Mayer July (Mayer Kirshenblatt) was a small, rebellious child, who grew up before World War II in Apt, the Yiddish name for Optów, a small town in Poland. He played hooky often, which allowed him the time to explore his hometown, keenly learning about the work, play, and ritual aspects of his neighborhood. Encouraged by his daughter, co-author Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Mayer July tells the story of his youth in text and paintings. What is most striking about this lengthy book is how well he remembers life in his Jewish hometown.
In reading this amazing autobiography, we learn about varied customs, including writing petitions, performing black weddings, engaging in ritual baths, getting a circumcision, preserving eggs in limewater, and the shaving of corpses. Mayer July meticulously describes his town’s landscape, the buildings, trees, markets, cemeteries, and orchards. We get an understanding of what goes on in the town’s photography studio and soap and candle factories. We learn about fiddle players, singers, cellists, professional water-carriers, actors, postmen, chimney sweeps, dogcatchers, rope makers, tinsmiths, milk ladies, thieves, and wigmakers. The book is full of folklore about murders, plagues, rituals, ghosts, miracles, farewell gifts, menstruation, and the importance of looking after the dead.
Foodways are carefully depicted and described from various baking practices and roasting pumpkin seeds to cooking a stuffed chicken neck, making potato pancakes, and steaming potatoes in the ground. Folk healing practices include wrapping cobwebs around a womb and using heated cups on the flesh to suck out an illness. We learn about the importance of music and dance in the community, and the connection of a dowry to marriage. Mayer July does not shy away from humorously describing varying bathroom practices, toilet cleaning, and how the land was fertilized. He describes men coughing up phlegm, how to kill a chicken, slaughter a cow, and force-feed geese. We gain enormous insight into pre-war relationships between Jews and Gentiles.
Black and white drawings are placed throughout the book, teaching us such things as how to make a tin whistle, a dreydl, a shoe, and how to bind a book. In order to describe making a brush, several paintings articulate each step of the process. Most often, however, it is narrative descriptions coupled with one painting that make a story or event come alive. Yiddish words are ubiquitous throughout the book, giving even more authenticity to the narrative.
The paintings are wonderfully composed. The artist knows how to use pattern, color, and movement. He fills his spaces with activity and contextual detail. The images take us through a range of emotions, from being charmed by nude male figures sliding down a waterfall to the discomfort of flogging. There is bar mitzvah humor and everyday activity. When individuals are the topic of particular scenes, they come to life with specificity. Often the perspective is off, but this approach adds to the images’ appeal.
Many citizens from Apt emigrated to Canada, while numerous family and friends came to tragic deaths. In October of 1942, thousands of the author’s neighbors were forcibly marched to a train station and sent to Treblinka. It was because his father experienced an unfortunate business loss related to his leather business that Mayer July’s immediate family ended up in Canada. His father left when he was twelve and the family joined him several years later. The family’s economic bad fortune turned out to be a blessing. While Mayer July is not himself a Holocaust survivor, his mother’s family was brutally executed and his father’s family was slaughtered. After seeing Goya’s painting, The Shootings of the Third of May, 1808, at the Prado, he was able to paint the horrid deaths of family members. Although he wasn’t there, the paintings are as real as if he had been.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett wrote the last section of the book. Here she conveys her love and admiration for her father and the Jewish community in Toronto in which she was raised. She explains how she worked with her father to record his stories and how she encouraged him to paint, an activity that he resisted for years. It was only after an illness and his retirement that he began.
They Call Me Mayer July is a story about a Jewish neighborhood in Poland before World War II. It is a story about a man with a keen memory and a vivid imagination and his family and their emigration to Canada just before the Holocaust. It is also the story of a daughter who worked diligently to make sure the story was told. This is a hefty book, full of information and wonderful paintings. There are lessons to be learned about economics, gender, and religion as well as about perceptions of poverty, safety, family and friends, education, and the meaning of life. It is a vivid reminder about how the imagination can help create wonder and agency, and how the earth’s many gifts can provide for us if we have the ingenuity and good sense to pay attention.
In spite of the hardships, Mayer July tells us, he had a rich childhood. Much of it was due to his ability to create his own fun, learn as he observed and participated in daily life, and savor the everyday experiences of his Jewish neighborhood. It is clear that this is a man whose senses are so awake and aware that his memory has not failed him. We are fortunate that Kirschenblatt-Gimblett persevered in her determination to get her father to record his stories, in both paint and words. What Mayer July has pointed out to us so well is that, “There was a big world out there before the Holocaust. There was a rich cultural life in Poland as I knew it at the time. That’s why I feel I’m doing something very important by showing what that life was like. It’s in my head: I will be gone, but the book will be here” (353).
This book would have been compelling if it had been only words or paintings with little description. But with both text and images, we have a treasure. Having studied that which many of us call “memory painting” for almost three decades, I now understand the full power of this genre. This is a marvelous book. I believe it will certainly live on long after all of us are gone. It’s that important.
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[Review length: 1060 words • Review posted on April 30, 2008]