the sort of obstacles and challenges that I fa in my research I couldn’t find what I was suspecting that I would find which was sort of casual references to sh in the papers and works of people who knew her um and I was guessing people who knew her in some cases right like I looked through through um as much as I could about M but M never references shal sh also another reference say w but I don’t have much of shal’s stuff so it’s very it was very interesting to me that was a surprising thing that I encountered in my work was that I just couldn’t find more kind of off-hand references to shal um that perhaps led me to believe that either most of the people who knew her were also murdered in the Holocaust and did not leave behind papers um or or and or um many of the people she knew may not have left behind papers may maybe they weren’t important enough their papers weren’t preserved um they weren’t necessarily major cultural figures maybe just just regular people so I always um have the ability to ask a question of my own um so what what was one of the more surprising things that you found in your work um like an actual un like an actual Discovery or Act Discovery or something that when you set out to do this you know sort of really um set you off in a different direction or was very unexpected and gave you different insights into who she was yeah um I my the easiest answer for this question is there was an amazing find in the form of a letter personal letter and I didn’t have any personal letters of her before I got this one letter um all the correspondence that I had was professional correspondence and just wasn’t quite as as rich or as telling um and this letter came to me just through the strangest of channels um Shad had a friend named elanora kova who was a Polish German writer living in Berlin uh not Jewish but um polish and they spoke polish together um so the Letter’s in Polish uh and and this was a letter that was only preserved because cova’s grandson has some of her papers right and it’s not a public archive it’s in a family archive and the person who was writing a biography of of kova um mentioned this letter mentioned Rah shali mentioned this connection in something that she published so I was able to find that in English reach out to her get a copy of this letter in Polish and this personal letter um told us it was it’s the one from 1934 that I cited once or twice um told us that shalik was living in Paris that she was experiencing the sort of difficulties of living in Exile um that she was trying to sell paintings trying to make her way into the Paris scene uh it tells us also in know um in in very clear terms that she had relationships with both men and women including sort of the struggles and and um love sickness that came with all of that uh and that and that really opened up doors in terms of thinking of her as a queer artist and being able to categorize her in that way um so that was a really important letter for for many different reasons it also mentioned um shal’s sister who was still living in woj in Poland um and Shel asked herself this question of um should I go back to Poland I mean in 1934 is is wo a better place to be than Paris and her sister’s response was no like we’re all experiencing the depression here this is not a good place to be stay where you are um but just even that question that she was sort of entertaining that that return to to to Poland in 1934 was was also eye openening um question about did you find any information of her artistic preference I.E illustration [Music] painting no um I think it would if there had been something it would be more about subject than about the medium of preference um and and DEP depicting people in different scenes their faces I mean that’s something that we see also descriptions of her Studio mention again and again the sort of faces the Eastern European faces um she did she did talk about how her Eastern European sort of Homeland was closest to her heart as a subject of her work as well so um that’s something that we can see as a through line um throughout her whole career um I’m going to give you two I think quick ones um thank you for fielding all of these um oh yeah okay um did she ever do any clay or sculpture artwork not that I know of I have no evidence of that and and um you know I also have no evidence that she learned some of the more sophisticated techniques that other artists were using in addition to lithography I don’t have any evidence that shalot learned um etching uh Dry Point any any woodcut um I don’t have any evidence that she did any of that but she did do the sort of drawing with the different um sort of pastel and and pencil materials that were able to make the the rendering for the lithograph um and any finds turn up after your book was published this may sometimes happen the book was just published in March so um there haven’t been so many since then uh but of course that’s perhaps one of the best questions to to end on because it is one of the things that I’m hoping to do with the project that I’m hoping to do with the book I’m hoping that people will will um become eventually better acquainted with her as an artist better um acquainted with her name her story uh and the fact the fact that so many of her Works have resurfaced in the last few years is what’s kind of giving me um an indication that there are more of her artworks out there hiding so um a couple the paintings that have resurfaced in the last few years have shown up in Paris and other French auction houses so um I think there’s there’s work still going to turn up at some flea markets in France somewhere I think there’s probably some work in collections in Israel maybe Germany um people have the work and they don’t know they have it right so maybe if they start to to hear about her name see her signature our shal is what they might be looking for especially in the the French paintings um and you know as those continue to resurface there might be other stories to tell there was one set of illustrations that uh came up at auction uh in 2023 just just year before the book came out so I was sort of incorporating these finds into my work at very much at the last minute um and those were actually illustrations of Israel zang’s work the king of schnorrers and they were among shal’s illustration works that were thought to be lost as well but what turned up were the originals the original drawings and maybe they were never actually included in any kind of Illustrated published volume but these she did do these original drawings and The Originals turned up um I believe in Israel uh and then we sold at auction in New York and they sold for $122,000 um which is amazing so um kudos to that auction house but also uh the fact that there is sort of interest in her on the Art Market I’m hoping will sort of drive this it all can be a circle right the renewed interest in her as an artist can drive the Art Market H and so so forth yeah so an opportunity to have you back on again um May maybe I hope I hope I hope so much turns up that that someone wants that yeah um and I’m going to make this actually the last one to end on which is loved your talk is your book available in print or ebook and yes we have it at the yish bookcenter shop. yish book center.org wonderful yes it is available in both print and ebook um it is available uh through the Penn State University uh press website you can use a discount code um I’m going to find the discount code I believe it’s nr24 like new release 24 um for the Penn State University press’s website it’s available at all other book sellers as well um and thank you for your interest har thank you so much for the book for your work and for a wonderful presentation and introducing us to an artist we should all know thank you so much um Lisa I really appreciate this opportunity to speak to the yish book Center’s audience and um it was really an honor and a pleasure to be here today with all of you great well we hope to welcome you some sometime soon to the Center thank you so I want to thank Carrie and in addition I want to thank our producer as always Elizabeth copoly who makes all of the magic happen behind the scenes today’s program is part of our ongoing series of virtual and live public programs I hope that you’ll all consider joining us for two upcoming Live Events Sunday June 16th is the opening of Harvey wangs New York and will be followed by a conversation at 2m by the photographer Harvey Wang on June 19th and again on June 23rd we’ll be screening nathanisacynic left of a few seats at yido um so hop on to Yiddish bookc center.org events um and please join us back in our virtual theater on Thursday June 21st for Treasures off the page the book Center type collection with Caleb sheer the yish book Center Richard s Herman endowed senior fellow and Before I Let You Go I want to thank all of our members out there whose ongoing support makes all of our ongoing work possible so I look forward to seeing seeing you in person at the center come see yisha global culture our Landmark core exhibition take a tour attend an event and otherwise we’ll see you back in the virtual W theater thanks again for joining us tonight