Rahel Szalit-Marcus and Solomon Gershov Illustrate Sholem Aleichem

The artist was born Rahel Marcus in the shtetl of Telshi in Russian Lithuania and later moved with her family to Lodz. She studied art in Munich before settling in Berlin in 1916. There she was acquainted with prominent Jewish Expressionist artists, such as Ludwig Meidner and Jakob Steinhardt, and the radical avant-garde artists movements of the revolutionary period following the end of World War I.

Before 1924, Szalit-Marcus completed illustrations to works by Sholem Aleichem, Martin Buber, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Heinrich Heine, Mendele Moykher Sforim, and Israel Zangwill.

A first-person narrative that begins with nine-year-old Motl, a member of a Jewish family in the fictional village Kasrilevke, the story recounts the hardships, poverty and fears that motivate the family to immigrate to the United States.

At the beginning of the story, Motl’s father, the village cantor, has died, and his older, married brother Elyahu tries to help the family through a series of failed get-rich-quick schemes with Motl as his accomplice.

In one scheme, Elyahu plans to sell kvass, a traditional beverage made by fermenting rye, a dark grain that gives the drink its color. Elyahu stirs the contents of a barrel. His face is angular and gaunt.

Barefoot and in ragged clothing, burdened by the large pitcher of kvass he carries, Motl is put off balance. The steep perspective further underscores the instability of the family’s situation.

Motl’s family makes an arduous journey through eastern and central Europe and then via Antwerp to London where they board a ship to America.

In 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, Szalit-Marcus fled to France. She remained active among the foreign artists in Montparnasse who formed the School of Paris, including Marc Chagall. She was arrested as part of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, interned at Drancy, and deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered in August 1942. Most of the paintings and watercolors she left behind in her Paris studio were destroyed, though many of her prints survive.

Gershov was born in Dvinsk (today Davgaupils, Latvia), at the time part of the Russian Empire, and moved to Vitebsk, today in Lithuania, as a very young child. There he studied at Yehuda Pen’s art school and with Marc Chagall. Like his teachers, he was interested in depicting traditional Eastern European Jewish life.

In 1922 Gershov moved to Petrograd (today St. Petersburg) to continue his art studies. From 1934 he lived in Moscow and became a member of the officially-sanctioned Artist’s Union. In the undated Tevye paintings, the protagonist is depicted as a traditional Jew with a beard and cap.

In each painting, Tevye is shown with one or more of the horses that pull his milk cart.

Gershov’s brushwork is loose and expressionistic. His color palettes vary from warm to cool hues, from fiery oranges to almost monochrome grisaille contained by dense outlines.