Mayer Kirshenblatt (Majer Kirszenblat ) – (4 September 1916, Opatów – 20 November 2009, Toronto) – folk painter, self-taught artist; remembers Jewish life in Apt (Opatów) before the Holocaust in words and images. 

He was born in Opatów, the eldest of four sons born to Avner Kirshenblatt of Iłża (Yid.: Drildz) and Rivka (née Wajcblum), a native of Opatów. His brothers were Vadya (Ovadya), Harshl, and Yosl. His family was middle class by interwar Apt standards.  Avner sold leather and findings to shoemakers from a small shop. The family of six and a maid lived in two rooms at 3 Kościelna (now Grota-Roweckiego) Street. In 1928, Mayer's father emigrated to Canada, leaving his mother to raise her four sons. They joined Avner in Toronto in 1934.

Mayer attended kheyder, a traditional Jewish school, from the age of four, where he learned to pray and to study the Bible in Hebrew.  He was of the first generation of Polish Jews to attend Polish public school, and graduated from the seven-grade Common School No. 1 in Opatów (located in the so-called Red School). He loved the Polish language and was fond of the technical classes. He was a member of the Zionist youth organisation Hashomer Haleumi.

After finishing public school and kheyder, he was apprenticed to an electrician, first with his uncle Laybl Rozenberg in Lublin, then with a foreman in Opatów. In preparation for his departure for Canada, he also apprenticed with a shoemaker. In 1934, he left for Canada with his mother and brothers. The family sailed on the "Kosciuszko" from Hamburg to Halifax and traveled by train to Toronto to join his father.

The first years in his new home were difficult. He had to learn English and adjust to a different world, one that was much bigger than the Opatów shtetl of his childhood. 

In 1940, Mayer married Dvoyra Szuszanow (later Doris Shushanoff), an emigrant from Brest-on-the-Bug, today Brest in Belarus. The couple had three daughters. The eldest is Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a folklorist and Professor Emerita at New York University.

In Canada, Mayer worked in a sweatshop and then as a house painter, before opening his own paint, wallpaper, and floor-covering store. He learned wood graining and liked to repair and refinish furniture. He belonged to the Apter landsmanshaft, hometown society, and stayed in touch with his landslayt, those who came from his hometown, who had also immigrated to Canada, as well as to the United States and Israel.

In 1967, Barbara began recording interviews with her father, asking him to describe his childhood in Opatów in detail. At the age of 73, having retired more than ten years before, he relented to the urging of his wife, eldest daughter, and her husband, also an artist, and began to paint memories of his childhood Opatów. He created more than 300 paintings on canvas and many drawings on paper of Jewish life in his shtetl:

"I paint the scenes as I remembered them as a child – a little boy looking through the window"[1.1]

What makes Kirshenblatt's work so remarkable is both his keen observation of everything around him and his exceptional memory. He recalls all the occupations – the water carrier, porter, bagel seller, milkwoman with her pails of milk, tombstone carver, shoemaker, brushmaker, cooper, and blacksmith, among many others, as well as street performers, a traveling circus, the town crier, and firefighters. He depicted not only Jewish holidays, such as Passover and Purim, but also Christian ones. He painted a Hasidic pilgrimage to the grave of a tsadik, as well as a Catholic Corpus Christi procession, a pilgrimage to Częstochowa, and the funeral of a Christian classmate's father.

KIrshenblatt was especially attentive to his home and family – the stencilled walls of their two rooms, the layout of the kitchen, his mother at the stove, a Sabbath dinner. He also remembered street life – his grandmother sitting in front of her little shop, the weekly market, and playing outdoors – skating and sledding in winter, teasing snails from the shells in spring, and swimming in the Opatówka river in summer.

Fascinated by how things work, Kirshenblatt made drawings of the steps in making a shoe and a dreydl and in binding a book. One painting shows each step in making a brush.

His paintings and drawings are not only works of art, but also documents – sometimes the only documents – of Jewish life in Opatów before the Holocaust.

At first, Kirshenblatt only showed his work to family and friends, soon began exhibiting his paintings in galleries, first in Toronto at  the Koffler Gallery and the Bathurst Jewish Community Center, and later at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley (2007); Geodesy and Cartography Museum in Opatów (2008); Jewish Museum in New York (2009); Galicia Jewish Museum in Kraków (2009); National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst (2009); Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam (2010); and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (2024).

In 2007, Kirshenblatt and his daughter Barbara published They Called Me Mayer July. Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust. POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in 2023 published a Polish translation of this book in 2023 as Nazywali mnie Lipcowy Majer. Żydowskie dzieciństwo w Polsce przed Zagładą. Wspomnienia malowane.

Kirshenblatt began visiting Opatów with his daughter Barbara in the late 1980s and returned several times. In 2007, he delivered a public lecture at the county seat in Opatów to a standing ovation, and in 2008, he exhibited digital prints of his paintings at the Geodesy and Cartography Museum in Opatów. Sławomir Grünberg made a film about him entitled Namaluj co pamiętasz (Paint What You Remember, 2009) at that time.

Maria Borzęcka

References

• M. Kirshenblatt, B. Kirshenblatt, They Called Me Mayer July. Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust, University of California Press, 2007. 
• M. Kirshenblatt , B. Kirshenblatt, Nazywali mnie Lipcowy Majer. Żydowskie dzieciństwo w Polsce przed Zagładą. Wspomnienia malowane, Warsaw 2023.
• S. Grünberg (dir.), Namaluj co pamiętasz, 2009, [online] https://vimeo.com/ondemand/painthome [accessed: 10.07.2023]
• Paint What You Remember. Shabbat and the Jewish Holidays in Opatów, Poland [online] jholidays/kirshenblatt (museumoffamilyhistory.com) [accessed: 10.07.2023]
• They Called Me Mayer July [online] https://samanthamyers.typepad.com/theycalledmemayerjuly/ [accessed: 10.07.2023]
• Paint what you remember, workshop Opatów, 2015 [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTFsq4wqNPU [accessed: 10.07.2023]
• (post)JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt [online:] https://www.polin.pl/en/postjewish-shtetl-opatow-through-eyes-mayer-kirshenblatt  [accessed: 10.07.2023]