Mayer Kirshenblatt was born in 1916 and left Poland for Canada in 1934. He taught himself to paint at age 73 and made it his mission to remember the world of his childhood in living color, “lest future generations know more about how Jews died than how they lived.”
In this talk his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, will discuss her father’s legacy and recent exhibitions of his work, including the current exhibition at the POLIN Museum, which presents a dialogue between Mayer’s depictions of his youth in the shtetl and today’s Opatów, a post-Jewish town with no remaining Jewish community.
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is the Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and University Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. Her books include They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of Jewish Life in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt) and Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki), among others. She was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of the Republic of Poland for her contribution to the creation of POLIN Museum.
