SAMUEL BAK, BORN 12th AUGUST 1933

SAMUEL BAK, born 12^th August 1933

Lawrence L. Langer’s collection of essays Pre-empting the Holocaust [Yale University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-300-08268-1] includes Landscapes of Jewish Experience: The Holocaust Art of Samuel Bak.

Pre-empting the Holocaust

The first essay in Pre-empting the Holocaust is the text of a keynote address entitled  Pre-empting the Holocaust which was presented in 1996 at a Holocaust conference at the University of Notre Dame. 

In Pre-empting the Holocaust Langer expounds his theme which is to argue against the conviction held by many that the Holocaust contains a positive lesson for the present and the future. 

He writes about the tendency amongst those who have an interest in the Holocaust to understand and interpret the Holocaust within his or her pre-conceived worldview, and thus to use the Holocaust to justify and strengthen the value of that worldview.  Thus, an attempt to place the events of the Holocaust into an existing ‘ideal of moral reality, community responsibility or religious belief’ involves a ‘pre-empting’ of what one will find in studying the terrible events. 

Langer analyses three literary works – Tzvetan Todorov’s Facing the extreme – Moral life in the concentration camps [trans. Arthur Denner & Abigail Pollak (New York: Henry Holt, 1996]; Judy Chicago’s Holocaust Project – From Darkness into Light [New York: Viking, 1993]; and Frans Jozef van Beeck’s Two Kind Jewish Men: a sermon in memory of the  Shoah [Cross Currents 42 (Summer 1992)]. 

Langer states that Todorov argues that the Holocaust was little more than a drastic example of the conflict that takes place within all people and all societies: the conflict between ‘ordinary virtues’ and ‘ordinary vices’.  Todorov is wary of ‘literal memory’: the first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors.  He prefers instead ‘exemplary memory’ which involves ‘generalising from the particular and applying abstract principles to concrete offences’.  His aim is to draw universal lessons from the historical events of the Holocaust that can serve humankind for the future.   

Chicago is presented by Langer as another ‘exemplarist’.  Langer argues that, despite the virtues in Chicago’s work, her stated desire to present ‘ a window into an aspect of the unarticulated but universal experience of victimisation’ fails to do justice to the ‘particularity of the Holocaust as a historical event’.

Langer states that before he delivered his sermon, the Christian theologian van Beeck said that he had never previously written about the Holocaust and that he had hardly ever discussed the Holocaust with anybody.  Langer writes that van Beeck’s sermon is written in the style of Christian preaching and that it ‘testifies to the deficiency of certain language for analyzing the Holocaust when it is imposed on the topic with little consideration for its adequacy’. 

Langer can offer no ‘corrective vision’ to the tendency to ‘pre-empt the Holocaust’ other than ‘the opinion that the Holocaust experience challenges the redemptive value of all moral, community and religious systems of belief’.

Landscapes of Jewish Experience: The Holocaust Art of Samuel Bak

The essay Landscapes of Jewish Experience: The Holocaust Art of Samuel Bak was first published in Landscapes of Jewish Experience: Paintings of Samuel Bak [University Press of New England, 1997].

The artist and the viewer of a painting need each other: with no-one to look at a painting the work of art is lifeless.  And so, as one looks at the Landscapes of Jewish Experience works of Samuel Bak, one is aware that within oneself emotions rise.  The landscapes are devoid of human presence, and yet, when looking at the paintings one strives to fill them with life.  There is no mortal life to be seen in these paintings but many are suffused with the haze of heat and smoke, and chimneys rise ominously across the barren scene. 

Bak has said that these works were painted to communicate the sense of the civilisation and culture that was destroyed.  And even though it is impossible to re-assemble that world, still, sense can be made of something that looks like it.  And the moment of destruction is always a part of each representation. 

Bak grew up in Vilna (now Vilnius) in what was then Poland: Vilna was one of the main European centres of Jewish learning.  In 1939 the city was transferred to Lithuania and in 1940 it was occupied by the USSR.  In 1941 Nazi Germany took the city and they began to extinguish Jewish life.  When the Soviet Union re-took the city in 1944, Bak and his mother were two of the few thousand Jews to survive of the 57,000 Jews in the city before 1941. 

Bak’s images let us enter a world that is beyond imagination.   It is characterised by broken elemental landscapes, ruined human edifices and habitations, some enigmatic semblance of a surviving Jewish culture, and an unsettling ambiguity as to whether hope or despair is dominant. 

Some works are so lacking in reference points for a landscape painting that they verge on the abstract or the surreal: they invert normal relative sizes or they combine figurative representation with symbolism.  Many works present large areas that portray inert materials such as rock or cut wood with a patterning that is almost hallucinatory in its detail and its expanse. 

Within the paintings Bak provokes a dialogue about the roots of Jewish meaning.  What sense is now to be made of the foundation of Israel – Genesis, Exodus and the Torah - after the Shoah – the Holocaust ?  The tablets of the Law are seen to be broken, adrift, possibly in the process of being re-made or maybe being withdrawn from humanity, or maybe crumbling to dust. 

Langer refers to the poet Nelly Sachs who explores similar themes.  Langer discusses the wider issue of the purpose of artistic creation that is based on the Holocaust: do we gain insight or do we find absence of meaning?  He argues that we are so led by Bak along paths of his own experience that we cannot help but find ourselves in a place that other genres of painting do not take us – a corrupted place of our shared humanity that leaves us even more uneasy before the divine. 

The last of the many of Bak’s works that Langer considers is The Sounds of Silence. 

Samuel Bak’s 81^st birthday was on 12^th August this year.