Odesa – Tel Aviv

Pseudonym: M.G.
Ca.1880 – 1939, Odesa; painter, graphic artist, theater designer, critic, art theorist

Herschenfeld founded and led the Society of Independent Artists in Odesa. Studied art in the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and in an art academy in Paris. Was a member of the Societé des Artistes Independants and took part in Paris Art Salons. Wrote the articles “Language of Painting” (1914) and “On Art and Joy” (1916. In 1918 headed the Free Academy of Fine arts of the Society of Independent Artists, and taught painting theory. During the Soviet period, taught painting and art history in Odesa. Works by Herschenfeld are to be found in the Odessa art museum, and in private collections.

Pseudonym: Teo Fra.
1883, Berdichev – 1957, Odesa; painter, teacher

He studied at the Odesa Art College, followed by further studies at Anton Aschbe’s academy in Munich and after then he lived and studied under Gabriel Ferrier at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1917, returned to Odesa. From 1917–1919 participated in the exhibitions of the Society of Independent Artists. In 1918, taught decorative art at the Free Studio of Easel and Decorative Painting and Sculpture. In Odessa, Fraerman acquired a reputation as a mature artist with a distinctly individual style. From 1920 to 1949 Fraerman was engaged in teaching. He was one of the founders of the Museum of Eastern and Western Art in Odesa. During Stalin’s “fight against cosmopolitism,” he was prohibited from teaching, and accused of “formalism.”

Pseudonym: Nuren
1887, Elisabetgrad – 1979, Moscow; painter, graphic artist, author of memoirs, teacher

He studied at the Odessa Art College. From 1911 – 1912, he studied at private art academies in Paris, along with the artists Marc Chagall and Pinchus Kremegne. In 1913 he returned to Odesa. Was one of the leaders of the Society of Independent Artists (1917 – 1918). Contemporary critics saw in Nirenberg one of the artists who embraced “with serious intention” the new art of Paris. From 1918 – 1918, he founded and directed the Odesa Free Studio of Easel and Decorative Painting and Sculpture. Nirenberg was a close friend of Peremen for a decade. He moved to Moscow in late 1919. He was friend with the writer Isaac Babel.From 1922 – 1925, he served as art critic for Pravda (The Truth).

Pseudonym. Also: Al Fas; real name: Srul Arye – Alexander Fainzilberg
1892, Kiev – 1944, Auschwitz; graphic artist, photographer

Sandro Fasini was the elder brother of the writer Ilya Ilf. He studied at the Odesa Art College. Worked as an illustrator for Odesa magazines. Among his fellow caricaturists Sandro Fasini was considered the “deity of local drawing”. Published poetry and an essay “Henri Rousseau,” (1918). From 1917–1919 was a member of the Society of Independent Artists in Odesa and participated in its exhibitions. In 1922, he emigrated to France. In a letter to a relative, Fasini wrote: “Right now, to choose Russia as an area of activity is to choose death. The human mind cannot comprehend what Russia has become. One must see it with one’s own eyes to believe it”. He resided in Paris. There he worked as an artist and photographer. He perished with wife in Auschwitz in 1944.

The Peremen collection has only Fasini’s early graphic works done mostly in a neo-Primitivist style. The Oscar Ghez collection (University of Haifa) includes a number of his works in the Surrealism style from the Parisian period.

1880, Odesa – 1975, Moscow; painter, graphic artist

Studied in the Odesa Art College. He visited Paris in the early 1910s. Was a member of the Society of Independent Artists. In 1918, together with Nurenberg and Fraerman, he served on the organizing committee of an exhibition of Jewish artists in Odesa (scheduled for 1918, which did not take place). In 1918, taught in Odesa’s Free Studio of Easel and Decorative Painting and Sculpture, and in its Children’s Academy. He resided later in the suburbs of Moscow and worked as a teacher of drawing.

1896, Odesa – date of death unknown; graphic artist, painter

Studied in the Odesa Art College. Participated in the exhibitions of the Society of the Independent Artists. He worked as an illustrator for the Odesa magazines. Numerous drawings and caricatures of theater figures by the Israel Mexin, “Odessan Toulouse-Lautrec,” appear in the publications from 1915 until the early 1920s. Like the French artists, Mexin was attracted to the world of theater, the music halls, and the night cafes. He moved to Moscow in the early 1920s. It is likely that Mexin was murdered during Stalin purges of 1937.

Pseudonyms: O.S., Sigma, Sigismond, Oliv.
1891, Odesa – 1972, Paris; painter, graphic artist, illustrator, decorator

He studied painting at Odesa. He resided in Paris in the mid-1910s and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants (1914). He returned to Russia at the beginning of World War I. Was a member of the Society of Independent Artists in Odesa. He was a contributor to the Odessa satirical magazine Bomba (The Bomb) (1917–1919). In the early 1920s, he emigrated to Paris where he worked as a decorator and book’s illustrator. A solo exhibition of watercolors was held at the in Paris in 1931. His works were shown at the Salon d’Automne (1923-1933). His further fate is unknown.

1898, Kodyma, Odesa District – 1967, Kharkov; painter and theater designer

Sobol studied art in Odesa. From 1918, he participated in the exhibitions of the Society of Independent Artists and of the Free Studio of Easel and Decorative Painting and Sculpture. He worked at the Kharkov Museum from 1922. In the early 1920s, he began to work as a decorative artist for theater. In 1938, he became the chief designer of the Kharkov Theater of Musical Comedy. He participated in the many exhibitions in Ukraine, in Kharkov and Kiev (1927–1935).

1892, Bakhchisarai – date of death unknown; painter, graphic artist

Yefet-Kostini graduated from the Odessa Art College in 1915. He participated in only one exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists (1918). He was a member of Amshei Nurenberg’s Free Studio of Easel and Decorative Painting and Sculpture. His further fate is unknown.

Pseudonym: Constant
1892, Jaffa – 1969, Paris; painter, sculptor, graphic artist

Was born in Jaffa. In 1914, he studied at the Odesa Art College. He participated in the activities of the Free Studio of Easel and Decorative Painting and Sculpture, and in the exhibitions of the Society of Independent Artists. He immigrated to Eretz Israel in late 1919, aboard the ship Ruslan. In early 1920 was one of the organizers of the Hatomer Cooperative in Tel Aviv. He moved to Paris in late 1922. There he took part in the Salon d’Automne and group exhibitions. In 1929 he studied sculpture. He was drafted into the French army at the beginning of World War II. In 1944, he joined the Résistance. In 1952, he visited Israel and took part in several exhibitions; he moved back to Israel in 1962, held several large exhibitions, and opened a studio in his home in Ramat Gan.

1862, Odesa – 1945, Oxford, UK; painter and illustrator

Leonid Pasternak was the father of the famous poet and author Boris Pasternak. He studied painting and drawing in Odesa and Munich and taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Pasternak illustrated Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace, was hosted, along with his family, at Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana estate, and painted many portraits of the famed author. In 1921, Pasternak moved to Berlin, where he became friends with German-Jewish artists Max Liebermann and Hermann Struck. He was also a friend of H. N. Bialik, who in 1924 co-authored L. Pasternak: His Life and Work, wrote that Pasternak’s style “is characterized by deep, ‘literary’ psychological contemplation.” Pasternak himself published an album containing portraits of Bialik, S. An-sky, N. Sokolow, Y. Engel, and D. Frischmann. (The preface was written by Struck.) In 1924, Pasternak joined a delegation of Jewish writers and artists to Palestine, painted its landscapes, and drew many local residents. In 1932, an exhibition of his works was displayed at Bezalel.

In 1938, with the rise of the Nazi regime, he moved to London. From there he continued to Oxford, where he lived until his last day.

1904, Pinsk – 1970, Tel Aviv; painter

When Haim Gliksberg was 2 years old, his family moved to Odesa, where his father served as chief rabbi. Haim studied art at the Children’s Academy established by the Society of Independent artists within the framework of the Free Studio of Easel and Decorative Painting and Sculpture in Odesa. He later studied at the Academy of Fine Art in Odesa. Haim Gliksberg immigrated to Eretz Yisrael in 1925 and initially lived at Yakov Peremen’s home in Tel Aviv. In 1945, thanks to his friendship with H. N. Bialik, he published Bialik Day to Day, which includes his own illustrations. He painted many portraits of writers, public figures, artists, and intellectuals. He was a founder of the Tel Aviv Association of Painters and Sculptors and advised to Tel Aviv Mayor Meir Dizengoff concerning the creation of the Tel Aviv Museum. He was awarded the Dizengoff Prize three times – in 1936, 1937, and 1956. His memoirs, Treasured in the Heart, was published several years after his death.

1900, Lipniki (Zhytomyr Oblast) – 1941, fell in the Battle of Moscow; painter

He studied art in Kyiv. He was one of the closest students of Mykhailo Boychuk, a Ukrainian monumental artist and a representative of the Ukrainian cultural renaissance of the beginning of the 20^th century. Under Boychuk’s supervision, he painted the frescoes Corvée and Harvest Festival at the Peasant Sanatorium in Odesa in 1928. Shechtman actively cooperated with Jewish cultural organizations. In 1929, Shechtman became head of the artistic department of the Odesa Museum of Jewish Culture. In the early 1930s, there was a campaign of repression against Ukrainian avant-garde artists, which targeted Boychuk and his past and present students – including Shechtman, who was fired from all posts. In 1934, Shechtman moved to Moscow. In November 1941, during World War II, Shechtman volunteered for combat. He apparently fell in battle on the outskirts of Moscow.

Hayim Nahman Bialik, a native of Radi, a village in the Pale of Settlement (in today’s Ukraine), is considered the national poet of Israel. However, his time living in the Holy Land was not especially productive. In fact, he wrote many of his best-known poems while staying in Odesa, which he first visited in 1892. There, together with Yehoshua Rawnitzki and others, he also established the Moriya publishing house, which was shut down when the Communist authorities began taking a heavy hand, but which eventually was reopened and reincarnated as the Dvir publishing house, which still endures. In 1921, with the aid of Maxim Gorky, Bialik managed to leave the Soviet Union, first for Berlin and then, three years later, for Palestine. His death a decade later sparked an outpouring of grief within the small Yishuv, with c. 100,000 people passing before his casket.

Shaul Tchernichovsky, one of the greatest Hebrew poets, was born in Mykhailivka, a village in the Pale of Settlement (in today’s Ukraine). By the age of ten, he had begun writing ballads in Hebrew and publishing his first poems. At the age of 15, he moved to Odesa, and in 1898 he published his first book of poems, Hezyonot U-Manginot [Visions and Melodies]. Tchernichovsky wrote a great deal about nature and drew extensively on Jewish sources as well as Ancient Greek culture. He was also known as an accomplished translator, rendering Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into Hebrew. He worked in Odesa as a doctor. He managed to leave the Soviet Union in 1922, and he settled in Tel Aviv in 1931.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky – poet, translator, and father of the Revisionist movement – was a native of Odesa and one of its greatest admirers. Throughout his life, he combined literature and creativity with politics and struggle. In 1901, while studying law, he came to Odesa for a short visit, but instead of returning to Italy as planned, he decided to stay there are write for Odesskie Novosti. His life in Odesa was not easy. He raised the suspicion of the Tsarist authorities; his plays were removed from the stage, and he was even jailed for several weeks. After the pogroms in Bessarabia, he lobbied Jewish communal leaders to establish Jewish defense units. During this period, his Zionist activism began in earnest. During World War I, he was one of the founders of the Jewish Legion of the British military, seeing action in the war in Palestine, where he served as the commander of the Legion’s first battalion. In 1920, he established a Jewish defense unit to combat rioters in Jerusalem. The British arrested him and sentenced him to a lengthy imprisonment, but he was ultimately pardoned and released. In the 1920s he founded the Betar movement and published his famous essay, “The Iron Wall”. Later he joined those who defected from the Haganah to create the Irgun, and he became its Supreme Commander. During World War II, he traveled through the United States explaining the need to establish a Jewish military. There he passed away, heartbroken by the looming clouds of war.

Author Eliezer Steinman was born in the village of Obodówka in the Pale of Settlement (in today’s Ukraine). He began publishing Hebrew and Yiddish prose while still young and studying for rabbinic ordination. Steinman was friendly with Bialik, who worked to secure his discharge from conscription in the Tsar’s army. Following the Communist Revolution, he became an ardent Communist, and in 1919 he moved to Odessa where he published the leaflet The Hebrew Communist and later the magazine Kolot (Voices). Within two years, however, he lost his faith in Communism, and in 1921 he fled to Warsaw with his wife, Varda, who pretended to be pregnant and smuggled his writings out under her dress. In 1924, he and his family immigrated to Eretz Yisrael and settled in Tel Aviv. He edited Katuvim, the organ of the Hebrew Writers Association, and also published prose works and strove to rewrite the Hasidic tradition. He was awarded many prizes, including the Israel Prize. Steinman was the father of writers David and Natan Shaham and grandfather of writer Orit Shaham-Gover, the chief curator of ANU.

Asher Zvi Ginsberg, best known by his nom de plume Ahad Ha’am (‘One of the People’), was born to a Hasidic family in Skvyra, Ukraine, and grew up in Odesa. He taught himself philosophy, science, and languages. Though he believed in the importance of tradition, he distanced himself from Hasidism and religion and became a leader of the Hibat Zion movement. To support himself, he worked at his father’s vodka factory in Odesa. He was the founder and first editor of the well-regarded journal HaShiloah, published in Odesa. Ahad Ha’am is considered the father of ‘spiritual Zionism’ and believed that Eretz Yisrael was not meant to be a physical refuge for Jews, but rather a solution to the spiritual and cultural problems of the Jews, as well as a moral beacon.

Yehoshua Rawnitzki was born in Odesa and studied in a yeshiva there. After getting married, he moved to a nearby town. In his early 20s, he began publishing essays on the return to Zion and also, together with Sholem Aleichem, wrote a column called Kevurat Sofrim (“Burial of Writers”) in the newspaper HaMelitz, using the pseudonyms Eldad and Medad. Rawnitzki headed the Odesa bureau of the Benei Moshe secret society, founded by Ahad Ha’am and modeled on the Freemasons, whose members were drawn from the ranks of Hovevei Zion. In 1891, Rawnitzki published Bialik’s first poem, El HaTzipor (“To the Bird”), in the journal HaPardes, which he edited. Later, the two of them founded the Moriah publishing house and published Sefer HaAggadah (The Book of Legends) together. They both immigrated to Eretz Yisrael in 1921, where their close friendship continued.

Shalom Yaakov Abramovich, known by his pen name of Mendele Mocher Sforim (‘Mendele the Book Peddler’), was one of the fathers of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature. Born in the town of Kapyl near Minsk, he settled in Odesa in 1881, where he earned a living as the head of the traditional school (‘Talmud Torah’). After the failed revolution of 1905 and the subsequent pogroms, he left the city for several years, but ultimately returned. He headed the Odesa writers association, whose members included Ahad Ha’am and Bialik, both of whom were much younger. No less important, Mendele is considered the father of the new Hebrew writing style. He was buried in the old Jewish cemetery of Odesa. After the cemetery was destroyed, he was reinterred in a Christian cemetery, beneath a large Star of David.

Moshe Lilienblum was born in Kaidan (Kedainiai, Lithuania), a town in the Pale of Settlement and is considered one of the fathers of the literature of Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment in Eastern Europe). At the age of 13, he was betrothed to a girl of 11, and they wed two years later, taking up residence with her parents. In his articles for the newspaper HaMelitz, he criticized the rabbinic inclination toward strict interpretations of religious commandments, thereby provoking the ire of the rabbis of Lithuania. In 1869, he and his wife moved to Odesa, but he found it difficult to adapt to the cosmopolitan city’s “spirit of charlatanry and heresy,” and he fought against what he viewed as lawlessness. He initially thought that the solution to the Jewish problem is the establishment of Jewish communes in Russia, but pogroms throughout the Russian Empire persuaded him to support immigration to Eretz Yisrael and to join the Hovevei Zion movement. His autobiography, Hattot Ne’urim (Sins of Youth, 1876), was popular among young Jewish readers.

Joseph Klausner, born in Olkeniki, near Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania) in the Russian Empire, was a historian and intellectual. He served as principal of the New School for Hebrew Teachers in Odesa, and in 1903 he replaced Ahad Ha’am as editor of HaShiloah. In this role, he printed, among other things, the poetry of Tchernichovsky, which Ahad Ha’am had refused to publish due to their patently Hellenistic influences. Klausner immigrated to Eretz Yisrael in 1919 aboard the SS Ruslan, along with many other influential personages of the new Yishuv. He was among the founders of the Hebrew University and the first head of its faculty of Hebrew Literature. In addition, he also served as the first editor-in-chief of the Hebrew Encyclopedia, a role he continued to fill until his final year. In 1949, he was a candidate to be the first President of the State of Israel, a position won by Chaim Weizmann.

S. Ben-Zion is the nom de plume of editor, educator, writer, and translator Simha Ben-Zion Alter Guttman, the father of artist Nachum Gutman and the Hebrew translator of Goethe, Heine, and Schiller. He was born in Telenesti (in today’s Moldova), and already as a child began publishing short stories, mainly in Yiddish. He moved to Odesa in 1899 and taught Hebrew, together with Bialik, at the “reformed heder”. Two years later, he founded, together with Bialik and Y. H. Rawnitzki, the Moriah publishing house, through which he published, among other things, the Hebrew reader Ben Ami and Sippurei Ha-Mikra La-Yeladim (Bible Stories for Children), together with his partners in the founding of the publishing house. He immigrated to Eretz Yisrael in 1905, in the wake of the pogroms in Odesa and out of a desire to transplant the Odesan republic of letters in Eretz Yisrael. He taught at the school for girls at Neve Tzedek and led a literary society whose members included Y. H. Brenner, Yehuda Burla, and S. Y. Agnon. Ben-Zion was a pioneer of literary journalism in Eretz Yisrael, founding the literary-scientific journal HaOmer (1905–1907). The journal lasted only two volumes of two issues each, but it is deemed very consequential – in part because it was here that the journal’s secretary, S. Y. Agnon, published “Agunot” (“Chained Women”), the story from which he drew his pen name. Ben-Zion was also the first editor of the monthly magazine for youth Moledet. He also edited Shai, the literary supplement of Hadashot HaAretz (‘News of the Land’), which later became the Haaretz newspaper. In 1909 he became a member of the founding nucleus of Ahuzat Bait – which grew into the city of Tel Aviv.

Sholem Aleichem is the pen name of the great Yiddish writer Shalom Rabinovich, born in the city of Pereiaslav, south of Kyiv in the Pale of Settlement. He grew up in the nearby village of Voronkiv, which was the inspiration for the fictional town of Kasrilevka in his works. At the age of 20, he began publishing in the weekly HaMelitz, using pseudonyms to avoid his father’s criticisms. In 1888, Sholem Aleichem founded a publishing house called Di Yidishe Folksbibliotek (The Yiddish People’s Library), which published works by the age’s major Yiddish writers. He received an inheritance and went into business, but he lost his money and fell into debt. In 1890, after repaying his debts, he moved to Odesa and became a founding member of Odesa Committee of Hovevei Zion. A year later, he began publishing his well-known series of stories about the Jewish peddler Menahem-Mendl, who dreams of becoming rich but instead fails in all his endeavors. In 1893, Sholem Aleichem returned to Kyiv – which he calls ‘Yehupetz’ in his stories – and began publishing the stories of Tevye der Milkhiker (Tevye the Dairyman), on which the popular musical Fiddler on the Roof is based. Following the failed revolution of 1905, he moved, penniless, to the United States. In 1909, his supporters organized banquets in his honor and used the proceeds to buy back from the publishers the rights to his works, thus alleviating the financial troubles that plagued him throughout his life. Sholem Aleichem contracted tuberculosis and died in New York in 1916. His funeral procession brought hundreds of thousands of grieving Jews out to the streets of New York.

Yakov Fichman – a poet, writer, and editor – was born in Beltz, Bessarabia (Balti, Moldova) and studied Hebrew literature from the writings of Ahad Ha’am and Mendele Mocher Sforim. At the age of 20 he moved to Odesa to be closer to Bialik and Ahad Ha’am, and in 1903 he moved to Warsaw. In 1912 he immigrated to Eretz Yisrael at the invitation of the Israel Teachers Union to edit its monthly magazine, Moledet. Two years later he moved to Berlin to edit a Hebrew monthly. He intended to continue publishing the monthly in Ottoman Palestine, but the outbreak of World War I foiled his plans. Instead, Fichman returned to Odesa, where he worked at the Moriah publishing house. He returned to Eretz Yisrael in 1927 and edited Moznayim, the magazine of the Hebrew Writers Association. During the course of his life, he published over 300 books and was also considered one of the most important literary critics of his day. He won the Israel Prize in 1957. Among his best-known poems are “Agadah” (“Legend”; also known as “Al Sefat Yam Kineret” – “On the Shores of the Sea of Galilee”) and “Orhah Bamidbar” (“A Caravan in the Desert”).