Last week, the celebrated Austrian-born Israeli artist Yosl Bergner died at the age of ninety-six. Bergner grew up in Montreal, the son of the great Yiddish-language poet and essayist Melekh Ravitch. In a piece first published to mark his 95th birthday, Ruth Wisse reflects on her longstanding friendship with Bergner and on his artistic career. Although today best known for his paintings, he also drew illustrations for the work of Franz Kafka and the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. (Reposted from 2015)
Melekh Ravitch began translating [Kafka’s work] into Yiddish in 1924. Yosl was proud that his father had been the first Yiddish writer to recognize Kafka’s genius, and the illustrations he did for Ravitch’s book were part of the Kafka series that cemented his international reputation. Yosl himself felt a powerful artistic affinity with Kafka, and he adapted the style of Kafka’s marginal line drawings for his Kafka works. Nonetheless, I don’t feel in Yosl the angst that Kafka conveys, and—at least for me—this is much to Bergner’s advantage. Kafka did not feel at home in his German language, did not feel at ease in his bourgeois home, did not love and honor his insensitive father, did not feel comfortable in his own skin.
In a widely quoted image from a letter to his friend Max Brod, Kafka describes Jews “with their hind legs fastened to the Jewish traditions of their fathers and with their forelegs getting no ground under their feet. The despair thus ensuing translates into inspiration.” Yosl understood such anxiety, but he had already found his footing and was moving forward. Part of this was thanks to Ravitch, who was content to have his son become an artist—as long as he did not give him too much competition—and Yosl, who is a terrific storyteller, obliged his father by choosing another medium for his art. . . .
Whereas Kafka’s father had transitioned from Yiddish to German and downplayed his Jewishness in becoming a respectable Czech burgher, Ravitch after World War I moved culturally in the opposite direction. He left his native German and Polish languages to speak Yiddish and moved from Vienna into the heart of Jewish Warsaw. As the son of such a father—one who rebelled against the bourgeois ideal by becoming a Yiddish writer—Yosl could legitimately take up a career of art. . . . We are accustomed to rebellions of sons against fathers, but Yosl came at modernism from the other side: Ravitch the modernist may have dulled for his son some of the novelty of novelty.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1881/yosl-bergners-jewish-israeli-genius/