Translating Russian-Jewish Engraving into Jewish Folk Art in Wartime Vilna

• In Event: Translation and Cultural Nationalism in Jewish Vilna, 1915-1923

Abstract

In the summer of 1916, while World War I’s bloodiest battles were raging, A. Klebanov, a Jewish engineer, penetrated the storage rooms of Vilna’s shuttered Jewish museum and found woodcarvings by the well-known Jewish sculptor Mark Antokolski. He brought them to a school he directed for the vocational training of indigent Jewish children and assigned the children the task of reproducing the carvings. Their efforts were later displayed in an exhibit organized by the German miltiary, which had occupied Vilna for nearly a year. Soldiers stationed in Vilna purchased the woodcarvings to send to their families as souvenirs, and the proceeds supported the vocational school.

Removed from its context, this episode seems like nothing more than an unusual fundraising ploy. But Klebanov was part of a coterie of Jewish intellectuals and activists using wartime circumstances to reshape Jewish culture and society. His appropriation of Antokolski’s work and his involving the vocational students constituted essential elements of this project. Influenced by and taking advantage of a variety of contingent factors ranging from German policies and demographic shifts to the realignment within Jewish communal politics, Klebanov participated in a movement to build an institutional framework for the creation of culture – plastic arts, music, theater – that was authentically Jewish.

While Klebanov and his collaborators understood Antokolski as having translated Jewish themes into the idioms of European art, Antokolski himself never espoused this view. He freely incorporated Jewish themes into his work alongside non-Jewish (and explicitly Christian) ones. By translating Antokolski’s woodcarvings into Jewish folk art, Klebanov recreated Antokolski as part of Vilna’s Jewish cutlural heritage.

Historians of Jewish art have generally focused on either the artworks themselves or the writings of artists and critics, emphasizing attempts to create Jewish high culture. This paper looks beyond high culture to examine the nexus linking art to crafts, vocational training, relief work, and communal governance. Drawing on published sources as well as archives of Jewish communal institutions, it uses the episode of the woodcarvings to explore these issues and shed new light on Jewish culture in the early twentieth century.

author

• Andrew N. Koss, Colgate University