A selection of Judah Passow’s portraits of Jewish Britain can be found in the issue 220 of the Jewish Quarterly.

No Place Like Home, an exhibition of Judah Passow’s photographs, opens at the Jewish Museum on February 1st. Information can be found here

www.judahpassow.com

Anyone like to buy Schindler’s list? I don’t mean a DVD of the film: I mean Schindler’s list. It’s available for $1.2 million on a U.S. website, apparently ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’. But what kind of person would take such an opportunity? The dedicated collector of Holocaustiana? Someone seeking that elusive dinner party ice-breaker? Or a different kind of collector altogether, the military history kind? There are other more sinister things on the market too: Dr. Mengele’s diary, anyone?

As a Jewish manuscript dealer, there can be those awkward moments when autograph collecting merges effortlessly into Neo-Nazism. When that Floridian collector turned out to have a moat around his house, guns and fourteen signed portraits of Hitler on his wall, for instance. Oh, and that time when a young German dealer added to his display a schoolbook penned by the nine-year-old Heinrich Himmler. It’s hard to know how to respond at such moments—produce a Magen David and twiddle it nervously, smile at the embarrassing whiff of anti-Semitism and hope that it will all go away, or just call the police?

Stalin wrote some solid poetry, and Gaddafi is a lovely novelist

It can happen off duty as well. Just the other day at a picnic, after I’d revealed my profession to a group of strangers, one of them asked, without an ounce of irony, ‘So, do you get much Hitler, then?’ I laughed awkwardly, as if he and I were on the inside of a joke, and offered a sort of apology: ‘Well, no, not really. I don’t tend to do Nazis.’ They murdered my family, I should have added, which sort of puts me off selling their autographs.Though, as you bring it up, I’m as obsessed with Nazis as the next man. But then, I’m Jewish. What’s your excuse?

Some time ago, I confess, I did have a brief period of doing Nazis. A signed copy of Mein Kampf came up in auction and I had an overwhelming urge to buy it. I fought with myself, wondered whether my desire for a Hitler autograph meant that I was an anti-Semite. And then I got tired of the discussion and asserted my Third Generation right to buy Nazi memorabilia. So, I bought it. And it was mine. Mein Kampf arrived, I installed it on my bookshelf, and I found that I kept on picking it up and touching it, tracing my finger over the handwriting, showing it to friends.I still wasn’t sure if I was a traumatised victim identifying with and appeasing the aggressor or just another despicable Hitler fanatic. As serendipity would have it, I owned one of Sigmund Freud’s walking sticks at the same time, which I kept under my bed. I remember handling both objects simultaneously, creating a sort of Freud-Hitler axis of good and evil. I trusted Freud to represent my interests and explain away my Hitler obsession. Or was I just using Freud as cover for my own Nazism? It was hard to tell.

Anyway, the point is that I don’t do Nazis anymore, though Hitler still remains a fascination, something of a guilty pleasure.I guess it’s not surprising,when every other book in my childhood home had Hitler or Holocaust in the title. Plus, my father fanatically collects postcards of synagogues that were destroyed by the Nazis. I have dreams about Hitler sometimes, including a recent one where he and I met at a dinner dance, finding ourselves both tragically without partners. I tell myself that it’s OK to dream about the man who killed my family, that it’s my entitlement. But what possible excuse can a non-Jew have for a Hitler fixation? Shouldn’t they stick to poets or Presidents or ice-skating champions? Something less, well, Jewish?

One of the paradoxes of collecting is the attention the collector pays to the unique blend of items he assembles, whilst simultaneously denying absolutely that the collection says anything at all about him personally, about his issues. I can say from experience that this is because the collector feels himself to be accumulating items not for himself, but for mankind.The collector is so mind-bogglingly un-self-aware,that it never crosses his mind that his collection of, say, autographed photographs of actresses who died very young in tragic circumstances, just might suggest that he has an unhealthily keen interest in the deaths of glamorous young women, which perhaps stems from a repressed desire to kill his own disappointing mother, whose absence from his early years resulted in his spending much of his childhood sat on the sofa beside an au pair, watching Marilyn Monroe movies. No, the collector is oblivious to the cause and effect, and anyway doesn’t want to dwell on his childhood.As far as he is concerned, he is doing what any other rational human being would do if they only had the bright idea, the eye for rarity, and the desire to preserve ‘culture’.

Armed with this kind of insight into the mind of the collector, it’s understandable that I would feel queasy to see another sale of Hitler’s paintings come up for auction in Shropshire last month. Now, I’m not against dictators dabbling in the arts per se—Stalin wrote some solid poetry, and Gaddafi is a lovely novelist—but this is something different. This auction house has been conducting regular Hitler Art sales for several years now, including an auction in 2009 that featured a supposed self-portrait by Hitler, who was shown sitting on a bridge in soulful self-contemplation. There has been much media speculation about the authenticity of the Hitler paintings that keep showing up (they are probably all fakes), but that doesn’t seem to stem the flow. As the auctioneer explained, ‘there is a tremendous fascination in Hitler these days and this sale will provide bidders with a rare opportunity of obtaining a work by Hitler at a time long before he started his campaigns of mass murder and world domination’. Well, I’m glad the auctioneer reminds us that the paintings all date from before all the Holocaust stuff, because otherwise we might be tempted to lump the early, kindly Hitler together with the later meaner Hitler, which seems unfair. Indeed, the auctioneer makes the point that the pictures are ‘all peaceful subjects, without exception, no military, no violent subjects’. It does make you sort of start wondering whether there is real credence to the argument that Adolf Hitler was, primarily, a struggling oil painter.

Oh, and did you know that one of the pictures in the collection—again, questions about authenticity—may have once hung in the offices of Sigmund Freud? (It seems I’m not the only one to summon Freud when cornered by his conscience.) Yes, they found Freud’s address penned on the reverse of a dodgy painting of a church, and it all adds up: Hitler was a struggling artist in Vienna at exactly the same time as Freud was in private practise there. So, Freud must have met the young Hitler, and found him personable enough to buy one of his paintings and hang it on his wall! And presumably Freud must also have recognised some talent in the young Hitler, some possibility of future greatness you’d think, for isn’t future greatness the currency of the art collector?

I have come to realise that collecting itself is a form of revisionism. You focus on a particular person, or period of history, and you necessarily draw attention away from the larger context. You distort historical events, because you have to bend history in order to see your reflection in it, at least the reflection you want to see. It’s ultimately about repair. I shouldn’t be against it, especially as I rely on the psychopathology of the collector to make a living. But it’s not always healthy. Someone once came to my table at a New York autograph fair, wearing a sharp suit and bow-tie, and announced, smugly, that he was looking for unsuccessful Presidential candidates. Sorry, nothing at all, I said. What I should really have done is throw a blanket over him, make him a cup of hot cocoa, and give him some of the love he missed out on as a child, during those months when his parents’ marriage was on the rocks and he was sent away to boarding school and failed all his exams and cried himself to sleep every night. You’ll always be a success in my eyes, I should have told him, but I can’t help thinking that maybe collecting isn’t for you.

Adam Andrusier studied music at Cambridge, where he performed piano recitals and a concerto. He has since formed his own company, selling rare autographs and manuscripts. He has written two novels.

Empty boxes, some child-made, some commercial.  Sponges from around the world. Postcards from the Hotel Celeste in Tunisia. A suitcase that belonged to a man who fled Danzig in 1939. Whistles.  A figurine of a stag scratching his ear with a hind leg. A snake curled on a lotus leaf, in ivory.  Three sweet chestnuts. A hare with amber eyes.  These are items in the respective collections of Maira Kalman and Edmund de Waal, two very different artists and writers who turn traditional Holocaust memoir-writing on its head by telling the stories of their Jewish families through objects like the ones above.

An Israeli-born, New-Yorkraised illustrator, designer, children’s-book author and artist across many media, Kalman is best known for her December 2001 The New Yorker cover with Rick Meyerowitz, a map of ‘New Yorkistan’ including such neighbourhoods as Botoxia and Upper Kvetchnya. Her two year-long series of monthly blogs blending image and text for The New York Times are now available in two books, And the Pursuit of Happiness (2010) and The Principles of Uncertainty (2007). In a visual essay for the latter, ‘Collecting Myself ’, Kalman calls the objects she collects ‘tangible evidence of history, memory, longing, delight.’ The history and memory evoked by the Danzig suitcase are all too familiar; of it, Kalman writes, ‘as if I need reminders of the Holocaust. That’s all I think about.’ Grief runs through her work, which draws on the partial survival of her own family, but by grounding her stories in objects, she tempers her grief with the longing and delight these objects elicit.  In the beautifully written The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), de Waal tells the story of his ancestors through a collection of 264 netsuke, tiny Japanese carvings, purchased in the 1870s in Paris and passed down by Charles, a cousin of de Waal’s greatgrandfather Viktor, to Viktor, to his son Iggie, and to Edmund himself. De Waal, a renowned British ceramic artist, has been making pots since he was a child and left school at seventeen to apprentice in England and Japan. ‘How objects get handled, used, and handed on is not just a mildly interesting question for me. It is my question,’ he writes. It is a desire to understand the netsuke better that leads him, albeit warily, into his family story. Inheriting the netsuke, he writes, ‘means I have been handed a responsibility to them and to the people who have owned them. I am unclear and discomfited about where the parameters of this responsibility might lie.’

Objects used to memorialise the Holocaust usually represent absence; they are invoked as traces of the dead and reinforce a story of destruction.  Quantity plays a vital role in this process of reinforcement. Twenty-five thousand pairs of shoes sit in the Auschwitz Museum, representing one day’s collection at the peak of the gassings. The museum also contains 3,800 suitcases and 12,000 pots and pans. The artist Christian Boltanski, whose Jewish father hid under the floorboards during the Nazi occupation of Paris, emerging in 1944 to beget Christian, has made a career out of memorial art. His work The Children of Dijon uses blurred, anonymous photographs of children’s faces to create dozens of tiny shrines; his 2010 installation, Personnes, includes a 50-tonne pile of old clothes. Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial in Vienna’s Judenplatz, Nameless Library, works on a similarly vast scale; it is a cast of the inside of a reading room with hundreds of books.

By ballasting their stories with the specificity of objects, Kalman and de Waal counteract this traditional narrative of loss with a celebration of the stubborn ‘thinginess’ of these things. This celebration both pulls the viewer repeatedly back to the present and plays with the darker desire to experience history and memory through these remainders of the past. Under Kalman’s brush, the Danzig suitcase, part of her suitcase collection, does not become a symbol of lost multitudes, as in the piles of suitcases at Auschwitz. Rather, she delights in the specifics of this one suitcase, announcing that it was made by Josef Winker and Sons, who owned a shop on Himmelpfortgasse. This irreducible thinginess, with its random humour, cannot be abstracted into the symbolic. Rather, the vibrancy of detail draws the viewer into the unique world of each object, a rich world replete with creativity, taste, humour, and individuality that counteracts absence with presence and loss with discovery.

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It is clear to everyone that the title, Never Looked Better, is ironic. It postulates that the discursive glue unifying the curators, artists and visitors is the shared acknowledgement that such a glue no longer exists.  While scornful of the period in which we really thought we looked our best, the exhibition looks back with a tangible, conflicted nostalgia. The title indeed seems to say that we never looked better than we did in the Sonnenfelds’ photographs. Why did we look so good? Because we believed in the rightness of our cause. Because we had a narrative. We looked good because we were good.

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Deborah Schultz is Research Fellow in the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, Department of History, University of Sussex. She is co-editor with Professor Edward Timms, of Arnold Daghani’s Memories of Mikhailowka:  The Illustrated Diary of a Slave Labour Camp Survivor (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009) and co-author with Edward Timms, of Pictorial Narrative in the Nazi Period: Felix Nussbaum, Charlotte Salomon and Arnold Daghani (London: Routledge, 2009) first published as a special issue of Word & Image, vol. 24, no. 3 (July–September 2008).

The Arnold Daghani Collection is housed at the University of Sussex. To visit contact library.specialcoll@sussex.ac.uk or phone 01273 678157.

Storeroom (Project 2) by David Breuer-Weil, oil on canvas, 200 x 400cm

I was asked to write an article on Jewish art collectors in England. For a few seconds I felt tempted to reel off a list of names of the most prominent art collectors, investors, Russian oligarchs and celebrity bidders in the main auctions of the major salerooms. But such articles are legion and widely available in Hello or the opening pages of the Evening Standard magazine. I wanted to avoid all the spin and promotion too often associated with the world of contemporary art and instead penetrate a little deeper to discuss why people collect art and why Jews appear to have been disproportionately drawn to it.
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Above all the exhibition eloquently and quietly laid bear the dilemmas faced by diaspora Jews in the face of the Palestinian-Israeli problem: how do we judge our fellow Jews who commit acts that in British society we would deplore; how long can we go on making allowances for the Holocaust in condoning belligerent behaviour? In indirectly raising such issues this exhibition makes a valuable contribution to Jewish culture in the United Kingdom.

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A bit of reinvented truth. A child with a story full of holes, can only reinvent for herself a memory. Of this I am certain. Therefore the autobiography in all of this can only be reinvented.  Memory is always reinvented in a story full of holes as if there is no story left. What to do then? Try to fill in the holes — and I would say even this hole — with an imagination fed on everything one can find, the left and the right and the middle of the hole. One attempts to create one’s own imaginary truth.
Chantal Akerman

In her 2004 comedy, Tomorrow We Move, Belgian-born filmmaker, Chantal Akerman created what has been termed a ‘Marx Brothers film made by Erich Rohmer’: Charlotte, a writer of erotic fiction, finds herself constantly interrupted by her newly widowed mother, who has come to live with her. Realising that they need a bigger place they are forced to open their cluttered, private space to a flow of potential new tenants. During the course of this invasion a diary belonging to Charlotte’s grandmother is discovered in a cupboard. Mother and daughter read its contents and are put in direct touch with the generation destroyed in the Shoah. In a moment of tenderness the mother turns and kisses her daughter.

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A Jewish couple visits the Sistine Chapel. The guide points up and says: ‘It took Michaelangelo five years to paint this ceiling!’ The husband turns to his wife and says:  ‘Wow. He must have had the same landlord as us.’ (Old Jewish Joke)

It is well known that Jewish humour is a not a common cultural fixture in Britain so imagine my surprise, while walking around the fashionable Hayward Gallery, when I heard ‘Two wise men of Chelm went out for a walk…’ relayed in a loud ‘New York’ accent. A string of Jewish jokes was emerging from a plastic yellow joke box adorned with a clown face, attached to the wall, and named Joke Master Jr. On closer inspection I learned that this was, in fact, ‘art’ by the American-born London-based artist Doug Fishbone. Granted, it was an exhibition — and one of the first of its kind — about laughter, humour and visual art. But still, among the cool works of Finnish photographers and fictitious Korean performance troupes, the hot hyper-vowelization, and volume of the Jewish comedy stood out.

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