"Rembrandt of the Straedtel": Goldberg's Non-Variations

A few years ago while clearing out our mother’s dining room, my sister and I uncovered half a dozen black ink drawings or prints that belonged to our grandmother, Gertrude Frankel (nee Gittel Goldberg). The artist’s signature, written in Hebrew, reads “Avraham Goldberg.” As it happens, my grandmother had a brother, Avram Goldberg, who came to Israel rather than the United States when the siblings left Minsk, Belarus before WWI (another member of the family went to Montevideo, Uruguay but that branch of the family also moved to Israel in the 1970’s). I first met my Uncle Avram, a very sweet man, when I was about 10 or 11 years old. He came to Los Angeles for a visit and we took him to Disneyland, which he loved. I saw him again when I spent the summer of 1965 in Israel and stayed over a few weekends with his son, Nechemia, and family—wife Tamar and two daughters, Chaya and Ruthie. During all this time I never heard any mention that he was an artist and I’m pretty sure the similarity in names is only a coincidence. Still, I was curious about the artist Avraham Goldberg and decided to see what I could discover. First, I checked on the Internet. I found one piece of Avraham Goldberg’s work for sale on an art auction website, as well as the name of a Tel Aviv art gallery that has another. I also learned that the artist was born in Poland in 1903, made aliyah to Israel in 1919, spent some years studying in Paris and New York and died in 1980. Although the lifespans of the two Goldbergs match, I’m reasonably certain my uncle did not study in Paris and New York. To explore further I stopped by the Bineth gallery; the staff there suggested I visit the library at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The library turned out to be a treasure trove. The library contains books and archived materials on Israeli artists; when I told the librarian what I was looking for she brought out a small stack of books and a file of newspaper clippings. Two of the books contained reproductions of Goldberg’s black ink drawings and color pastels prefaced by scholarly introductions. The third, an overview of painting and sculpture in Israel published in 1958, included a critical assessment of this artist along with others active at the time. The newspaper clippings from the Palestine Post and other newspapers reviewed exhibits of his work at the Tel Aviv Museum and in Jerusalem (1939, 1942, 1950). In addition to frequent shows in Israel, he also exhibited his work in France. One reviewer referred to him as the “Rembrandt of the Staedtel” and noted the influence not only of Rembrandt but also Daumier. As the title indicates, his subjects were invariably the Jews of the Ghetto—rabbis praying, old men and women (often his mother) around the Shabbat table or at the cemetery—expressing his “homesick longing for the semi-darkness of the lost staedtel of his childhood” and portraying the “burdens of a much-tried people.” While the reviewers gave a nod to his skill at portraying the dignity and suffering of his subjects, they also criticized the monotony of his work---“always the same rabbis, the same women.” My take is that during the early years of statebuilding, Israelis preferred more heroic and less defeated images; they were creating the future while Goldberg dwelled on the past, the lost world of Eastern European Jewry. I agree that our prints create a somewhat gloomy atmosphere but they also are very evocative and haunting. Although I’ll need to verify this, I have a hunch that what we have are merely reproductions and not originals. Still, it was fun to track down the background of this artist.