Oct 18, 2024
A collage by Yevgeniy Fiks.
What do Yiddish writers Celia Dropkin, Chava Rozenfarb, and Kadia Molodovsky have in common? All three were born in places that would become part of the Eastern Bloc. The writers, however, would become important representatives of North American yiddishkayt. Rozenfarb and Molodovsky figure in a collage in Yevgeniy Fiks’ exhibition, captioned “ייִדישע שרייבערס פֿון נאַטאָ־לענדער”, that aims to directly address this tension.
There is a lot that Yevgeniy Fiks wants us to unforget. The collective amnesia around the Cold War is striking — especially against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war. In the exhibition “NATO in Yiddishland,” Fiks used Yiddish as a lightning rod to examine the contested geopolitical past and present, while also illuminating Yiddish’s complex non-nationality. The show was on display at Galerie Zeitzone, just a stone’s throw away from the old route of the Berlin Wall in the Kreuzberg district, from August 15th to August 24th 2024. It was organized by the group Yiddish.Berlin.
Fiks, an energetic man who came to the opening dressed in a casual salmon-colored shirt and tennis shoes, was born in Moscow in 1972. In 1994 he emigrated to New York, where he lives and works to this day. Despite being born in Moscow, Fiks does not consider himself a “Russian” (or “Jewish”) artist, preferring the moniker “Post-Soviet.” This ambivalence lies at the heart of his work, which is often articulated through Yiddish; for example, Fiks created and curates the decentralized “Yiddishland Pavilion” at the Venice Biennale.
“NATO in Yiddishland” consisted of 38 collages, 22 books in passport holders, a visual wall-text, and two flags. The collages feature maps, cutouts of letters, and images of Yiddish writers. Provocative snippets like the one quoted above comment on and complicate the images. According to Fiks, “this project actually began with me writing the text, writing the captions, so the images come second. I wrote mostly in English with a mixture of Yiddish and Russian.” He then got help from yiddishist Yoel Matveyev in New York to create the final Yiddish versions. Fiks explains that Matveyev “understood very well what I was trying to do with the text, and actually made it even better, and even smarter, in terms of using different Yiddish [orthographic] systems.” Thus, the captions intentionally mix the competing spelling conventions of (now) American institutions like the YIVO, as well as Soviet, Chassidic, and more archaic systems.
This can be seen in Fiks’ visual wall-text:
The Artist Yevgeniy Fiks. Photo: Żydowski Instytut Sztuki/Yidisher Kunst-Institut.
Fiks and his Wall-Text
Here we see the Warsaw Pact’s Soviet phonetic spelling of truth intersecting with its name, and the etymological Hebrew-based spelling intersecting with NATO. Not without humor, Fiks is trying to tease out “this idea of kind of variety of Yiddishes, of versions of Yiddish, multiple versions of truth, and how does Yiddishland and Yiddish culture fit in the impossible circumstances of having to choose sides or negotiating with military alliances, negotiating in nation-states.”
But Fiks’ work also proposes Yiddish as a kind of antidote to this fighting. One of the flags in the exhibition, for instance, was half a NATO flag and half a Warsaw Pact flag bisected by a portrait of Sholem Aleichem (the ‘peace be upon you’ pseudonym of writer Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich). “Interestingly, Sholem Aleichem was a very acceptable figure, both for the [Eastern and Western] Blocs […] since there were no ideological issues that either Bloc had [with him], which was not true for many other writers. For example, Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Prize winner, was never published in the Soviet Union. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union,” said Fiks. Hanging under the flag, the collage captions often struck a utopian tone, like the one in the collage at the top of the article, “יעדער איז אַ לעגאַל מענטש אין ייִדישלאַנד”.
The Table of the 22 Book-Passports. Photo: Jordan Lee Schnee.
Another kind of utopian vision was projected through the installation of Yiddish books inside passport holders. The books, which viewers were encouraged to flip through, were mostly sourced from members of the Berlin Yiddish community. The installation seems to underline the idea of Yiddish as a kind of bridge between warring factions, as well as a transnational cultural currency, through Fiks’ “idea that Yiddish books could be used as a passport to cross borders.”
“There were 22 Yiddish books with Yiddish letters clearly visible on their covers,” said Fiks. The number here is significant. It points to the 22 letters of the Hebrew/Yiddish alphabet, giving the books a mystical gleam concordant with the Kabbalah of Names’ understanding of letters and numbers as transcendentally-charged. This chimes with Fiks’ idea of books as openers of symbolic gates.
The timing of the exhibition was also no coincidence. It coincided with the “Yiddish in Berlin” summer program, which is organized by Paris’ Medem Yiddish Center in cooperation with the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University of Berlin. The summer program attendees and instructors mixed with local Yiddishists at the exhibition opening, closing, and the several events in between.
The opening featured Berlin-based songwriter Zhenja Oks, originally from Odessa, who often sets historic and contemporary Yiddish poets to music. Before Fiks’ artist talk a few days later, Arndt Beck, who curated the exhibition, gave a presentation on Yiddish.Berlin’s activities over the previous five years, showing how the Zeitzone gallery has featured prominently as a center of independent Yiddish culture in Berlin. At the artist talk thereafter, Fiks discussed two of his curation projects— one based around a peripatetic Yiddish artist, called Yonia Fein Modern-ish: Yonia Fain and the Art History of Yiddishland, that showed in 2023 at City University of New York’s James Gallery; and another in which he is attempting to present the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan in Eastern Russia with artworks by contemporary artists. As yet, Birobidzhan has not accepted.
Later in the week, the local שמועס און װײַן group, a biweekly gathering to speak Yiddish organized by Jake Schneider, met for the 60th time in the gallery and held an open stage. Finally, Katerina Kuznetsova held a reading workshop entitled “Pogroms in Soviet Yiddish Poetry.”
These events all helped viewers grapple with Fiks’ complex work. Some of the captions ask direct questions like this tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the Weinreich aphorism about dialect versus language: “צי קען אַ שפּראַך אָן אַן אַרמיי און אַ פֿלאָט װערן אַ נאַטאָ־מיטגליד?” or the more pointed “װיפֿיל פּראָצענט פֿון אידישלאַנד בעלאָנגט צו נאַט”אָ? //
װיפֿיל פּראָצענט ייִדישלאַנד איז אינעם װאַרשעװער אָפּמאַך?” which makes viewers question the binary thinking inherent to the Cold War, something of which is in the air again.
Though now a Western European capital, in keeping with its divided past, Berlin is still at the nexus of Eastern and Western Europe: an ideal place to deconstruct this binary. What better way than through the prism of Yiddish culture and letters? On many levels, the “NATO in Yiddishland” exhibition and the activities around it further cemented this point.
Another collage by Yevgeniy Fiks.
