UTW 55

A double - leg amputee sitting in a cart, Warsaw’s Jewish district, 1937; inspired by a Roman Vishniac photograph.

Art: 2004 – 2008.
Media: Ink, gouache, colored pencil.
The handmade mat surrounding the drawing was drawn in pencil and gouache, 2008. 
The drawing is 32 inches H x 22 3/4 width.
Framing in-progress, July 2018.

The central figure was inspired by a 1937 photo by photographer Roman VIshniac, taken in the Jewish district of Warsaw. Vishniac was born near St Petersburg, Russia, 1897; he died in New York City in 1990. He was an acclaimed photographer of pre-Holocaust Jewish communities and individuals in central and eastern Europe; his photo taking was often at great personal risk.

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The man had lost his legs in a pogrom in Russia thirty years earlier. A pogrom was a state sponsored, directed or approved act of violence targeting Jews. The photo is published in A Vanished World – Roman Vishniac, with a foreward by Elie Wiesel, pub. by

Schocken Books, 1947; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. 

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Pogroms were prevalent in Czarist era and post-Czarist era Russia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Poland, perpetrated by both Catholic and Orthodox Christians who hated Jewish people.

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For people in many western countries in the 1970’s, both Jewish and non-Jewish, their familiarity with the term pogrom was from the popular 1971 movie Fiddler on the Roof. It’s a wonderful movie.

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 Kristallnacht, known also as The Night of Broken Glass, took place in Germany and Austria in 1938. It was a governmentally organized and sponsored pogrom of an unprecedented scale of murder and burnings across towns and cities throughout both countries.

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About the mat:

Mat imagery at bottom center and center left was inspired by Polish Jewish gravestones.

A visual reference for some imagery portrayed in several Under the Wings drawings have  been photos by Polish photographer Monika Krajewska,  in the book Time of Stones, pub. by Interpress, Warsaw, 1982.

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The six silver cups at top were drawn from cups the artist bought at a shop in Jaffa, Israel in 2007. Some viewers may perceive seven; one of the cups is broken.

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 The Jewish Bible (upper right) and the siddur – a prayer book with a metal plate cover, published in Jerusalem (center right) were gifts to the artist from the congregational community of Temple  Shalom, New Hyde Park (Queens), N.Y. for the artist's Bar Mitzvah, February 16, 1963.     

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 The Jewish Folktales book, lower right, is a book in the artist's library. It was edited by Pinhas Sadeh; translated from Hebrew by Hillel Halkin; pub. by Anchor Books- Doubleday, N.Y., 1989.

The Geography of Israel book (lower left) was borrowed from Seattle Public Library.  It was likely the 1971 book by Efraim Orni and Elisha Efrat.

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The sabbath candle sticks are from Kenya; the artist bought them at a Seattle department store closing sale when the store was going belly up in the 1990's.

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A 4 min., 30 sec. video of the artist talking about the drawing.

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A 6 min., 57 sec. video of the drawing.