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The lost and regained Shtetl of Simon
Karczmar
To paint the regained time of a distant
childhood and a lost, destroyed, exterminated world…
and to retain only its past joy, its life preserved in
the memory of a five or six year old child who spends
his summers in his grand-father’s village. A Russian
Shtetl, today in Lithuania, more precisely in a
Lithuanian enclave surrounded by the barbed wire of
the Belarusian border.
Half deserted villages where neat and brightly
coloured houses stand alongside those with collapsed
wooden walls, abandoned since the war, since the Nazis
wiped out the Jewish life that was still flourishing
at the beginning of the 20th century when
the little Simon spent his holidays there, leaving the
big city of Warsaw to be immersed after a long journey
in the colours, smells, flavours and songs of an
unknown world.
The little boy kept everything buried in his
memory. Simon Karczmar studied in the Academy of Fine
Arts in Warsaw and in Paris; he started a family and
had to give up his art. During the war he joined the
French Resistance, his wife deported to Auschwitz
returned among the few survivors of the camps, whereas
the sixty members of Simon’s family who remained in
Poland disappeared in the Ghetto or in the
extermination camps. His son Nathan hidden by
villagers in the centre of France also survived. All
three were reunited at the end of the war and went
into exile several times. At the age of fifty-nine,
after a lifetime of work, suffering and a few happy
moments, by a strange turn of fate, when an allergy
due to the fur he worked on threatened to leave him
blind, encouraged by his wife Nadia – Neshuma in
Hebrew: breath, soul – who knew what it was to come
back to life, Simon started to paint again… with the
eyes and the hand of the child he was when he used to
visit his grand-father at the very beginning of the 20th
century. Thus in a naïve, almost innocent style,
rejecting what he had learnt in the Academy of Fine
Arts, he painted an explosion of Jewish festivities,
swarming markets, carts jolting along muddy paths,
silent lovers cradled in the moonlight, transfigured
by memory, dream and the joy of a world remained
intact in his childhood memory that tragedy had been
unable to destroy. Late but accomplished
resilience. Simon Karczmar spends the last quarter of
his life painting and showing this regained world, a
lost world but which had left its trace in the happy
memories of a man who had lived through the history of the 20th
century. After
many travels and adventures he finally settled in
Israel, in another shtetl, in Safed where Arabs and
Jews tried to live side by side in peace. Angueliki Garidis November 2018, on the
occasion of two exhibitions held in Lithuania, one in
Dieveniskes
(the Juvenishki shtetl where Simon’s grandfather
lived, where a memorial in his honour has been
recently created and his name Simon Karczmar will be
given to the Regional Technical College)
(October-November 2018) and one in the Gaon Museum in
Vilnius (22nd
November, 2018 to 21st January, 2019).
 © Simon Karczmar, Night scene in the shtetl - acrylic on canvas
 © Simon Karczmar, Tevie the milkman by night acrylic on canvas
 © Simon Karczmar, Simha Thora acrylic on canvas
 Simon
Karczmar'Memorial, Juvenishki (Duveniskes,
Lithuania)
 Vilnius Gaon Museum  Vilnius Gaon Museum  Vilnius Gaon Museum  Vilnius Gaon Museum - Exhibition opening at the Vilnius Gaon Museum : http://www.jmuseum.lt/en/news/i/848/exhibition-simon-karczmar-from-juvenishki-to-safed-opened-in-the-museum/ |