Word: vilna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...eloquent layering of a complex iconography subtly placed within his landscapes and portraits. Bak is not only the creator of breathtaking work, but also a survivor of the Holocaust. The themes and variations of his artwork reflect the inhumane environment which he endured. Born in the Polish city of Vilna (present day Lithuania) in 1933, Bak felt the presence of danger throughout his childhood. His drawings received attention as early as 1942, through an exhibition in the ghetto of his birthplace. Bak was nine years old at the time...
...same pose. The desensitization of humanity is reiterated when the boy covers himself with what seems like a shield decorated with a cross, but instead is a type of bullseye used as a target for the murdering of innocence (Rainbow Boy, 1997; Small Target, 1997). In The Star of Vilna, a ragged wooden fence has a hole cut in the shape of the boy, and through it one can see him standing. It is the boy's body--his two arms, two legs and head--which makes the five points of the Star of David. Bak shows that the representation...
There is a midrash (a legend) that explains, "the further you are from Sinai [the moment of revelation], the more you are diminished." Bak varies the notion of family lineage in From Generation to Generation through a series. An elder from the village of Vilna, gazes upon versions of himself, his body decreasing in size, each time preserving his old age. The ancestors bless their descendents but stare toward the earth, without joy or life. It is as if these men have always been old, but one cannot tell which man is the oldest. Each generation, now with the knowledge...
Last September, during a trip to Vilna for the200th anniversary of the death of Elijah BenSolomon Zalman, Wisse was struck by the fact thatthe city has changed profoundly from the time whenher grandmother lived there. In Vilnius, theYiddish literature her grandmother nurtured is allthat is left of a once-thriving Jewish community...
...wife's salary as a legal secretary (when he managed occasionally to earn a bit of money, he did so by editing a not very successful soft-porn magazine called Hot Dog). The super-American, his daughter learns, was born not in Ohio, as he claimed, but in Vilna, Lithuania, five years earlier than his supposed birth date. The Jewish convert to right-wing Catholicism, Mary finds, was never accepted as anything but a Jew by his wife's Irish Catholic family. Most pathetically, perhaps, the father remembered as young, dashing and handsome--her Jimmy Stewart, the daughter says...