Both Kulbak's texts and Rybak's graphics show the memory of the shtetl, a small town which in its vertical perspective depicted the multi-layered phenomena characteristic for the culture of this part of Europe to which Sejny belongs.
It was not only a physical town, but also a peculiar philosophy of life, existence imbued with mysticism and religion derived from the tradition and culture of Judaism.
This picture of the shtetl emerging from the extracts of Moyshe Kulbak’s fiction and Isahar Ben Rybac’s lithography is present in the works of many other authors e.g. Grigoriy Kanowicz, who visited Sejny in the 1990s, or Julian Stryjkowski. The exhibition juxtaposes this picture with a cycle of contemporary photographs taken during my travels through the towns of Podlasie which until the outbreak of World War II used to be shtetls and whose long traditions and history were broken by violent and tragic events that took place in them in the summer of 1941.
The thought that accompanies the exhibition thus conceived is a statement with a heterogeneous emotional load: so much has been lost forever, so much can be rescued by remembrance. Those who are gone, who have passed away often in an unimaginably tragic way, can be brought back to life in art, in our memory, within ourselves.
The exhibition is complemented by a sculpture executed from small sticks resembling in their design a tangle of strokes and lines on a page from which a shape of a small town emerges. These blank contours of houses, pigsties, and streets overexposed to light, are in my intention an encouragement to fill them with stories about that life that has gone away but which does not have to die irrevocably and can still become a value upon which our identity may be built.
Wiesław Szumiński
Fragments of the novel The Messiah of the House of Ephraim by Moshe Kulbak, lithographs by Issahar Ber Ryback from the series Shtetl, My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance . Wiesław Szumiński’s installation and photography In Search of the Traces of the Jewish Past of the Small Towns of Podlasie.